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Google just announced that it’s bringing some serious location-based integration to its services, all centered around the new Buzz social networking tool built into Gmail. Google’s going to do location better than the usual latitude / longitude coordinates — it’s able to snap those to actual place names and then take context-aware actions depending on where you are. The new location services is integrated into the main mobile Google.com search page and the new buzz.google.com page for the iPhone and Android, and into maps for Android, S60, and Windows Mobile. Buzz is rolling out starting today, and it should hit everyone within “the next few days.” Continue reading Google Buzz takes mobile location services to the next…

Topics: Rumors , iPhone Imagine you and a friend are on a phone call, and both of you own iPhones . You’re trying to meet up somewhere downtown in a city neither of you know very well, so the best answer you can give your friend when he asks, “Where are you now?” is “Uhhh…” followed by several seconds of silence. It’s already possible to share your location using the Maps app on the iPhone — find your current location, tap on the blue marker on the map, tap “Share Location,” and then send it to your friend either as an e-mail or MMS…

Apparently, I’m not the only one who thinks there is a social paradox in the location space . A new service, Rally , believes the power of location lies in less rather than more. That is to say, fewer social connections rather than more of them. It’s an idea that you don’t hear a lot of social networks talking about these days as each tries to build a social graph that’s as sprawling as possible. But the team behind Rally is taking this different approach largely due to their past experience. Much of the team is the same one that built 12seconds , one of the video platforms that rose as Twitter began to become popular. And eventually, 12seconds started relying heavily on Twitter’s large …

Business-oriented social network LinkedIn has a new feature out called faceted search . As you search for something or someone, it automatically generates search filters, based on your query results, which let you quickly refine your search. The filters are based on 8 facets: current company, past company, location, relationship, location, industry, school, and profile languages. In practice, this means you can create amazingly precise queries. For example, I’ve searched for web designers in the UK, who speak English, who used to work at Yahoo, and who are my first and second connections (meaning, I’m either friends with them directly, or they’re friends of friends). The search results adapt instantly as you apply the filters, making the entire process quick and effortless. While this is great for…

Over the next decade, systems that track and record our movement through physical space will be woven inextricably into everyday life. Already we operate some location-based systems: dashboard navigation systems, smartphones with GPS features, and electronic tags that help us zip through toll stations. But in the coming years, location-aware tools will become more common, sophisticated, and indispensable. There are good reasons for people to be nervous about this: Locational records convey where we travel and with whom; where we have lunch and with whom; which political meetings we attend; where we go to church; what kinds of nightclubs we frequent; with whom we conduct business meetings; and with whom we spend the night. The records won’t be available to everyone, but they will likely be sold to …

Over the last six months just about all of my tech friends have started using Foursquare , a geolocation-based game that was built by the creators of Google-acquired Dodgeball. Some of them will literally pull out their phones as soon as they enter any restaurant, event or even TechCrunch HQ and check in just so they can be named ‘mayor’ of that establishment (whoever checks into any particular location the most times becomes mayor of that location). It’s fascinating and a bit bizarre to watch, and it clearly shows that Foursquare has tapped into something powerful. But all this time I’ve had a nagging feeling that Foursquare, at least in its current form, is not going to be the next Twitter , …

As one of the hot social-location properties, Foursquare has a wealth of information about where you go. Unfortunately, it doesn’t really offer many good ways to visualize it. In fact, Foursquare only focuses on providing a text stream of your check-ins. A new app takes that data and puts it on a map. 4mapper , built by John Wiseman , is a very simple application. Once you authorize it to use your Foursquare data (via Foursquare’s new API ), it will pull your location information and place it on top of a Google Map. Your check-ins are displayed as white dots on the map. The more times you have check-in to a certain place, the larger the dot will …

Are you sitting comfortably? Good. Because you’re not going anywhere for a while. Wired has a great article up right now that reminds me of Wired magazine content in their glory days in the early 2000s. The object of the piece is to examine the feasibility of disappearing completely in the digital age. They gave writer Evan Ratcliff a month’s head start to plan his means of vanishing, then set the entire internet on him once he’d executed his plan. I’m only about halfway through it right now but it’s an easy recommendation if, like me, you’re lolling on the couch, sipping coffee and browsing …

Back in August, Twitter announced that it was getting ready to roll out an ambitious new project: Geolocation. The idea was to be able to attach a location to every tweet. Today, the API for the feature has been officially turned on, but location is not a part of the main site — yet. This means that applications that have been built using the APIs — such as Birdfeed , which we previewed recently — will be the first to be able to use location features. As Twitter notes, Seesmic Web , Foursquare , Gowalla , Twidroid , Twittelator Pro and a few others are also supporting location right now. As you can see in the screenshot…

Verizon Test WiMAX Test Sprint held a happy hour last night to show off the WiMAX launch in here Austin, Texas, so I wandered over for some BBQ and broadband. I want to love WiMAX, but I can’t get excited about the promise of upload speeds of some 400 kilobits per second, which are only a wee bit more than what my Verizon 3G connection delivers. However, on the download side things are decent for a wired network and awesome for a wireless one. And before any WiMAX boosters despair, I was told that the local 4G network should continue to improve over the next few weeks, which is why I’m holding off on an all-out review. For a sneak peak, …