Here’s the TL;DR: Google Maps sniffs a browser’s user agent string. If it finds Internet Explorer on Windows Phone, then it kicks it over to the m.google.com mobile home page. So let’s be clear. It’s 2013 and one of the biggest companies on the internet is using a sniffer to…
I spent about a thousand words explaining RSS before I realized that, for the most part, if you are reading this blog I have to guess you have some familiarity with it (at least by just having heard of it). If you need some background, Wikipedia has a pretty good…
Color is the newest social media application on the block, launched just after SxSW and relying on proximity-based media sharing instead of a friend model. Founded by names from other successful ventures along with $41 million in funding, Color seemed poised to storm the social media market. One day after…
Brighkite has made an announcement today that affects me and a handful of other people (not counting all the people on Facebook whose timelines I inadvertently spam): Brightkite is dropping check-ins, posts and streams. Brightkite started 3 years ago with a Twitter-like ability to share your random musings. However, it…
If you are in the United States and not dead, it’s kind of hard to miss all the chaos leading up to election day next week. Surprisingly, not a lot of people seem to know where their voting place is or even if they are registered to vote. Conveniently, Google…
This article was originally posted on evolt.org, an online resource for web developers, maintained by web developers. I have granted evolt.org the right to use this article on their web site, and they are the only entity with the right to reproduce it. Whenever I speak about social media I…
Brighkite has rolled out a new home page today, and for those of us familiar with its old home page, gone are the sample check-ins and photos from your area. Instead, the home page is pushing its group text feature. In a blog post announcing the change, Brightkite acknowledges that…
Facebook Places is out. It’s the Foursquare / Gowalla / Brightkite / Loopt / etc.-killer. Or so Facebook hopes. All of those services have some pretty clear controls in place to limit how much information you share. Granted, you can mess up even their simple privacy controls and share the…
Today on ReadWriteWeb, Marshall Kirkpatrick (Co-Editor and Vice President of Content Development) has posted an article titled Why We Check In: The Reasons People Use Location Based Social Networks. In the article he explores why people use services like Foursquare and Gowalla to post their physical location for the world…
Earlier this week Twitter announced Twitter Places, allowing users to associate tweets with specific places, not just latitude/longitude or data pushed in from other services (Twitter Places: More Context For Your Tweets). Up until this announcement, you could associate a tweet with a specific place by pushing a location with…
Brightkite is working to be more relevant to the average web surfer using its image-happy almost-food-centric users by allowing them to post tips to venues (Tippety Top. Brighkite launches photo-tips). Oddly, as a Brightkite user, I first heard about this from Mashable (Brightkite Launches Location-Based Photo Tips), and then pestered…
This article was originally posted on evolt.org, an online resource for web developers, maintained by web developers. I have granted evolt.org the right to use this article on their web site, and they are the only entity with the right to reproduce it. Last week Mashable featured a post asking…