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If you want to map a locale or score some directions but want to avoid driving into a pole, you can now use your pipes . Google Maps now recognizes Search by Voice on Windows Mobile and Symbian S60 phones. Google introduced Search by Voice in 2008 and has been rolling that functionality out into different parts of the Googlesphere since. Now Google Maps 4.1 comes with voice search. Sponsor The categories of search that Maps will now recognize vocally includes the full spectrum of search fields already enabled for mobile. business name business category city, state ZIP code postal address intersection, city, state airport code latitude longitude Hands-free it is not, however. To start the search you still need to open Google Maps and hit “call” prior to making your search. The install is available on qualifying phones at m.google.com/maps . An interesting aspect of the language settings the ability to select not just your language but, if it’s English, the accent you use. I wonder if this functionality will be available to Spanish-speakers or whether the different accents within Yue Chinese will eventually be recognized. Discuss
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Google Mobile Announces Search by Voice for Maps
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Last week after Twitter’s Chirp conference, Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land asked Twitter Co-founder Evan Williams when we would begin to see the release of inactive and deleted Twitter usernames back into the wild. The answer turns out to be soon for some and later for others, but the question remains – how will we know when that name is finally available? Well, two developers, Blake Crosley and Luke Woodard , have jumped onto this goldrush and created TwitterClaims . Sponsor According to Sullivan, Twitter is still trying to figure out the proper way to handle the situation, as some usernames have been used but have recently sat inactive, while others were swept up in mass name claims by squatters and others still have simply been abandoned. (Sullivan notes an anecdote by Williams of one person who registered more than 10,000 names in one fell swoop but has done nothing with them.) So if you’ve been eyeballing that perfect Twitter username, just watching it sit there and do nothing, TwitterClaims claims to have the answer. Simply enter your email address and give the site up to ten names that you’re looking forward to having and the service will email you when the name becomes available. The service checks once an hour to see if the name is available and once it is, it emails you to let you know. Simple. It looks like anyone can claim a name, so once it becomes available and the notifiction is set, it’s on. You’ll still have to get there first, and others can be getting the same notification about that same username. Discuss
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TwitterClaims: Be First In The Twitter Username Land Rush
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About a year ago, Google launched real-time search suggestions that were tailored towards users in different countries. Today, Google is taking this one step further and is l aunching an improved version of Google Suggest that also takes larger metro areas into account. Now, Google Suggest will offer different suggestions for users in New York City and Portland, OR, for example. For the time being, this feature is only available in the U.S. Sponsor Smarter Spelling Correction for Names In addition, Google is also rolling out smarter corrected spellings for names. As Google notes, people often search for names, but don’t know the exact spelling. Now, whenever you add a person’s profession, affiliation or other related keywords to an approximation of this person’s name, Google will offer better suggestions and more useful spelling corrections. This feature, too, is currently only available in the U.S., though Google plans to roll it out in other parts of the world within the next few months. Auto-Correction for 31 Additional Languages Google is also rolling out auto-corrected spellings for 31 additional languages. These auto-corrections kick in whenever a user misspells a common word. For uncommon misspellings, Google will still give you a link to the corrected search results behind a link that says ” Did you mean: ReadWriteWeb .” Whenever Google feels confidents that the auto-corrected version is what you were really looking for, the search engine bypasses the link and just drops you off on a search results page that is based on the correct spelling. Discuss
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Google Introduces Localized Google Suggest and Smarter Auto-Corrections
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As Google has worked to add more and more real-time search capabilities by adding content from sites like Facebook, MySpace, Buzz and Twitter, we’ve been able to see more and more what people are talking about online. Google’s latest feature that it is announcing today takes real-time data and puts it into a perspective we can work with – the past. Sponsor Rather than letting all of this real-time data simply stream past and evaporate into thin air, Google is rolling out a “replay” feature, that lets you look at real-time data, in this case tweets, at any specific time in the past. The feature offers a timeline of tweets, showing the volume of tweets containing relevant search terms, broken down according to scale. After playing with it for a few minutes, we were able to see that it even gets as narrow as a minute by minute breakdown of tweets on a topic. It will be available by clicking on “Show Options” on the left side of your screen and then “Updates”. For now, Google says that it will offer tweets going back to February 11, 2010 but will soon extend back to March 21, 2006. The company says that the feature is currently rolling out and should be available globally in English within the next few days, but you can give it a whirl before then. As Google points out, the “replay” feature may be a great way to explore ” how the news broke about health care legislation in Congress, what people were saying about Justice Paul Stevens’ retirement or what people were tweeting during your own marathon run? These are the kinds of things you can explore with the new updates mode.” We’re looking forward to seeing what this sort of interaction with real-time data, in the aggregate, will bring to the table. It might not only be an invaluable reporting tool, but a great way to find out when a local restaurant is at its busiest. Discuss
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Google’s Twitter Timeline Lets You Explore the Past
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Given the recent developments in the Twitter developer ecosystem, I think it’s a good time to revisit the idea of an open Web alternative to Twitter. The fact is, the differences between microblogging and normal blogging are insignificant. I’m going to detail five of the differences. My point in doing so is to illustrate that the best way to bootstrap an open alternative to Twitter is not by inventing a bunch of new technologies or products. Instead, I want to show that most of the pieces already exist in the current blogging ecosystem. With a few modifications, a distributed microblogging ecosystem can easily emerge. Sponsor Guest author Chris Saad is VP of strategy at Echo , the world’s leading provider of comment/conversation technology to Tier 1 publishers. His role is to track trends in the marketplace, listen to and participate in the community and translate those needs into actionable product direction. His background includes co-authoring of the Attention Profiling Markup Language (APML) specification, and co-founding the DataPortability Project . Used by Digg, BBC, NewsGator, France Telecom and others, APML is industry standard for Attention Profiles. The DataPortability project’s mission is to advocate interoperable data portability for users, developers and vendors. Length Microblogs are, well, micro. They are shorter. This is not some marvelous invention – it is a simple, imposed limitation on the input field. Any publishing software today, from WordPress to Drupal, can be modified to force users to stick to 140 characters – call it “microblogging mode”. I don’t think this particular difference (or how to bridge it) warrants much more explanation. Real Time While blogs used to update rather slowly in a publish and subscribe model, microblogging has had a reputation for being faster or real time. The old school refresh rate of 15 minutes or more (the time between RSS refreshes) seems like an eternity these days. Of course the reality is that the Twitter API is still incapable of sending updates to individual clients in real time, and the whole thing is far from real time. Updates in seconds, however, is a key trait of microbogging. The fact is, however, that blogs now have a method of pushing updates that’s faster and more effective than even the Twitter API. It’s an open standard called PubSubHub and it’s supported by both Blogger, WordPress, Buzz and countless other smaller services. Blogs are already real time. Identified Subscriptions One of the nice things that Twitter does that traditional Blogging software does not do is called Identified Subscriptions. That is, when you subscribe to (a.k.a follow) a user, their name and face appear in your sidebar, and you get a nice little ego boost in the form of a notification email and increase in your follower count. Why couldn’t we add a simple mechanism to PubSubHub so that when a client subscribes to push updates, it leaves behind some optional identifying information about the user like their name and avatar? Or maybe instead of leaving the actual username and avatar, it might provide a URL to the subscribing user’s own microblogging site that has that metadata stored in the header. Addressability This is perhaps the most complicated difference and gap to close. With Twitter, you can easily say, “Hey @chrissaad you are are a crazy hippy” and I will get it in my message stream. Blogs can’t do that right? Well, actually, blogs have been doing addressability since day zero. The same way the rest of the Web does addressability – using links. Bloggers frequently link to each other and then check their trackbacks and pingbacks for incoming references. The only problem with this model is that it’s not user friendly enough. Mainstream users don’t understand URLs and checking pingback and referrer logs is just plain silly. So rather than reinvent the wheel, why not just add rubber? To make it easier for users, imagine if blogging software kept track of the users you were following (see Identified Subscriptions above) and when you type the equivalent of “@”, they provided a list of suggested aliases to choose from. When you select the person you are addressing, the software could insert the alias and hyperlink the name to the associated URL of that user’s microblogging site. Clients, then, could subscribe to Google Blog Search (remember blog search is essentially the blogging world’s open firehose) and search for any reference to your personal URL. The rest is just presentation tricks to show those replies mixed in with the rest of your microblogging items. Clients Why can’t existing Twitter clients allow users to subscribe to PubSubHub enabled RSS and Atom feeds. They would also subscribe to the Google Blog Search for references to your own URL (for @ replies). No need to rip and replace Twitter, just offer an open alternative: subscribe to any site – anywhere. The Future As you can see here, microblogging is and could be fundamentally the same as blogging in terms of the mechanics and technologies involved. The techniques used to build and improve the open blogosphere could be used to bootstrap a microblogging sphere as well. There have been many big strides in this area, such as Status.net. The opportunity now is for the (ex?) Twitter clients and blog publishing platforms and the standards groups to make small tweaks to extend the technology in the right way. Discuss
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Microblogging vs. Blogging: 5 Ways to Create an Open Twitter Alternative
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