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Posts Tagged ‘routes-bases’

Sometimes there are many ways to get from point A to point B, whether you are walking or driving. Until now, Google Maps’ directions feature has given you the route they consider the best and allows you to drag and drop the route to change your path. Today, Google Maps is adding functionality that suggests additional routes so that you can see all of them on the map for comparison.

Under a “Suggested Routes” heading, you will now be able to access other routes to the same destination. This is a feature that GPS systems in car, like a Garmin device, have been offering for quite some time so it makes sense that Google would want to catch up. Google says that they choose alternative routes bases on many factors, including distance, travel time, and number of turns. Google Maps boils this data down to what is the lowest “cost” and ranks the routes based upon the “cost.”

MapQuest doesn’t suggest alternate routes but the site does let you choose alternate routes by filtering directions by no toll roads, highways, and distance, which is a function Google Maps has as well.

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Celebrities get impersonated on the web. They’re famous — everyone is anonymous — it happens. Most celebrities just ignore it; but some get pissed off. Kanye West got mad as hell about Twitter users pretending to be him last week. This week it’s Aerosmith lead singer Steven Tyler who is up in arms — to the point of actually taking anonymous bloggers to court.

Tyler attempted to sue a group of bloggers that he says were impersonating him, sharing private facts, making false statements even using his likeness on the web, NBC Los Angeles reports. The only problem? The whole “anonymous” thing. Seeing as no one really knows who these bloggers are, they naturally didn’t bother showing up to court. Hell, I’m quite certain they didn’t even know they were supposed to be in court. So the judge dismissed the case.

Tyler is apparently most upset about these anonymous bloggers posting some comments about his mother who passed away last year. I wasn’t able to find those, but I did find a robust web community around “Fake Steven Tyler.” There’s a popular one in the Rock Band Forums, a group on Facebook (also based around his Rock Band avatar), there’s even a Wikipedia page and an odd YouTube video (embedded below).

Twitter took down the fake Kanye West accounts at his request, but it’s hard to see what Tyler or a court could do in this case. A good first step would be to figure out who you’re actually suing though.

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South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster gets served his final humiliation: a federal judge, U.S. District Judge Weston Houck, blocked him from prosecuting Craigslist management, at least until he’s made a final decision on the case. From the order: “Until the Court rules on the merits of craigslist’s claims, Defendants and their attorneys and staffs shall refrain from initiating or pursuing any prosecution against craigslist or its officers and employees in relation to content posted by third parties on craigslist’s website.”

The consent order granting the restraining order is embedded below.

McMaster started the war earlier this month by threatening criminal prosecution against Craigslist and Craigslist management for allowing pornographic images and ads for prostitution on the South Carolina Craigslist site. Craigslist took extraordinary steps to comply with McMaster’s demands, despite the fact that legal experts questioned if McMaster even had a case.

Craigslist stood firm and filed suit against McMaster in federal court. McMaster, now facing charges of his own, declared victory and ran away.

This final humiliation just makes it clear that no one on the planet with a shred of common sense seems to side with McMaster. The man is running for governor of South Carolina and is using Craigslist to make headlines. The evidence of his douchery is overwhelming:

• His office has never prosecuted a prostitution case in his seven years in office.
• McMaster ignored sites with far more prostitution listings to go after the higher profile Craigslist.
• The EFF says “Attorney General Henry McMaster has no case”
• Local South Carolina press ripped him apart.
• Techdirt calls McMaster a liar
• 80% of our readers would rather lose South Carolina than Craigslist
• South Carolina residents seem to agree.

I’d say we’re done here, although I still think Craigslist should permanently shut down the South Carolina site and ban South Carolina IP addresses just out of spite. But the good guys won one today, which is increasingly infrequent. Time to celebrate.

Update: In other South Carolina news, they found that missing 555 pound teenager. Sigh.

052209Order -

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With the apparent ease in layoffs, things might be looking up. This week we saw quite a few new jobs on CrunchBoard as companies are still looking for some tech savvy employees. But then again, according to analyst Christa Quarles, we might all be in the wrong industry. For job hunters in Europe, check out our Europe CrunchBoard.

Don’t forget we’re looking for a few good hackers here at TechCrunch.

New jobs on CrunchBoard:

• Director, Online Communications/Webmaster
  Broadcast Music, Inc. - New York

• Lead Web Developer
  NationalBLS - San Francisco, CA

• Senior Server Software Architect
  Nuance Data - Mountain View, CA

• Associate Product Manager
  Knewton, Inc. - New York

• User Interface Engineer
  Gerson Lehrman Group - New York, NY

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Perhaps the biggest problem facing Twitter these days is the influx of users who just wish to use it for spamming purposes. When someone follows you, it’s hard to know their intentions at first and you may follow them back. If they’re a spammer, your stream will be bombarded with junk. A new startup, Chirpio, wants to solve this problem and offer better user recommendations with a Twitter rating system.

While there have been plenty of other service that you can use fo find Twitter users you should follow, notably Mr. Tweet and WeFollow, Chirpio offers a very simple solution that everyone will be able to understand. When you sign in to your Twitter account on Chirpio via their OAuth support, you will see your tweet stream as you would on Twitter. But below each tweet you will see a way to rate the user up or down. More importantly, you can mark them as “Spam” and easily unfollow them. Below each user’s icon, you will see their composite rating score.

Along the top of your stream there are filters that you can use once you have rated users. For example, if I only want to see the ones that I rated as “good” (the up vote), I can do that. Likewise for “bad” — why you would be following “bad” users, I don’t know, perhaps just to drive your hatred of them. It’s important to note that a down rating is not the same as a “Spam” mark, so it is actually a useful rating for people who you follow on purpose but don’t really like.

In the right side column of Chirpio, you can find your own profile to see how users are rating you (you cannot see who voted what way). Below that is a “Top Rated” area showing the top rated users across the network. Obviously, the concern here is about people gaming the system, but co-founder Gee Chuang tells us they are developing an algorithm that would give different weight to different votes based on certain activity. He says this is similar to the way Digg weights diggs differently based on activity.

You can also rate users on Chirpio right on Twitter itself. Simply use the syntax “@chirpio @parislemon +” if you like me or “”@chirpio @parislemon -” if you dislike me. The same works with “spam” and you can also substitute “good” and “bad” for plus and minus, as well bulk rate people by including multiple names in these tweets.

It’ll take a lot of users using the system and rating people to see how well this will actually work as a recommendation system for Twitter. But I like how easy this is to use, and the simple idea behind it.

Founders James Fong, Daniel Khamsing and the aforementioned Gee Chuang built the service on Google’s App Engine, and have self-funded the project. Chuang says that an API is coming soon which will allow for Chirpio integration with other Twitter-based services.

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It turns out that people are following more than just their friends online. Look at the comScore chart above comparing unique visitors in the U.S. to FriendFeed versus Twine. Yeah, I was shocked to see that Twine has more than three times as many unique monthly visitors as FriendFeed (714,000 vs. 188,000). On a worldwide basis, comScore shows FriendFeed still slightly ahead of Twine. ComScore doesn’t always do a great job with small sites, so I checked Compete, which shows Twine with 2.25 million monthly visitors in April versus 998,000 for FriendFeed (see embed below). Different numbers, same story.

While FriendFeed is organized around following feeds of your friends’ activities across the Web, Twine is organized around interest feeds. Essentially, Twine members create topic pages that others can follow. It requires more work than FriendFeed. You have to add items such as links,articles, videos, and notes. But once you do, Twine organizes them for you using an underlying semantic index and tagging technology combined with social inputs from the community. So in a sense it competes more with Mahalo or Squidoo in that it creates authoritative pages around topics, except that these pages are really constantly updated topic or interest feeds that anyone can add to. You can read more about the original concept here, which relaunched publicly in October, 2008. All the growth is from October.

I pinged Nova Spivack, CEO of Radar Networks, the company behind Twine, to ask what’s up. He says that both the Compete and comScore numbers are off, but the trend is right. The initial growth came simply from letting people in who had been on the waiting list. But even he is surprised by the growth rate. So far five million items have been bookmarked in Twine. There are now 200,000 registered users who have created Twines (its name for interest feeds) across 30,000 different interest groups. The rest of the traffic comes from people visiting those topic pages.

And it is not all SEO traffic. Spivack provides the following breakdown of traffic by source: 59 percent comes from people coming directly to Twine, 20 percent comes from search engines, and most of the rest comes from people who receive email notifications and daily digests tracking the interest feeds they’ve signed up for. About 2 percent of traffic comes from twitter, but that portion is “rising fast.”

Following interesting people is just a proxy for following your interests, and Twine lets you connect with like-minded people as well. It is the combination that is killer.

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