Sometimes it’s nice to be able to take a look back at your Foursquare history to see where you’ve been or when you made that trip to a specific store. If you’re a Google Calendar user, it’s easy to add your Foursquare history directly to your calendar so you can check it at a glance.
To add your Foursquare history:
Visit your Foursquare feeds page, right click on the ICS link and copy the link location (do not download the file)
In your Google calendar, find the “Other Calendars” box on the lower left and click “Add”
Choose “Add by URL”
In the pop-up that appears, paste the URL you copied from the Feeds page and click “Add Calendar”
Wait a few minutes for Google to import the calendar
When it first imports, the name of the calendar will be the long URL you pasted in; to change it, click the dropdown arrow next to its name in the “Other Calendars” box, choose “Calendar Settings”, change the calendar name to something more friendly (like “Foursquare History”) and click save
You can change the color of the text by choosing a different color from the dropdown next to the calendar name in the “Other Calendars” box
As I tweeted at the start of the NCAA final game between Kansas and Kentucky, The Fray did not "save a life" with their rendition of the National Anthem. In real time it was pretty awful so I decided I should sleep on it then revisit. Well, I'm sad to report that a good night's rest did not make their version of the national Anthem any better. Listen for yourself.
This brings back reminders of Superbowl halftime concerts that were less than stellar. Planners of these events must understand these are total experiences. Attendees are forking over large dollars for airfare, hotel accomodations, and event tickets. Although the sporting event is the main attraction, we have moved into the era of entertainment. The fans are taking on a total experience.
NCAA and planning committee please do better in the future. Not to mention that our National Anthem deserves better.
Times change. Times especially change rapidly on the web and in social media. I used to have a Blackberry. I used to frequent certain restaurants that are no longer in existence. I used to drive a different car. I used to shop at different stores. I used to visit different websites.
On Facebook, as many of us have done in the past, I had "liked" many websites in the categories previously mentioned. So why "unlike" them?
As time progresses, we accumulate more information in our Facebook news feed. One way to clean this up is to unlike pages that had been liked that no longer bring value to you.
So, what would be the fastest way to do this?
When signed in to Facebook (web version), click on your profile (upper right, where you see your name). Look below and you will see a category called, Likes. Click on it.
Scroll down and you will find years. Click on one of the years (i.e. 2009) and then go through to determine which ones to keep (do nothing) and which ones to Unlike.
By the way, you will also see which pages your friends like.
Less than 2 years ago Google Wave was trending on twitter as the email killer. Social media was buzzing. A single tool was going to marry email, instant messaging, photo sharing and social networking. Eventually Google Buzz was anointed as superior to Google Wave. This was until one read that Google Wave is the future and Google Buzz is the present.
Today, neither Google Wave or Google Buzz exist. In spite of social media buzz touting these services as the best thing since sliced bread, both have closed shop. Thus, having the Google name associated with a service is not enough for survival. Being discussed for days on social media does not translate into success.
Yet, email is still prevalent in our lives and a viable communication platform. How do I know? Today via email I received the following from Google:
Dear Wavers,
More than a year ago, we announced that Google Wave would no longer be developed as a separate product. At the time, we committed to maintaining the site at least through to the end of 2010. Today, we are sharing the specific dates for ending this maintenance period and shutting down Wave. As of January 31, 2012, all waves will be read-only, and the Wave service will be turned off on April 30, 2012. You will be able to continue exporting individual waves using the existing PDF export feature until the Google Wave service is turned off. We encourage you to export any important data before April 30, 2012.
If you would like to continue using Wave, there are a number of open source projects, including Apache Wave. There is also an open source project called Walkaround that includes an experimental feature that lets you import all your Waves from Google. This feature will also work until the Wave service is turned off on April 30, 2012.
It seems everywhere one turns today, we are confronted with trending topics. Ever since Twitter introduced us to the top 10 trending topics, we see them on the evening news, the Today Show, CNN, Yahoo! and a number of places in mainstream media.
Within social media, trending topics have been around for awhile. For us early adopters of twitter, trending topics were first introduced across the entire twitter footprint. Eventually, Twitter provided us with the ability to filter trending topics by geos such as country and city.
Given that trending topics are based on real time online conversation, we have seen them range from newsworthy to funny to untrue. Yet with all the buzz surrounding trending topics, it might seem surprising that they have been around for some 40+ years in a different form.
Those of us who have worked in an office environment of the brick and mortar variety have conversed with coworkers at water coolers. If we were to break down these conversations, the majority likely covered trending topics of the day. Unlike in today's digital world, there was a time delay since information reached us more slowly. That being said, the water cooler topics were still among the trending of the day whether originally reported in mainstream news or via Entertainment publications.
In the 1970's trending topics, although not known by that label, were prevalent in conversation with the emergence of a new show called Saturday Night Live (SNL). Most evident was a segment focused on news events called Weekend Update, which to this day is the longest running sketch on the show. In spite of that history, discussion of trending topics even preceded the Weekend Update sketch.
In 1967, America was introduced to a television pilot called Laugh In that became a mega hit show from 1968 to 1973. Among a sampling of the topics covered were civil rights, war, social issues and a look at the news past , present, and future. A young comedy writer by the name of Lorne Michaels, whom later became best known for creating and directing SNL, was among the writers of Rowan and Martin's Laugh In news parody segments.
Thus, just as we thought trending topics are a new to the conversation, we go back in time to see that they have been part of the American fabric for decades. Although expressions such as "Here comes the judge" and "sock it to me" might seem dated, we have been discussing trending topics for decades just in a different environment. Considering that Twitter limits us to 140 characters per tweet, perhaps Laugh In's "Quickies" would still play well today. As expressed by Jack Benny in the video taken from Laugh In, "We've got to keep it moving."
Everyone is doing a blog on something, so this is a blog on nothing. Okay, not really but could not resist the Seinfeldism analogy. Totally into customer experience, social media, pop culture, music, sports, healthy food, nature, pooch's and lately addicted to Terra chips (all varieties).
