If you use Facebook you are presumably no stranger to having your personal details plastered all over the internet, so why not take it a step further and start telling all your FB ‘friends’ exactly where you are at all times?
FindMe lets you do just that. Using as similar cell-tower triangulation technique to Google Maps for Mobile, FindMe lets you give labels to physical locations like ‘Work’, ‘Dave’s House’ or ‘Tescos’. Whenever you (or rather, your phone) go back to those places, FindMe will quietly update your Facebook status line with an appropriate message.
For you non-Facebookers, a Status Line is a one-line descripton of what you are up to, e.g. “Stuart is listening to La Traviata and savouring a vintage port” or, more likely, “Stuart is in Tescos”.
Should you want to stop telling MI5 your exact whereabouts for a while, you can ‘Go Dark’ (e.g. stop FindMe updating for a bit).
FindMe is freeware, available for Blackberry and Windows Mobile.
Nokia might be taking its own slogan literally after it emerged that the manfuacturer and Facebook – the two biggest players in their fields – are apparently in discussions to build the social networking site into Nokia handsets.
According to The Guardian, quoting the paidContent website, Nokia is looking at ways of putting a mobile version of the increasingly ubiquitous networking site on certain handsets.
Part of the deal will apparently see Nokia buy a stake in the company – a spokesman is quoted as saying that “a partnership is in the works”.
2007 has seen Nokia push hard on securing deals with non-mobile brands like Universal Music and promote its Ovi suite of mobile internet services, offered direct from its handsets.
Facebook does already offer a mobile version that offers limited functionality, but it’s expected that this deal will end up seeing a full version of Facebook accessed from a handset.
Great news if you’re a Facebook fanatic, but well, not, if you’re not.
When we covered Nokia’s Sports Tracker last year we mentioned rumours of forthcoming integration with other web services. The first of these, a Facebook applet, has entered Beta.
Sports Tracker is a GPS-enabled app that logs your progress during training runs and lets you plot your progress on Google Maps as well as analyze data using various graphs and an exercise diary.
Aspiring athletes can embed the widget in their Facebook profiles so that their friends can get regular updates on how little exercise they are actually doing.
Cynicism aside, this could be a good way to force you into sticking to that exercise-based new year’s resolution that you rashly announced to everyone at the party and then swiftly regretted when you realised we were in for a month of freezing rain.
Vodafone has started letting its customers upload content to Facebook, MySpace, Bebo and YouTube – direct from their handset.
The operator, finally facing up to what its customers want to be able to do on their handsets, has opened up its service so that users can upload pictures and videos to their online networking site.
To do this, users must click on My Communities on Vodafone Live! and download the app, choosing which of the four services they want to upload content for.
At the moment, only Nokia N95 8GB and Sony Ericsson W910i users can do so, but expect this list of handsets to get bigger.
It’s the first time Vodafone customers (Or indeed almost any mobile users) can do this, so expect a rash of rival operators all announcing similar services in the coming months.
[Via Pocket Lint]
The latest installment of the Pocket Picks iPhone review concerns the two most high-profile Web 2.0 apps on the handset: YouTube and Google Maps. They’re both the result of Apple palling up with Google, despite the latter having its own mobile ambitions with the Android platform.
YouTube first, then. It lets you browse the popular video-sharing site by Featured vids, Most Viewed, Top Rated, Most Recent, and using a Search function. In the case of Most Viewed, you can narrow it down to today, this week, or all-time depending on your preference. On the iPhone, you can see how YouTube is a good dip-in dip-out experience, in that you fire up the app, watch a few videos to kill time, then duck out again.
Choosing a video switches iPhone into widescreen mode, and the quality is pretty good (obviously, you’ll want to be using the iPhone’s wi-fi connection rather than EDGE). Once watched, you can bookmark them, share (this sends an email with the link in), and click straight through to a bunch of related vids. The only disappointment is there’s no way to read or post comments, or even ratings.
Continue reading ‘UK iPhone Review Part 5: YouTube and Google Maps’
Nokia’s Sports Tracker software has been available from its Beta Labs for some time but has now been officially launched, together with a shiny new web app to let you share and publish your boasts training progress reports.
Sports Tracker requires a Nokia S60 3rd Edition phone with either an external or internal GPS receiver which it uses to automatically keep a log of your speed, distance run, and location when out training. This data can be uploaded to the site and presented in a variety of ways including a map view, progress graph and workout summary.
Another nice feature is the ability to upload geo-tagged photos that you take while out and about. The software will pop them up onto the appropriate point on your route map or let you manually place them.
Nokia Sports Tracker is completely free and Nokia say they are working on an API that will let you access your data from other websites and apps, which should let you publish your progress on your blog or (potentially) into social networking sites like Facebook.
Got a Windows Mobile device? Use Facebook? Actually know any of your ‘friends’ in real life? This could be for you..
OutSync is a little windows application that does just one thing - it grabs the photos from your Facebook contacts and syncs them with your contacts in Outlook.
It’s not perfect - Facebook’s terms of use deny access to peoples actual contact details for privacy reasons, and you can get stuck with the ‘?’ icon (aka, the I-haven’t-uploaded-a-photo-yet icon) for some of your contacts, but it is completely free and if you are sick of the default contact image then this is worth a look.
OutSync was written by Mel Sampat of the Windows Mobile developer team and you can see a short video of him demonstrating his little toy here.
Rmbrme is a clumsily named (all the good URLs are gone, remember?) but possibly quite useful mobile service that is meant to make it easier to, well, remember people.
Recent Comments