Location based social networks - are you over it already? It feels like location is all we ever hear about anymore, especially this week leading up to SXSW.

We're excited about location too; see our enthusiastic write-ups What Twitter's Geolocation API Makes Possible and The Era of Location as Platform Has Arrived. But it's getting a little ridiculous. We offer below a few thoughts to consider about all this location madness.

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1. That Phrase: "Location, Location, Location"

   You're going to hear journalists use it far too much. Want to know where it came from? Language sleuth William Safire investigated for the NYT last year and concluded that the phrase was probably first used in a 1926 real estate classified ad in the Chicago Tribune: "Attention salesmen, sales managers: location, location, location, close to Rogers Park." Don't you feel more savvy now?

2. Too Many Startups?

   We're under embargo on almost all of them, but we can tell you there are at least 25 companies making location-related announcements at SXSW this week. Probably more. The Dunbar number of startups in a particular market, if you will, is something like 5. More than that and most people stop taking new entrants seriously. It's one thing to offer different technologies along the value chain of location, but sharing your location and aggregating messages by things like hashtag are two very crowded niches right now. One of my favorites is SitBy.Us, an app that lets you see where your Twitter friends are sitting in a conference session. That's pretty cool.

   You've got to wonder if and when Location will Jump the Shark and what consumer exhaustion for it might mean for the long-term prospects of the market. Everyone wants to be "the Twitter of SXSW 2010" but the fact is that SXSW represented a statistically insignificant increase in Twitter usage, historically speaking.

3. Location Startups "Not Playing Nice"

   There are loads of ways to post your location but it's very hard to get a feel for who exactly is where. SimpleGeo launched a site called Vicarious.ly today that aggregates check-ins across scads of services, all around Austin. It doesn't work very well, though. SimpleGeo's Matt Galligan told us today that the site is really just a proof of concept and that our perception that these startups aren't playing very nice together is very true. "And it's a real shame," he told us. It's hard for a 3rd party service to clearly identify whether these competing services are really talking about the same location, for example. No one tells their users what users on competing services are up to in the same location. Gowalla's Josh Williams says he doesn't know what the problem is and that Gowalla is very open about user data by open standards.

   Update: Galligan pinged us after publication to clarify: "I mostly meant the problem with venue data was because of how awful the *business listings* market is. There's certainly issues with non-connecting venue data but it's a *very* hard problem to solve, so I don't blame them right now. It can, however, be solved in the future."

4. We Need Cross-Service Venue Tracking

   If you're thinking of going to a place, or you're there and wonder who else is, what you need is a place where you can see who has checked in there across all services. For the place to be at the center of your experience, not the service. Michael Arrington says the new AOL Lifestream lets you track particular locations, but that service only supports Foursquare among location services. What we need is something like that across any and every check-in service. That's the kind of thing that data standards can enable.

   Google's Chris Messina told us that the Activity Streams standard has a namespace for "place" and would probably add support for GeoRSS soon, but that so far Google Buzz is the only location service that seems to be supporting it.

5. Gowalla Doesn't Get Enough Love

   Gowalla's API is read-only, meaning that 3rd party apps can't publish check-ins to the service like they can to Foursquare. Gowalla says they are working on it, but they are the underdog already and this isn't helping. AOL's cool new Lifestream product, for example, only supports Foursquare, not Gowalla. That's a real shame. You know what's nice about Gowalla, though? You can see who has checked into a place and when, even if they aren't friends of yours. That's not something that's easy to do with Foursquare at all. It's also much prettier than Foursquare and uses peoples' full names, instead of grade-school-style first names and last initials. Gowalla's API just isn't seeing the adoption that Foursquares is, though. Have you seen Avoider.org for example? That's pretty funny stuff and it's built on top of Foursquare.
   

   The above is for illustration purposes only. I like both these guys just fine.

6. Imagine the Future, It's Going to Be Different

   If location based services ever become popular with the mainstream, every urban area might end up looking like the Foursquare map of downtown Austin this weekend. That means services are going to have to come up with creative and interesting new ways to make that data usable day-to-day and not overwhelming.

   Likewise, when you think about the future, imagine Facebook being a player in this market, because they are going to be soon. It's possible that Facebook and Twitter could be where all these other services meet-up. Brightkite has different features than BlockChalk but we can see what our friends are doing across any of these apps on Facebook, perhaps. And Facebook is where your mom checks-in, if she's not an early adopter.

   Finally, will location tracking be persistent? Loopt right now uses mobile carrier tie-ins to track your location constantly and expose it to a circle of trusted friends. Is that something that all services will enable in the future? Gowalla CEO Josh Williams told us "no way" does he think that will be the dominant model, but Adam Duvander, author of the forthcoming book Mapscripting 101, says he agrees with Loopt: that the value in persistent location tracking will be so compelling that everyone will end up going for it in the end, once proper privacy settings are figured out.

   What do you think, do you think persistent location tracking is the future of location based services?

   These are some of the things I'm thinking about location this week.

   Discuss

   
   

   
   

Patrick thinks robots will become just regular folks, but their own nation.  Stephen thinks we'll power everything including the robots with a sun.  Not solar.  A sun. A small one.

Get the episode at this link.

 

This podcast is brought to you by SquareSpace.com.  Squarespace.com, the fast and easy way to publish a high-quality website or blog.  For a free trial and 10% off your new account, go to – Squarespace.com and use the code CAST when you sign up for a new account.

You can now see Chatroulette users’ locations, thanks to a new Google Maps mashup that pinpoints where in the world people are signing in to the voyeuristic video-conferencing service.

The new Chatroulette Maps website presents markers of users’ IP addresses on a worldwide map, meaning less anonymity than users have previously experienced (which may go some way to encourage folks to keep it in their pants).

Capturing screengrabs of the users, Chatroulette Map then adds them to the map using geo IP tools. The accuracy of tracking locations via IP addresses varies with the provider and area. It’s certainly not super precise technology, but in built-up areas with an ISP with an up-to-date database it can be up to 95% accurate, and elsewhere, certainly enough to get an idea of location.

Although Chatroulette uses Adobe’s Stratus platform, the actual webcam hook-up between two users is a peer-to-peer link, which means the user’s IP address is revealed by this direct means of connection.

Chatroulette Map says there are plans to make the images rateable, as well as filter out any NSFW content, but for now the service just offers a snapshot of Chatroulette users across the globe.

Anyone unhappy with being screengrabbed and mapped can get in touch with the site to have their marker and pic removed, provided they e-mail in a pic of themselves as proof.

Will this development put you off using Chatroulette? Do you see it as an invasion of your privacy? Let us know in the comments below.

[via Laughing Squid]

Tags: chat roulette maps, chatroulette

We’ve just added a batch of new fonts to the Typekit library, including some amazing classic typefaces you’ve been waiting for.

P22 Type Foundry

P22 is renowned for its work with museums and foundations to ensure the development of accurate historical typefaces, and we’re excited to add a few beautiful examples to Typekit’s library. Starting today, you’ll find fonts designed by historic figures like Frank Lloyd Wright and Benjamin Franklin, including the iconic P22 Underground — the type used in the London Underground. In addition to P22’s typefaces inspired by art, history, and science, they now distribute fonts from Lanston Type, Rimmer Type Foundry, and The Sherwood Type Collection, among others. We’ll be adding many more fonts from their collection in the future. Here are a few highlights of what’s available now:

Giambattista Bodoni created this modern typeface in 1790 which served as the structural model for Sol Hess’s faithful rendition. Hess made necessary adjustments for mechanical typesetting on Lanston’s Monotype composition system. This font was remastered in 2006 by Paul Hunt.

The legendary sans serif design developed by Edward Johnston for the London Underground system in 1916 is available for the first time as a commercial font in an exclusive arrangement with the London Transport Museum. The font is true to the original design.

P22® FLLW® Eaglefeather® is based on the alphabet designed by Frank Lloyd Wright for the “Eaglerock” project in 1922. The full range of weights and styles allows for expanded typographic possibilities in a wide variety of uses.

This font was created in collaboration with the Philadelphia Museum of Art to coincide with the Benjamin Franklin Tercentenary. It includes faithfully reproduced letterforms digitized directly from images of impressions made by Benjamin Franklin and his printing office circa 1750.

T.26 Digital Type Foundry

Founded by Carlos Segura in 1994, T-26’s once experimental fonts are now considered mainstream. T-26 offers numerous original fonts, and we’ve stared rolling out the first few today.

Automate is a futuristic, geometric sans serif font designed by Anuthin Wongsunkakon in 2008. Anuthin is one of the founding partners of Behaviour Group Inc., a design firm based in Bangkok, Thailand and considered Thailand’s first design studio with full typographic service.

Minerva Modern is a modern, sans serif typeface designed by Gábor Kóthay, a Hungarian type designer, multi-disciplinary artist, and teacher.

Aurea Ultra is a bold slab serif font was designed by Mario Felicianoand just begging for some nice big headlines to announce.

Mark Zuckerberg's hacking of email accounts and user profiles in 2004 could be felonies under Federal and state law, according to privacy lawyers.

As we described last week, Mark used login data of early Facebook members to break in to the private email accounts of two Harvard Crimson editors. He also broke into the systems of competitor ConnectU and changed user profiles, also according to IMs.

Read the rest of this story »

See Also:

• Mark Zuckerberg's Early Misdeeds Gain Mainstream Media Attention
• At Last -- The Full Story Of How Facebook Was Founded
• Danny Sullivan: I Came Close To Killing My Facebook Account This Week

A woman was crushed to death between a subway train and the platform at the 77th Street station of the No. 6 train on Thursday afternoon, the police said.

The Web is huge. And growing. Faster everyday. It's almost like an ocean where there's no evaporation (the data on the Web stays there virtually forever), but yet, it's always raining in it. The rain is the new content that's added into the ocean.

Every tweet is a drop, every blog post is a drop, every check-in is a drop that falls into the ocean. This ocean is almost constantly under a tropical storm in some places, like Twitter or Facebook.

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Guest author Julien Genestoux is the founder and CEO of Superfeedr, a company dedicated at making RSS and Atom feeds realtime. It has implemented PubSubHubbub from day one and now host several hubs, including ReadWriteWeb, Tumblr, Posterous and Gawker. Follow Julien on Twitter.

When you're a search engine, you obviously have an exhaustivity requirement. You can't really skip on indexing the Indian Ocean. Google sends its bo(a)ts all over the ocean where it's raining to update its index. However, the ocean is growing so fast that it will eventually become harder and harder to stay exhaustive.

Unfortunately, not only the ocean is growing, but it's also raining more, which means that if a bo(a)t is away from a zone for too long, when it will be back it will have changed tremendously. That's what happens when you see results in a search engine that are 1- or 2-years old, or even older. They're not wrong, they're just often inaccurate, but rank well.

It's a real technical problem for search engines to know where to send their bo(a)ts, and at the right time! And when Google says they're going to feed their search index with PubSubHubbub data, that's what they're trying to do: save a little bit on the boats.

I strongly disagree with John Battelle when he says this is not a huge deal. My take is that he sees this only as a great technical and infrastructure opportunity for Google, not so much as an immediate benefit for the end user. I strongly disagree - and so do you. You disagreed when you typed "earthquake" into Twitter Search, or even "hudson crash", or "Mickael Jackson". At that point, you knew that Google wasn't able to provide you with the information you were looking for, and this is a massive loss for Google.

Google will have a hard time getting this brain share back. The first thing it needs to do is to actually have results that date back from the minute when people look for these things.

You may argue that if you search 10 times a day on Google, you go maybe once a week to Twitter search. I'm the same, no worries. Yet, I know that Twitter is much better than Google at contextualization. When I do a search on Google, I expect to find the absolute truth. If I look for earthquake, I'm looking at facts about earthquakes: pictures or maybe historical data. If I look for earthquake on Twitter, I'm looking for context; I want what is being said about earthquakes now (and here!).

As a matter of facts, Google always had a lot of issues about context because they know so little about the people who search there (or maybe they know a lot, but don't want to scare us). Adding PubSubHubbub is a way for them to be able to take the "time dimension" back. They many never have the conversations that Twitter has, but they will have a much bigger ocean of data than Twitter's sea of Tweets

Photo by Pam Roth.

Discuss

Betaworks, the New York City-based holding company investing in the realtime Web, just raised a $20 million Series B. The round was led by RRE Ventures and Intel Capital, DFJ Growth, AOL Ventures, The New York Times, Softbank Japan and Softbank NY, Lerer Investments and Founders Collective, also participated, along with investors from the last round, which was $7.5 million

The company both invests and incubates realtime media startups, including Summize (acquired by Twitter for realtime search), bit.ly, TweetDeck, StockTwits, SuperFeedr, Outside.in, OMGPOP, and gdgt.

CEO John Borthwick says that the funds will be used to do more of the same, invest in and create realtime media startups.

Martin Klimas was born in 1971 in Lake of Konstanz, Germany. He received his degree in Visual Communications from Fachhochschule Dusseldorf and has had many exhibitions in Germany and abroad. He is represented by Foley Gallery in New York and Bransch for commercial assignments.

Aol launched Lifestream, a social aggregator and publisher, as part of their AIM platform at TechCrunch50 Last Fall. Since then it has gained nearly 2 million users, say Aol. Based on that success Aol is now launching Lifestream as a standalone product at lifestream.aol.com.

Like Friendfeed, Lifestream aggregates a number of third party social networks – Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Foursquare, Delicious, Digg, Flickr, YouTube, etc., so if you follow a Lifestream user you’ll see all of the content that user publishes on those networks, and Lifestream automatically pulls in content from people you already follow on those various social networks, so you don’t have to create yet another new friend list. Lifestream isn’t yet integrated with Google Buzz, but Aol says it may be coming soon.

Users can filter out content from specific networks if they like, on a per user or broad basis. A way to think about this – “noise cancellation for social networks.”

Lifestream also lets users publish back to social networks. Status updates posted to Lifestream can be posted back to Facebook, Myspace and/or Twitter. Lifestream also optionally notes your location in your status updates via GPS on mobile devices, or you can manually add it instead.

That’s not it though. Users can sign in to Lifestream using their Facebook account via Facebook Connect, making it unnecessary to remember separate account and credentials for the site.

You also have a variety of choices in how you use Lifestream. You can access it via the website, an AIR application, or via iPhone and Android applications. As I said above, the mobile applications are particularly useful because they auto-note your location for easy check-ins, and you can post pictures you take from the phone.

That mobile version of the product is what excites me most. You can see where your friends are checking into on, say, Foursquare, click through to a place page and then go there yourself and check in. And Lifestream allows you to follow places just like people, so you can see whenever someone checks in to your local cafe or bar. That ability to follow places is probably the single best reason to use Lifestream.

The Lifestream product is simple, intuitive and really, really useful. Frankly it’s what Google Buzz should have been – both an independent social network on its own, but very deep integration into all of the other social networks you are likely to use daily. It’s nice to see actual innovation coming out of Aol.

(Cross-posted with the Google Merchant Blog)

Vic Gundotra, VP of Engineering, demonstrated last December a preview version of Product Search for mobile with local inventory, which lets you see right in your search results whether items are in stock at nearby stores. We're happy to announce that as of today, if you're searching for a product that is sold by participating retailers, including Best Buy, Sears, Williams-Sonoma, Pottery Barn, or West Elm, you can just look for the blue dots in the search results to see if it's available in a local store. If you see a blue dot, you can tap on the adjacent "In stock nearby" link, and you'll be taken to the seller's page where you'll see whether the item is "In Stock" or has "Limited Availability" near you. You'll also see how far away the stores are from you -- as long as you've enabled My Location or manually specified your location.

If you have an iPhone, Palm WebOS phone, or any Android-powered device, and you're in the US, just go to Google.com in your mobile browser, tap on the "more" link, and then select "Shopping." Or look for the "Shopping results" section in Universal Search results when you search on Google.com.
Finally, if you're a retailer and you'd like to participate in this program, we want to hear from you. Please fill out this brief form to let us know that you'd like to be considered. In the meantime, you can get prepared by making sure your Local Business Center data is up to date, and ensuring that your Product Search data is in great shape.

Posted by Paul Lee and Yury Pinsky, Product Managers

If I were forced to give up all but one image adjustment tool, I would keep curves. Hands down. The curves adjustment tool is an integral part of every professional’s knowledge base and image editing package.

Even if you’ve taken a good photo, chances are it can be improved or it needs to be adjusted to work in a collage or collection. Or even to just to intensify a mood. You can always make a good thing better – and curves is a one-stop-shop way to do that.

With curves you are able to:

• Adjust the over-all contrast or tonal range
• Adjust the local contrast or tonal range
• Adjust the color

Let’s jump in and find out how. It’s simpler than it looks.

Overview

The idea behind Curves is all about re–mapping values. A pixel starts out at a certain brightness, and you change it to be brighter or darker.

The curves box opens as a straight line because you haven’t made any changes yet. That means that the brightness values before and after are the same. You will effect a change by changing the shape of the curve.

The points from left (bottom) to right (top) affect: blacks, shadows, midtones, highlights, and whites. By altering the position in these regions will affect the corresponding tonal range of your image. Leaving the line in the center will leave the tones unchanged.

You begin altering the brightness values by clicking once somewhere on the line. This will establish a “point”; this point can now be dragged to a different place within the grid, which causes that tonal value to change, either lighter or darker depending on whether you drag it up or down. The reason it’s a curve is so that the change blends smoothly throughout the image. An abrupt change in value can be very noticeable. The increasingly gradual change of the brightness values on either side of the change permit a very smooth and believable adjustment.

It’s important to note, however, that you can’t increase contrast in one region without decreasing it in another. The curves tool redistributes contrast. Therefore think of the image having a contrast allocation or budget and you need to decide how to best spend it.

Also, the curves tool will preserve the tonal hierarchy (unless you use uncommon negative slopes). That means that the brighter parts of the image will stay brighter even after your conversion – just maybe not by the same amount.

S- and Inverted S-Curves

The S-Curve and the Inverted S-Curve are two curves most commonly used. The S-Curve adds contrast to the midtones while subtracting from the shadows and highlights. The Inverted S-Curve does the opposite.

Often in photography, it’s difficult to expose your image perfectly. Brightness or darkness in tonal ranges can benefit from optimization. The S-Curve is often useful in these cases – not to mention, quick and simple.

Empty Tonal Range and Histograms

One very useful and important function of curves is to correct empty tonal ranges – in the histogram edges (blacks and whites) or gaps in between (shadows, midtones, and highlights). An under exposed image can be helped by pulling in the black and white points to correct the exposure.

Or if there are gaps in between the tonal peaks you can decrease contrast in specific parts of your image – thereby freeing up the contrast to be used in the more visible areas of your image.

Clipped Highlights

Images containing a bright light source, such as the sun, can often be harsh or posterized (also called color banding). Posterization of an image entails conversion of a continuous gradation of tone to several regions of fewer tones, with abrupt changes from one tone to another. This can create an unrealistic look, and often a smoother transition to white is preferred.

Correcting Color Balance

All curves thus far have been applied to RGB values of luminosity. But they can also be used on individual color channels to correct color casts in specific tonal regions. Often the color in an image is correctly balanced, but due to reflection or a light source with a varying temperature or color, you may see unwanted tints in a tonal region. Changing the white balance or adjusting the overall color would inadvertently harm the other tones. So we can selectively increase or decrease the amount of a color cast in the red, green, and blue channels to achieve perfect balance.

Any adjustments upward of the diagonal line in the red channel increase the red in the image. Lowering, below the diagonal line, increases the cyan. The other channels are the same: Upward in the green channel, green; lower, magenta. Upward in the blue channel, blue; lower yellow.

RGB color images should be thought of as being comprised of a composite channel and three grayscale channels containing the values of the three colors – red, green and blue. This is shown in the example above of the red on the left, green in the middle, and blue on the right.

Window > Channels to see this on your image.

You can see in the image above that there is a slight blueish cast in the color tone. Not to mention, the image is slightly washed out (improperly exposed).

As you can see, the sky is already quite white, so we won’t want to effect the highlights and above. By lowering the curve in the midtones and shadows, without effecting the highlights, we solve the exposure problem. Then we’ll get rid of the blue color cast: By lowering the blue in the low end, we eliminate the problem and the gowns go to black – as they should be.

Blending Modes

Also, curves adjustment layers (Layer>New Adjustment Layer> Curves) can be set to make curves only apply to a channel – such as Color and/or Luminosity – which allows for further, varied control. Another benefit is that it can make your adjustments more subtle through use of the opacity controls for the layer.

Notes

Practice makes perfect. The more you use the tools and techniques available to you the better you’ll get, improve your photography, and have fun.

Here are some things to remember when using the curves tool:

• Minimize use of the curves tool, as anything which stretches the image histogram increases the possibility posterization.
• Avoid the use of the curves tool on an already altered image.
• Perform curves on 16-bit images when possible. (Image > Mode > 16 Bits/Channel)
• For extreme levels of color correction, consider applying curves using LAB mode.

We knew iPad pre-orders were starting tomorrow, but know we know exactly when all you lovable crazies have to stumble out of bed and transmit your credit card numbers to Steve's brain: 8:30AM ET, or 5:30AM on the West Coast. We generally recommend a bed shaker alarm clock, but hey, let's not pretend we haven't all turned a few long nights into tomorrow with our old friends Jackie D and Mistakes. See you on the other side, chochachos.

iPad orders start at 8:30AM tomorrow morning originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 11 Mar 2010 20:31:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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