Alternative uses for Foursquare

Now that the new social app Foursquare is available worldwide, I’ve been giving it a try here in Des Moines. With Foursquare, I “check in” by texting a message to the service when I arrive at various destinations and collect points for my check-ins. (Eventually I could be appointed Mayor of a place I visit often. This is the only reason I even tried Foursquare in the first place.)

The purpose of this app is to let my friends know where I am while I’m out gallavanting around, so they can join me for a drink or a meal, and learn more (through tips) about why I like the places I patronize.

The problem is, the people I’m acquainted with who are most likely to be reading my updates are not the people who are usually wondering on a Saturday night, “Where the heck is Janet? I MUST go where Janet is and hang out!” So, this may ultimately end up being one of those situations where I finally just admit I’m not the target market, and accept defeat.

Unless I can find some valuable alternate use for Foursquare – not altogether unlikely, given that I once dismissed Twitter with a “talk to the hand” flourish, only to find that later it had morphed into an incredibly valuable business and personal connectivity tool.

So here, with a hopeful eye on the future of Foursquare, are a few alternate uses for this latest bit of “I don’t get it.”

1. If you’re a professional with clients, or have friends who own businesses, you can earn brownie points by listing them as venues and then checking in. (You’re welcome, @Sambetti’s! And yes, I meant it about the onion rings.)
2. Easy way to fake a day of outside sales calls when you’re really laying on a chaise lounge at home with an umbrella drink in your hand. (Aside: Foursquare needs a plug-in that lets you schedule auto-checkins to really be useful in this situation.)
3. Useful tool for savvy burglars who can estimate, based on your latest check-in, how much time they have to ransack your house.
4. Quick way to notify loved ones that Captain Sulley has safely landed your plane (i.e., “Just checked in @Hudson River.”)
5. What, too soon?

I love PicClick.com – no more paging through Ebay or Amazon search results

Today I spent a few minutes using a new web tool called PicClick (www.picClick.com), which vastly improves the way I scan and view search results from eBay and Amazon. I’m still digging into it, but it immediately made me think, “WOW this is great!” – so, thought I’d better share it.

The problem with the two sites (though mostly on eBay) is that the process of scanning my search results can take a long time because they are spread over several pages. With PicClick, I can type in a favorite search phrase along with my preferred price range and get all results displayed on one page, in the style of a photo gallery. I can sort the results by start or end time or by highest or lowest price, etc.

For eBay searches, each item in the gallery gives me a photo of the item, time remaining on the sale, and the current bid. (“Buy It Now” items have the word “Buy” in front of the price.) I can mouse over the item for its full title, then click through to view the full description or submit my bid.

This format works great for me because the types of searches I do are distinctly visual – I might search for “vintage tablecloth,” where each item is going to look a little different. It’s also an improvement, though, if you’re searching for the best price on a single item  such as “Pampered Chef garlic press” – you know they’re all going to look the same, you just want to scan the prices for the best deal.

Over on the Amazon side, I also get all search results displayed on one page – but the scope of Amazon’s site makes results-surfing a little harder. For example, when I searched for “Hemingway,” I not only got search results for Earnest Hemingway’s books but also for things like the “Hemingway” table lamp from Kenroy Home or a 1990 edition of Playboy magazine featuring Margaux Hemingway. The solution is to make use of the categories listed on PicClick’s main Amazon page. If I first click “books,” then search for “Hemingway,” the results are infinitely more browsable – assuming, of course, that I’m looking for books by Hemingway.

Another thing I appreciate about the site is that it’s monetized not by making me pay to use it, but invisibly so that the person who developed it gets paid if I purchase an item by clicking through one of his links. That means the developer gets paid if I buy something, but I don’t have to pay for the convenience of the improved browsing. It makes me wish two things: 1). That I had thought of it; and 2). That I had the skills to write the code.

At any rate, my hat’s off to deveoper Ryan Sit. (hat tip to Mashable.com.)

Blog tools: search your own blogroll with Rollyo

I try to link back to the blog posts of other Des Moines area bloggers as often as I can. One of the ways I decide whom to link to from a particular post is this: I determine a topic I want to write about, then I do a Google search to see who else is talking about that topic. Problem is, of course, Google gives me links to bloggers from around the world – and I want to specifically link to local bloggers as often as I can. So, what I needed was a tool that could do a Google-style search only on Des Moines area blogs.

It didn’t take long before I found what seems to be a tool for doing just that: it’s called Rollyo, and it allows me to create my own custom search list by entering the URL’s of up to 25 selected blogs. So, I spent a little time creating a few of my own “searchrolls,” and now I can search for occurances of my selected phrase just within the blogs I’ve specified. This tells me if anyone else locally is blogging about the topic I’m covering, and helps me quickly uncover a post I might be able to link back to.

Only two faults I’ve found so far: first, the limit of 25 URL’s. I ought to be able to enter as many URL’s as I want to in a single searchroll. And second, I can only search one of my custom searchrolls at a time. It took me four separate rolls (25 URL’s in each) to enter all my local site links, so I have to do four separate searches. That’s still better than searching the entire Internet for a link to a local blog, but I’d like to be able to check multiple searchrolls with one click.

Are you a Rotten Neighbor?

Remember WalkScore, the website that lets you determine whether a particular house is within walking distance of various neighborhood amenities? It’s designed to help you learn more about homes you may be considering purchasing.

Well, now you can run another diagnostic tool called RottenNeighbor – this one allows you to look up surrounding properties and find out if someone’s complaining about the neighbors. Find out who’s got a Pitbull, who’s running a marijuana farm, and who’s just plain noisy or inconsiderate on the block. Be sure to look up your own address too, to see if anyone’s complaining about you yet!

VK, have you seen this? I think you might have some neighbors you want to report!

Follow the trail that follows you

Nick has become the victim of a company down-sizing - a situation which I certainly do hope evolves into a door opening rather than a door closing.

His post reminded me of something I wrote a few months ago about modern-day job-hunting. On another blog, I posted about the notion that your friends may not be the only ones seeking you out on MySpace and other social networking sites. (When I launched DMweblife, I moved that post over here.)

Employers, too, may be checking you out – not just by “Googling” your name but by using social site aggregators to seek out all the various profiles you’ve put on the web. If any of these happen to include information or photos you wouldn’t want to share with an employer, you may find yourself blushing in your next job interview - or perhaps excluded from consideration all together. 

Here are a few of the sites potential employers could be using – if they’re social media savvy – to learn more about you. I’m sure there are more, so if you know of any be sure to post them.

• PeekYou.com - boasts some 50 million-plus profiles, but I wasn’t among them. UPDATE: Okay it did find me – lots of info, too!
• Wink.com – this one found a lot older stuff… a few things I’d forgotten about (though nothing embarrassing – LOL)
• Zoominfo.com – focuses on your employment history. It only found my current position, where I’ve been for 7 years.
• YoName.com – searches major social networking sites; found me in lots of places.
• Ex.plode.us – searches major social sites, including some I use, but did not find me by name or username.

And finally, a resource that works for you in the job hunt (well, the above could too, if you always behaved yourself and posted only professional-type stuff…) Anyway, someone asked me recently if I was on LinkedIn yet, and I wasn’t… then a few days later I heard someone else say, “Yeah he’s on LinkedIn…” and so I finally went and looked at LinkedIn – it’s a professional networking site that lets you find your current and former co-workers, network for jobs, etc.

*The trail that follows you

One more link back to Mike Sansone and then I’ll be quiet and let you discover him for yourself… today he put up some tips for graduates about establishing a personal brand. He asks the question, “If an employer Googled you, what would they find?” Well, this question isn’t just relevant to the grads themselves. It brings up an interesting question for all parents to consider.

The question is: What are your kids posting today that could come back to haunt them when they apply for jobs or colleges? I have a daughter who is 13, and she has had a MySpace page for the past four months or so. With employers doing Google checks (as well as credit checks — WTF is up with that?) on prospective employees, it’s no small stretch to think they (or the folks who review apps for college scholarships) could find a teen’s MySpace page, where perhaps that teen has not been too concerned about what they post.

And as parents, to what extent do we try to balance (thru our influence) a kid’s need to find him/herself… to “try on” various identities, including the negative ones… to express him/herself… with the need for future considerations?

It’s no longer enough to tell your kids, “get good grades in high school because it will affect your chances at college.” These days, kids have many amazing communications tools that we as parents didn’t have at that age. But they are completely unaware of the fact that what they post on MySpace and other sites may actually have an impact on their future success. Can we help them understand without appearing to suck all the joy out of their online experience? What’s the right age to begin?