Fourwhere: Foursquare, Yelp and Gowalla on a single map.

Around SXSW ’10, Sysomos, a Toronto-based social media software developer, released Fourwhere, a web tool that mashed up Foursquare tips with the Google Maps API to give users an enriched experience of their surroundings.

Earlier this week, the service got a major upgrade, adding comments from Gowalla and Yelp to its map:

Drill into a specific area by searching for it at the top of the site. Right clicking* on the map gives you a menu that lets you either show nearby venues with comments or all venues in the area. If you choose to see venues with comments, Fourwhere will search all three services for tips and display them on the map. You’ll also see a list of all the locations and their comments on the right.

When you click one of the tip bubbles, you’ll see comments from all three services combined in the box, along with an icon to denote which service it came from. Click the user’s picture to get more information about them.

(via About Four Square)

It’s great to see aggregators like Fourwhere organizing the various location-based data bits popping up across the various networks in order to provide users more all encompassing local knowledge.

YouTube launches cloud-based video editor

YouTube has unveiled a cloud-based video editor that simplifies the process of cutting clips and uploading them. It’s more basic than desktop programs such as Final Cut Express–even Charlie’s brother will be knocking his own revenge videos up in no time.

You can trim videos and splice them together using the drag-and-drop editor. And it allows you to include AudioSwap library’s music files, although Google Operating System is reporting that using the files may display the ads on your finished oeuvre. Here are some examples made by YouTube users already.

(via Fast Company)

Hilarious overview here:

For a more technical overview of the Editor, see Mashable.

WordPress 3.0 Released

GSP Digital is using the latest version of WordPress: 3.0, which was released on 6/17.

WordPress is in widespread use as a blogging platform and increasingly as a Content Management System (CMS).

Car Fonts

Font designers, a race car driver, and interactive artist Zach Lieberman recently collaborated to produce a new font using cars:

Two typographers ( Pierre & Damien / plmd.me ) and a pro race pilot (Stef van Campenhoudt) collaborated to design a font with a car. The car movements were tracked using a custom software, designed by interactive artist Zachary Lieberman.

(via Jawbone)

The font was enabled by the openFrameworks c++ toolkit. The project is nicely summed out by this video:

More art from Mr. Lieberman and friends can be found here.

The Significant Objects Project puts a value on storytelling

Started in 2009, the Significant Objects Project is a living experiment measuring the value stories add to our experience of objects. The experiment works as follows:

1.    The experiment’s curators purchase objects — for no more than a few dollars — from thrift stores and garage sales.
2.    A participating writer is paired with an object. He or she then writes a fictional story, in any style or voice, about the object. Voila! An unremarkable, castoff thingamajig has suddenly become a “significant” object!
3.    Each significant object is listed for sale on eBay. The s.o. is pictured, but instead of a factual description the s.o.’s newly written fictional story is used. However, care is taken to avoid the impression that the story is a true one; the intent of the project is not to hoax eBay customers. (Doing so would void our test.) The author’s byline will appear with his or her story.
4.    The winning bidder is mailed the significant object, along with a printout of the object’s fictional story. Net proceeds from the sale are given to the respective author.
(via Significant Objects)

You can read one of the experimental stories, written by technology visionary Bruce Sterling, here.

What does this experiment say about the role of product stories in adding value to the consumption experience?

Twitter’s World Cup Push

Twitter is taking a number of steps to enrich the conversation surrounding the World Cup:

[A special] section [of the Twitter site] highlights the key matches coming up as well as top tweets from Twitter accounts affiliated with soccer in some way. Notably, each World Cup matchup will get its own page and live-updating tweet stream about that particular game. For example, here’s South Africa vs. Mexico.

But the coolest thing may be the way you can show your allegiance to one team using a special hashtag. Twitter only hints at this feature, but as you can see, employees are already using it. In this tweet from Twitter’s Vitor Lourenço, he’s clearly rooting for Brazil, for example, and you can see the Brazilian flag in the tweet. How did he do that? Simply use the hashtag “#BRA”.

(via TechCrunch)

Explore the World Cup section of Twitter’s site, here.

Interesting to see Twitter providing both:

- New tools for connecting with like-minds (flags in tweets)

- Tweet filters that make conversations more relevant for participants (pages that aggregate game-specific info)

Google TV + Logitech = user-controlled multimedia

At its recent conference, Google threw its hat into the ring in the Internet-enabled TV space with Google TV:

Google TV is a new experience made for television that combines the TV you know and love with the freedom and power of the Internet. Watch an overview video below, sign up for updates, and learn more about how to develop for Google TV.

(Via Google)

Here’s a demo:

The new product will be getting a boost from hardware innovator (and GSP client) Logitech. Ashish Arora, Vice President of the Digital Home Group, explains:

To help bring Google TV to life, Logitech will offer the first retail companion box to work with the platform, which will deliver Google TV to the 60 million HDTVs already in U.S. living rooms today. The Logitech companion box will leverage our Harmony remote technology to give you seamless control over how you interact with your content. In addition, the Logitech companion box will include a controller that’s specifically designed to optimize the Google TV experience – combining a compact keyboard, remote control and touchpad.

Google TV = seamless discovery of content.
Logitech + Google TV = seamless control over how you experience the discovery of content.

(Via Logitech Blog)

[Note: Get the latest updates on the Logitech-Google partnership here.

All of these developments suggest that the future of television will be a lot more personalized and engaging, empowering users to control both the pace of programming (start/stop/replay) and the depth of content (pausing a show to play an associated game or read a Wikipedia page about a character).

Parsing Flickr separates locals from tourists

Eric Fischer has created an awesome map using Flickr data to highlight differences in how tourists and locals inhabit New York City:

Tourists and locals share an uneasy detente at times on New York’s crowded streets. When it comes to photography, however, there’s evidence that these two tribes dwell in different cities.

Eric Fischer, a 37-year-old computer programmer from Oakland, Calif., created a map using geotagging data on the photo-sharing websites Flickr and Picasa to plot the points in New York(and 71 other cities) captured by shutterbugs. He then devised an ingenious system for separating tourists from locals. A user with many shots of the same city taken over a wide range of dates is deemed to be a local, and marked on the map with blue dots. Tourists get a red dot. (Yellow dots could not be placed in either camp).

(via WSJ blog)

Playing games on multitouch devices using physical toys

PONG-like game for a multi-touch device like the iPad where you can use physical toys to control movement.

MINI vs Porsche Showdown

MINI vs Porsche – Can a MINI beat a Porsche? Head of MINI challenges Porsche CEO to race June 21