reDesign

Microsoft’s Virtual Earth has a phenomenal addition to Live Search Maps that allows users to create virtual aerial tours. Here’s an example using pictures from my trip to Kauai:

The tours can be exported as a video file and uploaded to a video sharing site (as above) or shared by link to Live Search Maps. Like many such links on AJAX sites, it doesn’t preserve the correct state. Click “Tour in 3D” in the upper left and “aerial” above the map for best effect.

Tours can be created manually by pushing pins into a map. The service also plays nicely with GeoRSS, GPX, KML or KMZ files. The above tour was imported from my flickr pictures. (Unfortunately, flickr caps geo exports to the most recent 20 pictures per search.)

The 3d map tours can be generated from GPS tracklogs. Here’s a tour based on the tracklog from a recent bike trip through San Francisco, taking the ferry back from Sausalito:

Major cities, like San Francisco, benefit from 3D models of key buildings. The blue line in the video is the tracklog.

Both of these tours were created using the default settings. You can also customize the view shown at each location by rotating, tilting or zooming. I don’t see an option to playback the full tracklog.

Disclosure: I work for a Microsoft subsidiary.

Yahoo! Local has rolled out some new features to increase the Web 2.0-ness of its local search product:

• RSS feeds. You can subscribe to feeds of all reviews near you. If you find a reviewer you like, you can stay up-to-date on his or her reviews.
• A “first reviewed by” designation to highlight contributors who are the first to review a place.
• Attribute drill down. You can narrow your search using filters such as “family friendly,” “casual” or “elegant.”

It’s been a few months since I last checked in on Yahoo! Local. Overall, it’s a huge improvement. It has a long ways to go before catching category leader Yelp. (The metric being by my subjective opinion of product quality.)

Yelp has had the first two features for at least a year.

Among the local players, Yelp has had the best incentive system for contributors. Its “First to Review” designation is one of many things that Yelp does to encourage frequent participation. An “Elite” system rewards frequent contributors with a badge on their profile and invitations to parties. The front page of the site highlights a review of the day. Featured Yelpers also appear on the home page.

It may sound corny, but such incentives are important to keeping people engaged. Most social systems have some sort of perk system, including ODP’s edit-alls and metas and the Wikipedia cabal.

Although Yahoo’s design is more visually appealing than it used to be, it’s still cluttered.

Unlike Yelp, the map scrolls off the search results page, making it hard to see where results 3-10 are located unless you have a very large screen.

Getting reviews is more work than it should be. Yahoo! breaks its 69 reviews for The Italian Store across 29 pages, 3 at a time. Yelp shows all 42 of its reviews on one page, making it very easy to scan.

Then there’s the ads. I’m all for ads — I work in the Web space and like to get paid — when they’re relevant. The ads on Yahoo! Local are anything but. Here is an example of the ads that appeared above the listings for restaurants:

The top two ads are for services that compete with Yahoo! Local. Ads on the side (not shown) pitched “Watch mouth-watering videos of Oklahoma’s best restaurants” and one from Target offered “Find restaurant online. Shop & Save at Target.com Today.” (I’ll admit to clicking through on the Oklahoma ad just to see what would constitute a mouth-watering video of Okahoma restaurants. Unfortunately, they linked it to a video of a bad rendition of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.)

I understand that local advertisers are scarce, especially outside the Bay Area. But Yelp takes the right approach. If you don’t have something interesting to say, keep your mouth shut.

More on: local search, yahoo, yelp

Disclosure: I used to work on local products for AOL.

Google is continuing its efforts to turn its My Maps personal mapmaking tools into a geographic blogging platform. Back in October, they added profile pages for map creators. I wrote at the time that it would be nice to have user comments on the maps to introduce flickr-like incentives for map creators.

Today’s release allows viewers to rate maps and leave comments. You can also see statistics on maps, including the number of views and the top referring links to the map.

More on: google, maps, Web 2.0

In a much anticipated move, Facebook has changed its News Feed algorithm. The new algorithm rewards applications that compel their audiences to interact with them regularly. Scrabulous is a great example of a winner from this change.

Under the old algorithm, you would only see News Feed items from applications that you have installed. If all of your friends loved Scrabulous, you wouldn’t hear about it except possibly when they installed the application. I find this particular feed item from Scrabulous a bit spammy because the text doesn’t reflect anything that Ben did within the application. If it said “Ben played the word QUARTZY for 126 points” it’d be a more interesting news item.

This change also helps applications that compete with Facebook core features like the Wall and Photos. They are now on a more equal footing when it comes to promotion in the News Feed.

The additional competition for inclusion in the News Feed will hurt applications like Vampires that have large installed bases because they got in on the spam-all-your-friends bonanza when the F8 platform launched.

An earlier change by Facebook allows you to vote on News Feed items. In the screenshot above, clicking the thumbs up icon indicates that you like an item. Clicking on the “X” indicates that you don’t like an item. It’s unclear whether the vote applies to the person that the item is about or the application that generated it.

More on: Facebook

TechCrunch is reporting that Facebook has changed course on Beacon, a controversial new data gathering and publishing system. With Beacon, participating Web sites sent data to Facebook that automatically appeared on your profile. For example, if you wrote a review on Yelp or TripAdvisor, the review would appear in your Facebook Mini-Feed and could appear in the News Feeds that your friends see. Other partner Web sites include eBay, Fandango and Overstock.com.

This has caused a couple of concerns:

• Users saw information published that they didn’t necessarily want published. Many people are purchasing Christmas presents and the contents of their orders were put out on their feed, ruining surprises.
• It’s unclear what Facebook does with data that users choose not to publish. Facebook still receives the information from partner sites.

Under the new direction, stories will be sent to Facebook, but will only be published when the user takes an explicit action. That addresses the first concern, but it doesn’t address the second. For all we know, Facebook could be storing that information indefinitely and using that to target ads.

Facebook is all about giving up privacy in exchange for social connectivity. I frequently provide false information when sites ask me about age, gender, etc. Facebook, on the other hand, gets real data because it’s essential to the core function. It’s a tradeoff that I make. But automatically providing transaction-level detail from any partner site is a tradeoff I’m not willing to make.

I’m perfectly happy to have Facebook distribute reviews I write on Yelp. (I was using an application called Yelper to do this before Beacon existed.) But I wouldn’t want Facebook to automatically publish all my reservations on OpenTable (OT is not a partner, this is hypothetical). If I sell an unwanted gift on eBay, I don’t want friends to know about it. Not only do I not want Facebook to publish that information, I don’t want them to get it in the first place.

The biggest problem with Beacon is that there isn’t a clear benefit to the user. It seems like a data grab primarily for marketing purposes. Jason Calacanis’ take on this is well worth reading.

Beacon has a lot of power and can provide a lot more benefit to users than it currently does. I’ll talk more about that in the future.

Update: Om Malik reports that Facebook is deleting information that users choose not to publish.

See also:

• Facebook Beacon 2.0: What You’ll See (TechCrunch)
• Facebook updates Beacon: now truly opt-in (Inside Facebook)
• Feeling Betrayed, Facebook Users Force Site to Honor Their Privacy (washingtonpost.com)
• To Save Its Bacon, Facebook Weakens Beacon (GigaOm)

More on: Facebook, privacy, social networking

My friends who’ve seen me walk around with a GPS as I take pictures on vacation or hikes think I’m a little bit odd. But apparently, I’m not the only one. In the 15 months since Flickr officially supported geotagging, more than 35 million pictures have been geotagged — enough that they can launch Flickr Places to show them off.

One of my big complaints with most travel sites is that they downplay the visual and visceral elements that make travel fun. At Flickr Places, that’s front and center. Places offers a gorgeous travelogue of places around the world. You can see pictures, Flickr groups about the location and connect with photographers.

A tag cloud shows the top tags for an area; this sounds more useful than it is. Most places I searched came up with words like clouds, sunset, people, church. It’d be nice if the universal words were thrown out and the focus places on words that are unique or much more common for an area.

I’d also like to be able to zoom in on the map and see where the most photographed places are. (There are some data quality issues with this, but they’re manageable.)

Flickr also changed the way maps are presented. Although the maps and overall presentation are more visually appealing, some key functionality was lost. In the previous version, the map represented your search. If you zoomed in or out, the new map defined the boundaries. As a result, you could see new pictures that didn’t appear in the other view.

The World Map view now provides a tag visualization that shows the latest tags from around the world. (See my earlier coverage of World Explorer from Yahoo! Research.)

See also:

• A page on Flickr for every place in the world (flickr blog)
• Ridiculously cool upgrade to Flickr maps and Places (Yahoo! Local & Maps blog)

More on: flickr, geotagging

Google’s latest changes to My Maps allows you to collaborate on personal maps with others in much the same way you can share a Google Document or Spreadsheet.

You can also allow anyone to edit a map.

Group editing is great for maps that are too hard for one person to scale. Before this release, I started maps of free Wi-Fi and restaurants with outdoor dining. Now I can invite my friends and the public to help build out the maps. Although some of these data is captured by vertical players such as JiWire and Skyhook, the integration with Google’s Local Search brings it to a much wider audience.

Google could use the same platform to have users build out vertical directories to augment data from providers like InfoUSA by actively soliciting users to contribute places on specific topics. This is already happening on an ad hoc basis as users follow their passions and create maps.

We’ve seen news organizations use My Maps to cover stories such as the California wildfires. They could open that up to a collaborative process with their readers.

See also:

• Google Maps gets social
• The quest for buried treasure in mapping
• Using Google Maps as a virtual notepad
• Map your world with Google Maps
• Personal mashups - letting users re-draw the map

A longstanding problem with online maps and navigation devices is that your destination is often not where they say it is. When you reach the “destination”, you’re often a few hundred feet from where you wanted to be. There are three common reasons for this:

• No one has walked every street and identified where each address is. Addresses are approximated based on standard numbering schemes. On a block that goes from 200 to 300, 250 will be placed in the middle.
• Businesses sometimes use vanity addresses. The business may have an address on Madison Avenue in New York, but the real entrance is off less glamorous 54th Street.
• The business address is incorrect or malformed in the database.

Google Maps is now tapping users to help fix this problem. Users can edit the location markers for a given address. To prevent abuse, any movements greater than about 600 feet are moderated.

This is especially helpful for addresses that are incorrect in the Google database or can’t be accurately geocoded. These appear on Google Maps with a circle to mark the location and a warning.

The Pentagon Post Office is listed with an address of “The Penagon, Arlington, VA 22201″. As a result, it appears about three miles from where it really is. I was able to move it to the correct spot, on top of the Pentagon. Because this is more than 600 feet, the change will be moderated. I’ll be watching to see how quickly that happens. (Update: Google has since removed the Pentagon Post Office record altogether.)

If this feature takes off, it will make Google’s Street View feature much more useful. Right now, when you pull up a Street View of an address, there’s a good chance you won’t see the business you were looking for because it shows a view of the approximated location.

More on: Google, maps, satellite navigation

A large untapped opportunity in social networks is connecting people with information they’re looking for.

I was flying home this weekend from Lake Tahoe and connected in Salt Lake City. While I was there, I updated my Facebook status to indicate that I was in Utah for the first time.

Later that night I received a message from my friend Dean:

hey Rocky, whatcha doing in the beautiful, bizarre state of UT?

I lived there for a year after AOL. Let me know if you need any tips on where to go while you are there.

Without doing a search, I had information coming directly to me from someone I knew. I was just in Utah for 90 minutes, so I didn’t need any tips. But when I go there for real, I now know to begin my search with Dean.

By distributing information needs through our network, social networks allow us to tap into a large base of knowledge from known sources.

Services like Yahoo! Answers allow you to ask questions, but Answers is largely anonymous. Too many of the answers devolve into insults and name calling and it’s hard to tell if people know what they’re talking about. There is also an incentive problem: I don’t participate in Yahoo! Answers because I don’t have enough time to answer questions for random strangers. But I’m happy to answer questions for friends.

LinkedIn’s Answers product usually delivers better results by posing questions just to your network. And because I know these people, I can easily assess the credibility of their answers. LinkedIn’s professional focus is a bit limiting; I wouldn’t pose questions about vacation plans there.

If I were really going to Utah, I suppose I could spam everyone I know with an email asking if anyone knew anything about Utah. The passive approach of updating my Facebook status is more socially acceptable.

For now, this relies on my friends seeing my status message and responding. It was more or less random that Dean saw my status message. As social networks get smarter (and get more data), the request can be routed automatically to the people likely to have a good answer. My status message could be displayed more prominently to friends whose profiles indicated that they’d lived in or visited Utah.

Marketers can also be part of the conversation. Facebook allows you to become a “fan” of a company or a product. If I become a “fan” of United Airlines, they could send me information about their Utah service or upcoming sales. I’d love to hear about any great deals to Park City this winter.

More on: Facebook, search

See also:

• Marketing on social networks
• The power of location in presence

Social networks like MySpace and Facebook are among the leaders in user engagement, with many users returning daily and some visiting many times a day. They’ve almost reached the same level of engagement as email* and have double the engagement of news and sports sites. Yet they present a special problem for marketers: the content is so compelling that few people bother to look at the ads.

The ads have been poorly targeted banner ads or Facebook’s “flyers.” The flyers target a specific network, but even those frequently miss the mark. I’m in the Northwestern network and frequently get ads for coffee shops near the campus in Evanston.

The future of marketing on social networks is getting users to create and distribute advertising information for you.

Two of my favorite Facebook apps are MyTech and HotLists.

MyTech is an application from CNet that allows you to publish your technology purchases. Here’s a screenshot from my profile:

My friends can see what I’ve bought and how I’ve rated it. The purchase and review appear on my mini-feed. (Facebook will soon change the rules on its news feed, allowing the review to also get distributed in my friends’ news feeds.) The Facebook platform and MyTech are enabling word of mouth well beyond the people I talk to on a regular basis. The personal connection also allows my friends to get more information on a product by asking someone they know.

Another great application is HotLists from the makers of HotOrNot. The HotLists application allows you to associate yourself with brands. Here is mine:

Who is going to associate themselves with brands?

Lots of people, if you make it easy enough. We do it every day when we wear a Product(RED) T-shirt, drive a BMW or put white earphones in our ears. On Facebook, HotLists’ statistics page shows that more than 38,000 people use the application every day; about 3.8 million have it installed.

A natural extension of the HotLists application is a brand recommendation engine that suggests brands you might be interested in based on the brands you’ve already selected.

This won’t work for all brands. I don’t see people putting Metamucil or Depends on their Facebook profile. But it can work for brands like Keen. Whenever I wear my Keens, it’s a conversation starter with other Keen fans.

My brand attributes also imbue the brands I choose. People who know how much I travel know that Briggs and Riley makes luggage that can travel a million miles.

* This is based on the general U.S. Internet population; in the college audience, social networks have likely exceeded email in engagement.