A quick little experiment for you if you haven't tried this before: Go to Google Maps and ask it for directions from San Francisco, CA to Beijing, China. Now, you wouldn't imagine any other way than to hop on a plane, right? Instead, Google figures you'd like to drive, takes you to the beach and then, somewhere around step 32, advises you to make the 3,879 kayak trip across the Pacific Ocean. While the cross-Pacific directions are a perennial joke, they're literally useless for travelers.
Rome2Rio, a site built on top of the much-loved Google maps interface, offers up directions by plane, train and automobile rather than telling you to hoof it to the beach and get to paddling.
TweetDeck's Web application, which made its Chrome Web Store debut back in December, has generally proved to be a worthy alternative to the TweetDeck AIR application for the desktop. However, up until today, the Web app only worked with Google's Chrome Web browser. Now, says the company, TweetDeck is coming to all the major browsers, including Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer and Opera.
In our continuing series here on ReadWriteWeb, we round up some of our favorite new apps for smartphones (well, iPhone and Android) each month. With March having just wrapped up, we've listed some of the new apps that caught our eye over the past few weeks below. This month, we also have dedicated a special section to the apps of SXSW.
Did we forget any of your favorites? Let us know in the comments!
Are you one of those people that has spent the past decade walking through life looking for opportunities to squeeze yet another Big Lebowsky quote into a conversation? Or perhaps you feel that the best way to express your thoughts is not with your own words, but the properly woven poesy of Wordsworth?
If you're a quotation maven of the nth degree, then Quotebook could be your new favorite friend for the iPhone.
The iPad was made for magazines but very few existing magazine publishers are making good use of it. Instead, a new class of startups have begun to build magazine-like apps for reading links from around the web. Flipboard is the best known and best funded, but there are others. One that's new to me and is in the news today, for reasons good and bad, is Zite. If you've used or heard of Flipboard, you should check out Zite: it's easier to use and easier to personalize. The trade-off is that it's easy to personalize, but not to customize with a lot of control. It's more like Pandora than it is like iTunes.
Zite lets you sign in with your Twitter, Google Reader or (as of tonight) Delicious account and it learns what you like by seeing what you share on those other services. It doesn't display your subscriptions from there, it just uses that information as inspiration. Then it learns from your behavior with the magazine it creates. It's like Pandora for web magazine reading, but smarter.
Nowadays, meeting someone in real life is just the first step. What's their phone number? Email address? Do you follow them on Twitter already? Are you Facebook friends? What about LinkedIn? Maybe they could write you a stellar recommendation somewhere down the line!
Following someone on all the proper social networks can be a confusing and time consuming effort. Maybe they're easy to find on one, but not another. If you want to make sure that others can follow you across multiple networks, then FullyFollow.me makes it as easy as a single click.
Like the popular flight-finding service Kayak, a new startup called Sparkbuy, launching at the Web 2.0 Expo today, wants to make the process of finding the perfect gadget easier using a similar simplified interface. Although consumers already have a number of gadget-shopping services at their disposal, including everything from Google Product Search to Amazon, Sparkbuy is innovating through its easy-to-use website design and its manuallymcurated collection of data.
The result is a gadget-shopping site that even the most woefully un-tech-savvy consumer could use, while still appealing to gadget geeks looking for an easier comparison shopping tool.
Nowadays, music discovery can be a magical, yet completely disconnected, experience. There are tools to find the most popular music from blogs, algorithms to suggest music according to characteristics and custom created lists and channels made by curators. Still, something integral is missing - your friends.
Once upon a time - long before peer-to-peer file sharing services hit the Web - the way to discover music was by trading mix tapes with friends. Nowadays, you might burn a CD for a friend but, as our music collections increasingly move into the cloud, it's becoming harder and harder to share your musical tastes with your friends. AudioVroom wants to change this and bring your friends to the music discovery experience of apps like Pandora.
There's new application launching here at the CTIA Wireless 2011 conference in Orlando, Florida: Gogobeans. The app is a digital locker of sorts for all your phone's content - photos, videos, contacts, bookmarks, files, apps and more. So in one sense, it's like a cloud-based backup of everything on your phone. But Gogobeans isn't just a backup tool - it's a platform where content can be shared with anyone just by shaking your phone.
At this week's SXSW conference in Austin, Texas, we got a sneak peek at a new Twitterized "newspaper" application for iPad called BroadFeed, just prior to its iTunes launch. Designed by marketing agency Organic, Inc., the app has publisher appeal because it won't "steal clicks" (i.e., page views) from content providers when displaying articles your friends linked to in their tweets.
On the consumer side, BroadFeed offers several features to entice new users in this increasingly crowded "social magazine" space. It automatically works with your Twitter account and your custom Twitter lists to organize the topics based on popularity, allowing you to read the most important items first. This gives the app a level of intelligence that some of its competitors don't have just yet.
