Ads for their Business Center..
I haven’t found localized versions of those ads.. but probably they exist already.

New ways of promoting your business
They recently introduced new ad units for local businesses. Those ads appear on both google.com as on the maps.google.com. They are just local listings (as in address info).

Furthermore they’ve put ads on the iPhone Google Map

Aggregating info from other pages and creating their own
And last but not least Google has introduced Places pages. They get information from the web (eg. from Yelp, etc) and put it on their own page. These pages then pop up in the search results.. so they directly compete with the pages the information is aggregated from (Yelp, ..).

So Google is doing some interesting stuff in the area of Local Search that is going to make it harder for the old traditional Yellow Pages companies but also for the new hip and UGC sites like Yelp, Truvo, Qype, TrustedPlaces, YelloYello, ..

PS. Don’t know if ‘warpath’ is actually a word.. but you Dutch people know I mean ‘oorlogspad’

What will the future of local search look like in a few years? How much information will we have ?

“Firefox gathers information about nearby wireless access points and your computer’s IP address. Then Firefox sends this information to the one and only default geolocation service provider, all information gathering scary ad-monster privacy killer Google Location Services, to get an estimate of your location. That location estimate is then shared with the requesting website.”

Google maps has it already integrated!

Here is a list of browsers supporting location services:

• FireFox 3.5+
• Chrome 2.0+
• Mobile Safari (iPhone 3.0+ firmware)
• BlackBerry Device Software 4.1+
• Nokia Web Runtime Toolkit

Browsers that still must follow .. let me know if you have an update or other browsers (plugins) that enable Location-awareness.

• Internet Explorer
• Opera
• …?

Edit: Check geo-location-javascript on google code. It names some more devices!

SearchLogic makes it easy to do search and ordering for your models. There is a nice and shiny new version (v2) .. only thing is that it has some bugs.

AuthLogic makes it easy to do authentication. See the AuthLogic RailsCast. Only thing that I miss is a list with known plugins.. so here are some I’ve found:

• AuthLogic OpenID - github.com/binarylogic/authlogic_openid
• AuthLogic LDAP - github.com/binarylogic/authlogic_ldap
• AuthLogic oAuth - github.com/jrallison/authlogic_oauth

Let me know if you know Twitter, Google or any other.. or how they are supported using one of the above..

Update:

• AuthLogic Twitter - Should work with AuthLogic oAuth.
• AuthLogic FaceBook - github.com/kalasjocke/authlogic_facebook_connect
• AuthLogic Google - ?
• AuthLogic Hyves (Dutch social network) - ?
• AuthLogic Netlog (Belgian social network) - ?

See:  http://github.com/joost/hyves_api

Voor iedereen met een iPhone is de applicatie te vinden op: http://www.me2i.nl/mug. Zie onderstaand filmpje en foto’s voor meer informatie

One example is the technology blog TechCrunch vs. the technology blog TheNextWeb. Look at the sites:

• both white’ish (TheNextWeb became white recently if I’m correct)
• both have a big banner in top with the featured posts
• both have nice bloggy square banners on the right
• they just have the same appearance..

Of course all blogs look the same.. but this are three typical things.. I can ramble on about both having all these news articles below each other, both having pagination on the bottom of the page, both being coded in html..

The point I’m trying to make is.. everything (digital) on the Internet gets copied: movies, music, blog articles, designs, javascript, open source code, blog design, program design, etc..etc.. The question is: what about it? Is it bad? Should we stop it? Does it make things better (like with open source code)? How far can we go? Do we steal a blog design or a complete program? Is turning an OSX app into a WebApp copy-ing or innovative?

Interesting stuff that is keeping people busy for a long time..and probably will..

So now you know it is not YOU that is to blame.. but Google

BTW, fix it using the stable js version (2.s instead of 2.x or whatever you’re using):


<script src="http://maps.google.com/maps?file=api&amp;v=2.s&amp;key=yourkey” type=”text/javascript”></script>