ReadWriteWeb readers are some of the most educated on the social web, surveys tell us that. Smart people never stop learning, though, do we? Now reading ReadWriteWeb is all the more educational with the addition of a new feature from startup company Apture.
Try it out: Highlight any word, phrase or name on this page. Now click the little "search" button that pops up. This is a good one: Krishna Bharat.
Pretty cool, huh? Apture's new contextual search feature was incredibly easy to add to our site (one line of javascript) and we think it adds a whole lot to the reading experience here. So find a word or phrase here that you'd like to learn more about - and highlight it. You'll see a web of multi-media connections swirling around our written content at the snap of your finger.
Say you're sitting at a bar in Brooklyn but you're thinking about what's happening tonight in Greenwich Village. You look at Foursquare to see if any friends are checked-in anywhere interesting, but come up empty handed and the trending topics only show the hot spots around you. Looks like you're out of luck.
A new mobile website, called MisoTrendy, wants to help with that problem by showing you the trending places wherever you want to go, not just where you are.
Miio is a new microblogging service which is a bit like a mashup between Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook and an RSS reader. Now typically, we don't like describing services as a "it's like a this plus a that," but Miio is precisely the kind of service that needs a little help in the "what this is" department.
Don't get us wrong, the concept itself isn't bad: a discussion board built around interests as opposed to popularity. It's just that the execution makes the service seem a little confusing.
So what is miio? That's what we're trying to figure out today.
It's been 5 years since Google first introduced the Google Maps API, a move that has brought Google Maps to more than 350,000 websites worldwide, and this week the company is celebrating the API's birthday with a map of Google Maps mashups.
It is intriguing indeed to witness the Technology of the Future giving us a window on the past. We've discovered new ancestors, both biologically and culturally, using lidar, GPS and online mapping. Those discoveries, however, have been made by professionals. Most of us want to interact with history not to make large scale discoveries that change humankind's understanding, but personal ones, that change ours.
To that end, here is a survey of mash-ups that unite mapping, photos, street views, video and documentary photographs from ages past. Historypin, Then and Now, There and Then and SepiaTown all give the individual the opportunity to add depth of field to the mind's eye.
Google is determined, one way or another, to convince the Brits that its Maps and Street View are worth more than simply violating their privacy. Today, the ever-cataloging and image-capturing company has added a new feature to its U.K. version of Google Maps - "properties" listings.
According to this morning's announcement of the new feature in the Google LatLong Blog, a survey conducted just before Google Street View launched in the U.K. found that a fifth of respondents had used Street View in their househunting efforts.
A new mashup lets you track the BP oil spill news using Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and more, all from one interface. Called "Oilaholic," the site serves as a one-stop shop for everything oil spill-related, including the latest tweets, the live video cam feed from uStream, the latest Facebook news and Flickr photos, the hottest headlines from Google News and elsewhere on the Web, a real-time "leak meter" feed (which is incredibly disturbing), and a live chatroom for venting your frustrations after you look at the leak meter, plus links to useful resources including government agencies, volunteer efforts, phone numbers to call and more.
Microsoft has
Bing continues to add overlay data on top of its mapping application rather than relying on third-party mashups and its becoming increasingly useful in doing so.
The tech world is still reeling from the impact of Facebook's radical changes, announced last week a the F8 developer's conference, and their implications for privacy, the open Web and the future of social networking. However, these newly introduced features, such as the "like" button for websites, social plugins and Facebook's Open Graph API, have spurred some early-adopting developers to create tools for end users that include everything from bookmarklets to search engines. Over the course of the past week or so, a number of these tools have been covered by leading tech blogs (including us, of course), but we wanted to create a resource that lists all of them in one place.
The neighborhood boundary data provider used by Google, Twitter, EveryBlock, CitySearch and other companies has expanded to include top cities in South America, Middle East, Africa and Asia. Norwich, Vermont based Maponics says it now also offers deeper coverage for leading US and Canadian markets, with new neighborhoods in 100 cities.
Maponics says it is the first service to provide neighborhood boundaries on every populated continent on earth.
