Filed under: Utilities, Web services, Social Software, web 2.0

Maybe you’ve heard of Foursquare — that trendy mobile app that lets you and your friends check in when you go somewhere — but chances are you haven’t heard of FourWhere. It’s a search engine for location-based social networks, starting with Foursquare, but planning to expand to Gowalla and others. Just like third-party apps started popping up for Twitter as it got more popular, you can expect to see a lot more of these add-ons for location-centered networks in the future.

So, what does FourWhere do, exactly? It’s like a mashup of Google Maps and Foursquare, allowing you to find venues and the comments people have left about them. Just right click anywhere on the map to bring up nearby venues. Clicking on a location shows you how many people have checked in there and what tips they’ve left. You can even filter out venues with no tips.

FourWhere is handy, but not perfect. I noticed that a lot of comments were labeled “more than 6 months ago,” when they were actually made recently. Also, one of the most important pieces of FourSquare information is missing: who’s the mayor? If you could use FourWhere to pick out vulnerable spots to grab a mayorship, it would be a lot more useful.

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FourWhere introduces search for location-based social networks originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 09 Mar 2010 16:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Time-Wasters, Social Software, Web

Remember those sites that purported to tell you what your website is worth? Just type in a domain name, and out popped an impressive-sounding number that wasn’t worth the pixels it was rendered with. Well, now we have the same thing for Twitter. It’s called TweetValue.

If you were wondering about the validity of the dollar value that TweetValue comes up with for your Twitter account, check out this sparkling copywriting gem displayed prominently on the TweetValue’s front page:

“Get ready for some bling-bling and some tweet-tweet!”

Yeah, so there’s that.

The site seems to have achieved a high level of popularity recently, which would explain why it is running slowly and having occasional rendering problems. More than anything I see TweetValue as a fun little gag, and a way to gain totally meaningless bragging rights over your friends.

For the record, TweetValue puts our @DownloadSquad Twitter profile’s value at $970. What’s yours?

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TweetValue calculates the dollar value of your Twitter account - Time Waster originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 09 Mar 2010 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Palm, Web services, Social Software, web 2.0

We covered location-based game Foursquare’s webOS client earlier in the year, noting that competitor Gowalla had a client for the Palm Pre and Pixi ‘in the works’ - and today, just in time for SXSW, the Gowalla webOS client has appeared in the App Store. As with all things Gowalla, the client is slickly designed, and includes all the bells and whistles found in the Gowalla iPhone app from Checking in, friends checkins and the recently expanded ‘Trips’ feature.

Whilst the number of webOS devices may be somewhat lower than, say, iPhones, the release today is particularly important given the webOS browser doesn’t support location services that would otherwise allow Gowalla users to use the well-designed mobile website.

Be sure to check out our gallery of Gowalla for webOS screenshots - and if you own a Pre or Pixi, the app is ready to download in the webOS App Catalog.

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Gowalla hits webOS with a slick new client originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 09 Mar 2010 17:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: E-mail, Google, Mozilla, Freeware, Social Software, Browsers

There are a number of email plugins that look to give you contextual information about the person you’re communicating with. The first one I tried (and arguably the best I’ve seen) is Xobni, an Outlook plugin.

There’s now a similar plugin available for Gmail users called Rapportive. Rapportive replaces the ads you normally see in the right-hand sidebar with a profile of the person you’re emailing with that is automatically generated by searching online services for your correspondent’s email address. Rapportive is only available to users that are using either Firefox or Chrome as their browser, since Firefox and Chrome have a plugin architecture.

The information Rapportive provides is interesting, and it searches a surprising number of online services. But I can’t help but think that they’re putting themselves on shaky ground by choosing to replace the ads in Gmail; I doubt Google could easily block this behavior technologically, but if Rapportive gets too popular I don’t doubt that Google’s lawyers might be able to block it, permanently.

In the mean time, if you’re looking for a clever way to get more information about the people you correspond with the side-effect of blocking ads in your Gmail, have a look at Rapportive.

[via ReadWriteWeb]

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Rapportive replaces Gmail ads with useful social information originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 08 Mar 2010 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Utilities, Freeware, Social Software, Web

Twilk is a simple site that looks at either your Twitter follower list and/or the list of accounts that you follow, and creates a tiled background image that is then applied to your profile page. The people whose accounts you refer to most often via @ replies, re-tweets, or mentions will show up in the first two columns going down the page.

Although Twilk is primarily a free service, they also offer a paid subscription that will automatically update your background daily.

The idea of Twilk is clever, but it doesn’t make for the most visually appealing profile page. It would be nice if Twilk offered to add a screen, or to slightly darken the images uniformly, so that the resulting background didn’t look so chaotic. However, if you’re looking for a way to pay homage to the folks that you follow (or those that follow you), Twilk isn’t a bad way to go.

Twilk uses your followers’ icons to make a Twitter background for you originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 08 Mar 2010 08:10:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Social Software, web 2.0, Android

We recently covered the beta version of Gowalla’s location-based social app for Android, and now it’s hit version 1.0. You can download Gowalla from the Android Market starting today. Gowalla’s main competitor, Foursquare, has already been on Android for some time.

If you’re familiar with the Gowalla iPhone app, the Android version won’t disappoint. It has practically all of the features of the iPhone app, wrapped up in a nicely-designed Android-style package. You can check in, keep track of friends, see your profile and complete trips from the new app. The only thing you can’t do is add a location, but that feature is presumably coming soon in an update.

As we mentioned before, Gowalla for Android has very accurate location detection, powered by Skyhook Wireless, so it’s great at picking out exactly where you are when you’re ready to check in.

[via Mashable]

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Gowalla 1.0 hits the Android Market originally appeared on Download Squad on Sat, 06 Mar 2010 15:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: E-mail, Web services, Social Software

Everything about Facebook seems driven toward getting more data into the system, but it’s always been a lot harder to get data out. Now that Yahoo! Mail has integrated Facebook Connect, though, you’ve got one more option for importing your friends’ email addresses from Facebook.

To grab your Facebook friends as Yahoo! contacts, just head over to your Yahoo! profile and go to the contacts tab. For now, there’s a Facebook import prompt on that page, but in case you close it or Yahoo! removes it, you can also find the import link under “tools > import.” You’ll have to approve Yahoo! to connect to your Facebook account, but the import process is pretty seamless after that.

For me, the big win in all of this is that once I’ve got my Facebook contacts into Yahoo! Mail, I can import them into Gmail, which is my main email provider.

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Yahoo! can now import your Facebook contacts originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 05 Mar 2010 11:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Palm, Social Software, Mobile Minute

Whilst the original version was handy for checking on your friends’ status updates, it offered little more than a Twitter-like UI for the Facebook service. With this new update, there’s not just the status messages, but news feed items, events and photos all within a stylishly tidy UI.

The update is, as you’d expect, freely available for download via the Palm App Catalog.

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Facebook for webOS loses its Twitter envy and finally becomes useful originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 04 Mar 2010 16:28:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Social Software, Microblogging

The folks over at Delicious have been fairly active recently. A month ago they added filtering and browsing features, and yesterday they released a couple of new changes. Well, one is not that new actually — more of a comeback, but it’s still cool (or hot, as the case may be).

The Hotlist has been lurking under a more confusing name for some time, and now it’s back to being a “hotlist”. It shows users what’s going on right now, and which pages are getting bookmarked the most right this minute.

The People feature is actually new. Not much to say about it, but that it lets you “send” links to people via Delicious. I would’ve told you more about it, but to use it you actually need…friends.

One thing Lee here helped me figure out is that when you click a count next to a link (”how many people bookmarked”) you get a list of all the people who bookmarked it, and then you can add them to your network and at least pretend they’re your friends (or stalk them) and see what they’re bookmarking. Neat!

Delicious brings back the Hotlist, adds “People” feature originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 03 Mar 2010 15:31:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Social Software, Microblogging

Nothing sets off a good round of speculation like a vague, tantalizing tweet from a developer. Twitter’s Alex Payne (aka @al3x) set a small fire in the tech blogosphere (does anyone still call it that?) when he let slip the following delicious tidbit on Saturday afternoon:

If you had some of the nifty site features that we Twitter employees have, you might not want to use a desktop client. (You will soon.)

It’s a perfect storm of offering information and building excitement without actually revealing too much about what we can expect. Al3x, you tease!

TechCrunch speculates that Alex might be talking about baked-in geotagging, and cites third-party Twitter web client Brizzly as an example of a featureset that Twitter could duplicate. The advantage of bringing things like filtering, location-based search, and more powerful follower-management tools to Twitter natively is that they won’t have to deal with the delays or API rate limits that third-party devs face.

Do I think that popular desktop clients will suddenly become obsolete? Definitely not. Will Twitter’s web experience get a lot better? Heck yes, unless they try to crowd too many features into it. I’m looking forward to seeing what Alex’s mystery features entail.

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Twitter employee teases users with “nifty” new features originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 01 Mar 2010 13:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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