New Biking directions added to Google Maps
Whenever I meet someone who finds out that I work on the directions team for Google Maps, the first question I’m asked is often “So when’s Google Maps going to add biking directions?” We’re big biking fans too, so we’ve been itching to give you a concrete answer. I don’t want to keep the good news a secret any longer, so the answer is: right now!
Today we’ve added biking directions and extensive bike trail data to Google Maps for the U.S. My team has been keeping close tabs on all the public support for biking directions that’s been steadily coming in, but we knew that when we added the feature, we wanted to do it right: we wanted to include as much bike trail data as possible, provide efficient routes, allow riders to customize their trip, make use of bike lanes, calculate rider-friendly routes that avoid big hills and customize the look of the map for cycling to encourage folks to hop on their bikes. So that’s exactly what we’ve done.
Let’s say you want to bike to work, or maybe you want to drive less and spend more time outdoors. Biking directions can help you find a convenient and efficient route that makes use of dedicated bike trails or lanes and avoids hills whenever possible. To find biking directions, select “Bicycling” from the drop-down menu when you do a directions search:
So, how does it work? Well, I’m based in Seattle, along with the rest of the biking directions team. The city is notoriously hilly, but also has some great trails and a strong cycling community. Let’s say I’m trying to get from Golden Gardens to a friend’s house in Montlake:
This route avoids hills (phew!) and puts me on the Burke-Gilman trail for most of the journey. When I need to get off the trail to cross town, biking directions makes sure to keep me on bike-friendly roads and avoid some of the city’s busiest intersections. The time estimate for the route is based on a complex set of variables accounting for the type of road, terrain and turns over the course of my ride. If I decide that I want to stop at Woodland Park Zoo along the way, I can click on the blue path and drag it to my desired route — just like with driving directions — and we’ll still customize the journey for cycling suitability. Over on the Lat Long Blog, you can read more about all the unique tweaks and calculations factored into our routing algorithm.
We’ve also added information about bike trails, lanes and recommended roads directly onto the map. This can help you get a better sense of your route, or let you find trails nearby for a recreational ride. When you’re zoomed into a city, click on the “More” button at the top of the map to turn on the “Bicycling” layer. You’ll see three types of lines appear on the map:
- Dark green indicates a dedicated bike-only trail;
- Light green indicates a dedicated bike lane along a road;
- Dashed green indicates roads that are designated as preferred for bicycling, but without dedicated lanes
Thanks primarily to our partnership with the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy, we now have more than 12,000 miles of trails included in biking directions and outlined directly on the map. We also have data on bike lanes and recommended streets for 150 cities across the country. We’ll continue to add new trail information and encourage riders to send feedback (biking directions is in beta, after all) and route information for inclusion via the “Report a Problem” tool. When Map Maker is available in the U.S., all riders will be able to directly contribute their local knowledge about trails, bike lanes and suggested routes.
We know that many of you have been anxiously awaiting this feature, so head over to http://maps.google.com/biking to try it for yourself and then hop on your bike!
Posted by Shannon Guymon, Product Manager
Open for business: the Google Apps Marketplace
Every day, thousands of businesses choose the cloud. More than 2 million businesses have adopted Google Apps over the last three years, eliminating the hassles associated with purchasing, installing and maintaining hardware and software themselves.
We’ve found that when businesses begin to experience the benefits of cloud computing, they want more. We’re often asked when we’ll offer a wider variety of business applications — from accounting and project management to travel planning and human resources management. But we certainly can’t and won’t do it all, and there are hundreds of business applications for which we have no particular expertise.
In recent years, many talented software providers have embraced the cloud and delivered a diverse set of features capable of powering almost any business. But too often, customers who adopt applications from multiple vendors end up with a fractured experience, where each particular application exists in its own silo. Users are often forced to create and remember multiple passwords, cut and paste data between applications, and jump between multiple interfaces just to complete a simple task.
Today, we’re making it easier for these users and software providers to do business in the cloud with a new online store for integrated business applications. The Google Apps Marketplace allows Google Apps customers to easily discover, deploy and manage cloud applications that integrate with Google Apps. More than 50 companies are now selling applications across a range of businesses, including:
- § Intuit Online Payroll: A small business application that offers business owners a new way to efficiently run payroll, pay taxes and let employees check paystubs all within one integrated online office environment.
- § Manymoon: The company’s free work and project management application for Google Apps makes it simple for businesses and teams to organize and share information including tasks, projects, documents, status updates and links with co-workers, customers and partners.
- § Professional Services Connect (PS Connect): This new cloud-based offering coming soon from Appirio, pulls contextually relevant information on people, projects, customers and transactions from a user’s domain and surfaces it directly inside a Gmail message so services professionals can make more informed, real-time decisions.
- § JIRA Studio: A hosted software development suite from Atlassian enables software developers to flow naturally between Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and other design and development tools in order to better track and manage project issues and workflow.
Once installed to a company’s domain, these third-party applications work like native Google applications. With administrator approval, they may interact with calendar, email, document and/or contact data to increase productivity. Administrators can manage the applications from the familiar Google Apps control panel, and employees can open them from within Google Apps. With OpenID integration, Google Apps users can access the other applications without signing in separately to each. The Google Apps Marketplace eliminates the worry about software updates, keeping track of different passwords and manual syncing and sharing of data, thereby increasing business productivity and lessening frustrations for users and IT administrators alike. That’s the power of the cloud.
For more information on the benefits of the Google Apps Marketplace to businesses, check out our Enterprise Blog post. Developers interested in learning how to integrate with Google Apps can check out our post on the Google Code Blog. Or, you can explore the Google Apps Marketplace directly at http://google.com/appsmarketplace.
Finally, we’ll be diving deeper into application development for the enterprise at Google I/O on May 19-20. We hope to see you there!
Posted by Chris Vander Mey, Product Manager, Google Apps Marketplace
YouTube calling: Now serving ads on the YouTube mobile site
Mobile phones are rapidly becoming essential tools for surfing the web, connecting with friends, and sharing and watching video online, and we’re seeing these effects at YouTube. The YouTube mobile site is more popular than ever: site traffic grew by over 160% in 2009, and now millions of people all over the world are streaming tens of millions of videos every day on their mobile phones. The mobile space moves fast, so we’ve been working hard to roll out new features and functionality quickly, especially as more and more people adopt YouTube-capable phones.
The increased usage of high-end devices like the iPhone and Android is also making mobile advertising easier and more effective for advertisers. So today, we’re launching ads on the home, search and browse pages of the American and Japanese YouTube mobile websites (m.youtube.com from your mobile browser). This is a great way for advertisers to reach YouTube viewers across multiple platforms. In fact, at launch YouTube will immediately provide one of the largest audiences for a mobile ad campaign anywhere on the mobile web. And because YouTube mobile attracts early adopters, the site can deliver to advertisers a coveted demographic of tech savvy trendsetters. We’ve already seen some early campaigns run on YouTube’s mobile site by advertisers like Sony (for the DVD release of “District 9″) and Kia, both of whom were able to easily reach their target audience, no matter where they were looking for video.
Our first tests of YouTube mobile ads — with brands ranging from L’Oreal to Land Rover — showed strong results related to click-throughs, user experience and brand awareness, and we’ve learned a lot in the months since then. As a result, ads on the YouTube mobile website will be banner ads sold on a full-day basis (like with the YouTube homepage on the web), making a mobile buy an easy and valuable addition to any YouTube campaign. For example, today Mazda is running a homepage ad on YouTube.com, and extended their campaign to run ads on our mobile site as well.
If you’re interested in learning more, reach out to your YouTube or Google sales rep, or visit youtube.com/advertise.
Posted by Taylor Cascino, Strategic Partner Development Manager
The Internet in America: A YouTube Interview with the FCC
If you’re reading this, then you’re probably on the Internet — via your laptop, your mobile phone or other handheld device, or maybe even through your television. But in 2010, millions of Americans still do not have access to the wealth of information made available on the Web. Even though the Internet was invented in the U.S. over 20 years ago, many Americans lag behind in both access to the Internet and speed of connections, which is why the Federal Communications Commission (or the FCC, the federal agency that oversees the U.S. communications industry) is launching its much-anticipated National Broadband Plan next Tuesday, to lay out its strategy for connecting all Americans to fast, affordable high-speed Internet.
After this plan is announced, you have the opportunity to interview FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, in the second of a series of in-person YouTube interviews with government leaders. (Our first, with U.S. President Barack Obama, took place last month.) Go to CitizenTube today to submit your video or text question via Google Moderator, and vote on your favorites; we’ll bring a selection of the top-voted questions to Chairman Genachowski in our interview next Tuesday, March 16. The deadline for submission is Sunday night, March 14, at 11:59 p.m. PT.
To help structure our conversation with the Chairman, we’ve broken the interview down into seven topics. To learn more about what the FCC is doing in each area, click on the links for each topic below. Then submit your question on CitizenTube under one of the topic headings.
- § Access and Affordability
- § Mobile and Wireless
- § Security and Privacy
- § Digital Economy
- § Internet in Schools
- § Open Internet/Network Neutrality
- § Others (learn more at Broadband.gov)
Access to the Internet has transformed almost every aspect of our economy and society. This is your chance to press the FCC on how the National Broadband Plan will work, and ask your questions about improving the Internet in America. We’re looking forward to seeing your questions and hearing what the Chairman has to say.
Posted by Steve Grove, Head of News and Politics, YouTube
Google Apps Marketplace now launched
The Google Apps Marketplace allows administrators to discover and purchase integrated third party cloud applications and deploy them to their domains. Applications listed in the Google Apps Marketplace integrate with Google Apps using open protocols. Once added, they then can be easily managed from your domain’s control panel and accessed by users through the same links as the Google Apps suite.
Editions included:
Standard, Premier and Education Editions
Languages included:
US English
How to access what’s new:
You can visit the Google Apps Marketplace directly at http://www.google.com/enterprise/marketplace/home.
You can also access it from your administrator control panel by clicking on ‘Add more services’ to see the option to shop the Marketplace.
To add an application from the Marketplace:
1) Click “Add it now”
2) Agree to the vendor’s Terms of Service
3) Grant access to the data that the app is requesting (some apps require data access, some don’t…so only grant access to apps you trust)
4) Turn it on
For more information:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/open-for-business-google-apps.html
http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2010/03/more-great-apps-for-google-apps.html
Twitter Starts New Anti-Phishing Service
Twitter has just announced that it is launching a new anti-phishing feature that allows Twitter’s Trust and Safety team to monitor all links submitted through the service for potentially malicious attacks. Part of the new feature will involve the use of Twitter’s link shortener twt.tl, which may now start popping up in some of your emails and direct messages.
Amazon Wields $25 Gift Certificates To Pacify Frustrated Comic Book Fans
Over the last few days, a strange situation has been brewing between Amazon and a sizable number of comic book fans. On March 7, Bleeding Cool broke the news of an apparent Amazon sale featuring high quality hardcover Marvel graphic novels at bargain-basement prices of $14.99, when their retail prices were more along the lines of $125. Alas, it turned out to be a pricing error. Amazon could have simply canceled the orders (which is common practice for online retailers), but instead, it tried to do right by its users and said it would honor some of the orders. Except it didn’t actually have enough books in stock to do what it promised, leading to another wave of frustration from the comics fans. Now Amazon is looking to smooth things over with some $25 dollar gift certificates.
The tale is a bit complicated. After word of the apparent sale began to spread, plenty of comics fans began to snatch up the books as quickly as they could, causing some of the graphic novels to climb toward the top of Amazon’s best seller lists. Within hours Amazon fixed the pricing glitches (which affected multiple items), and told some customers that rather than canceling their entire orders, they’d still receive a single copy of the books they purchased at the heavily discounted price. The only catch was that they’d only get one copy apiece (many people had purchased multiple copies). Quite a nice gesture considering that Amazon could have simply canceled the orders outright.
Unfortunately, something went wrong. This morning, Bleeding Cool reported that many (and perhaps all) of these single-copy orders had been canceled as well, without any kind of notice or email from Amazon. As it turns out, Amazon simply doesn’t have enough books in inventory to fulfill all the orders it promised, so it’s handing out $25 gift certificates as an apology for the inconvenience.
Not everyone who bought a Marvel book is getting a certificate — if you placed an order that was immediately canceled, then it sounds like you won’t get one. Some people should be actually getting their books in the mail. If you got an email saying your order was cancelled, you should be hearing from Amazon about this shortly.
It’s hard to really fault Amazon for this. Obviously there were some errors in miscommunication, but it really didn’t have to do any of this — every online retailer has a clause in their Terms of Service that doesn’t make them liable for pricing mistakes.
Radian6 to Launch Engagement Console Desktop Application next month(April)
One of the biggest hurdles to jump in integrating social media into a business is figuring out the most cost-effective and functional way to scale its use. As your organization grows and continues to weave social media into its processes, it will be critical to establish a workflow that extends across departments while still allowing your teams to engage efficiently.
A desktop client built on Adobe AIR, the engagement console lets your both track and engage in the conversation taking place on blogs, videos, forums, boards, Twitter, Flickr, Google Buzz, LinkedIn, Facebook fan pages, public discussion groups, and mainstream news sites. The site also allows for assigning of tasks from within the platform, enabling users to access workflow from within the client.
You can customize a tracking grid of social media sites by breaking out your conversation into stacks by broad or specific topics, tagged customer lists, or even user assignment. Stacks can also be separated out by media type.
The need for a tool that helps businesses scale and simultaneously streamline their social media working processes is growing by leaps and bounds, which is why we are thrilled to announce the release of our upcoming product, the Radian6 Engagement Console.
Radian6’s new Engagement Console is a desktop application that:
- Extends social media monitoring, listening, and engagement to every desktop within your company.
- Is a complete social Web client that lets you listen to all media types, including blogs, videos, forums, boards, Twitter, Flickr, Google Buzz, LinkedIn Answers, Facebook fan pages & public discussion groups, as well as online mainstream news sites.
- Allows real-time collaboration among your team members and one-click-workflow assignment of posts enabling faster and more cost effective engagement.
- Ties into the full power of Radian6, so your teams can channel the right conversations to the right people within your enterprise.
- Records all interactions in Radian6 for comprehensive operational reporting, and conversation analysis and reporting.
The Engagement Console is outfitted with a number of features to help you organize and maximize social media monitoring and engagement throughout your department and company.
Comprehensive Listening Coverage
Customize a listening grid by breaking out your conversation stacks by broad or specific topics, tagged customer lists, or even user assignment. Stacks for your Radian6 topic profile can be separated out by media type to keep you in the loop on exactly where people are talking about your brand or area of expertise.
Fast-Moving, Streamlined Workflow
Open up the Workflow function next to your Radian6 conversation stacks to tag, assign, and route posts to team members, and watch them respond in real time. Pull up a stack of your own assignments and start engaging on Twitter, Facebook, blogs, and conversation threads right from the Engagement Console. For even more efficiency, create one-click workflow buttons that assign priority, status, sentiment, and user assignment to multiple posts all at once.
All the conversations you choose to participate in – and the ensuing engagement between your team and external constituents – will be recorded for reference. Review how your team handled the conversation, any notes they provided, and see how your interaction impacted and rippled through the larger business community.
Multi-Network Integration and Social Profile Viewing
Keep pace with all the activity happening around multiple Twitter accounts as well as your Facebook account with the Engagement Console. Tweet, reply, retweet, and send direct messages, shuffle through user profiles, and follow new contacts right from the platform. For added ease of use, click on the Auto-Shorten URL function.
Follow the activity on Facebook by observing and responding to status updates, wall posts, comments, and “likes”. Also view news feeds for your Facebook friends, see new photos or videos as they’re being uploaded, and leave your own comments and status updates without leaving the Console.
For a more well-rounded and contextual look at the people in your community, click on the name of a particular user to check out their comprehensive social profile, including where they can be found online and a history of interaction, notes you’ve made, and conversations you’ve had with them.
Reporting and Analysis
Within your Radian6 stack, take a look at the post volume for your particular topic profile with the built-in, at-a-glance time series graph. Click through to access the Radian6 dashboard to review and analyze metrics, segment and filter your data for micro-level analysis, and generate reports for your department and management teams.
Want More?
The Engagement Console is currently being previewed and will be available to Radian6 users in April 2010.
If you head on over to our Preview page, you’ll see a form you can fill out to let us know you’re interested in the Engagement Console. We’ll keep you in the loop as things progress and let you know exactly when it launches in April.
We’re excited about this announcement and what the Engagement Console will potentially do to advance the cause of listening and engaging within the enterprise. Have initial questions? Please let us know in the comments!
Get Satisfaction On Facebook To Socialize Customer Support
Filed under: FaceBook Integration, Facebook, Featured, Technology News
Build a viral and loyal community by transforming your fan pages into a service center and advocacy hub
A Get Satisfaction support page within your Facebook communityWith Get Satisfaction, the fan page is transformed into a powerful source of social knowledge that extends far beyond Facebook. Just as on your wall, the Get Satisfaction App allows customers post questions, feedback, concerns, praise … but before they post, we’ll search all the community and display the conversations, answers, and responses right there inside Facebook. If they post a new topic, that too becomes a part of the Get Satisfaction community.
Leverage the power of Facebook fans — your most social customers — to become a part of your larger customer community. Because all this social content is hosted in the Get Satisfaction platform, it is highly optimized for search engines and can also be syndicated on your website or pushed into your CRM. This new actionable intelligence delivers valuable consumer insight that ripples throughout the organization and into customer service, consumer relations, sales/marketing, R&D, and product development.
Those who already have a Get Satisfaction community and a Facebook fan page can chose from two integration plans:
Social Engagement Hub on the Facebook Fanpage
A custom integration for brands and high volume communities that lets you fully brand the community experience inside Facebook fan pages with:
- Brand customization and banner real estate in the fan page community
- Configurable viral post messaging to maximize acquisition of new fans
- Customizable tab name
- And much more, available upon request…
Support Tab on the Facebook Fan Page – Coming Soon!
The simplest and most effective way for small and medium companies to use the Fan Page App to support their customers on Facebook.
Weebly stats New Theme Community
About Weebly: Weebly is a San Francisco, California based company that was founded in 2006 with the mission to help people put their information online quickly and easily. We now enable 3 million people to easily create personal sites and blogs or establish web presences for businesses, weddings, classrooms, churches, artistic portfolios, and more.
Theme Gallery
Theme Options
Favorites
The first button, “Favorites,” is a list of your favorite themes and most popular Weebly themes. Before you choose any of your favorites, we’ve added ours to the list to get you started. And any time you see a theme thumbnail, you can click on the star to favorite it.
These have been our most requested features for a long time, and we’re really excited to be able to show you a preview.
Follow Us
Earn a Dollar daily
