Foursquare users have put a lot of energy into leaving tips and raves about locations on the geo-aware social app, but that doesn't help if you're not a member. FourWhere publicizes and organizes Foursquare's venues, "yelps" and tips/reviews for everybody's benefit.
FourWhere is really handy and a breeze to get started with—with one small catch. Search for the city you're exploring in the upper-right bar and confirm the location. Then you'll see, well, nothing. Right-click somewhere in the map that pop up, though, and you can choose to see all nearby venues that Foursquare users have checked into, only places with reviews/comments, or clear your map and start over in another area. Mouse over a blip on the map, and the user and comment that created it are instantly highlighted in the right-hand column.
If Foursquare users are going to spend all that time on their smartphones, getting all righteous about the absolute best cannoli in town, everybody should benefit, right? Fourwhere is free to use, no Foursquare membership required.
Facebook has a new experiment running, that appears to be aimed at increasing engagement on the right-hand column of some pages. In the “Suggestions” box on the right-hand side of some pages, including the Games dashboard and photos, it is showing photos from your friends’ albums and notices about unread messages.
The box has previously shown suggested friends or Pages you might want to become a fan of. The introduction of content from your friends could make that part of the page more interesting — the only other content in the column is advertising. If users get more used to looking at Suggestions for interesting material, overall engagement for the feature could increase, and they might be more likely to notice and click on the ads.
Strangely, though, Facebook seems to be showing photos from many months ago. We’ll probably see a variety of content as the test progress.
The 2010 Winter Olympics are in full swing, and we've rounded up some official Olympic and Olympic-inspired wallpapers to help you fully indulge your Olympic obsession.
Note: The "Full Size" link directly under the picture only shows you the sample image we uploaded for this gallery. You need to click on the name of the particular wallpaper in the right hand column to access the full range of sizes at the source site.
Not keen on the gallery layout? See all the larger images on one page here.
Official Olympic Wallpaper
The images provided here are sample size for viewing, if you want to use the wallpaper you need to grab it from the link above.
Olympic Medals
The images provided here are sample size for viewing, if you want to use the wallpaper you need to grab it from the link above.
Red Olympic Mittens
The images provided here are sample size for viewing, if you want to use the wallpaper you need to grab it from the link above.
Golden Olympics Rings
The images provided here are sample size for viewing, if you want to use the wallpaper you need to grab it from the link above.
Official Olympic Mascot Wallpaper
The images provided here are sample size for viewing, if you want to use the wallpaper you need to grab it from the link above.
Stylized Olympic Rings
The images provided here are sample size for viewing, if you want to use the wallpaper you need to grab it from the link above.
Official Olympic Mascot Wallpaper
The images provided here are sample size for viewing, if you want to use the wallpaper you need to grab it from the link above.
Official Olympic Wallpaper
The images provided here are sample size for viewing, if you want to use the wallpaper you need to grab it from the link above.
Official Olympic Wallpaper
The images provided here are sample size for viewing, if you want to use the wallpaper you need to grab it from the link above.
2010 Olympic Emblem
The images provided here are sample size for viewing, if you want to use the wallpaper you need to grab it from the link above.
Robson Square - Vancouver
The images provided here are sample size for viewing, if you want to use the wallpaper you need to grab it from the link above.
Official Olympic Wallpaper
The images provided here are sample size for viewing, if you want to use the wallpaper you need to grab it from the link above.
Olympic Cauldron
The images provided here are sample size for viewing, if you want to use the wallpaper you need to grab it from the link above.
Olympic Rings as Color Palette
The images provided here are sample size for viewing, if you want to use the wallpaper you need to grab it from the link above.
Statue Featured in 2010 Olympics
The images provided here are sample size for viewing, if you want to use the wallpaper you need to grab it from the link above.
2010 Luge Run
The images provided here are sample size for viewing, if you want to use the wallpaper you need to grab it from the link above.
The Flickr Developer Blog has posted an interview with Simon Willison co-creator of the Django Web framework and one of the developers of the sophisticated Flickr mashup WildlifeNearYou.com. The project took around 14 months to complete, and Simon shares some of the tips and tricks he picked up during that time working with the Flickr API.
Flickr machine tags featured heavily in the tips:
Here’s a fun example: finding all of the Red Pandas that have been spotted in Europe. WildlifeNearYou doesn’t yet have a concept of Europe, but Flickr’s API can search using Yahoo! WhereOnEarth IDs. We can find the WOEID for Europe using the GeoPlanet API: http://where.yahooapis.com/v1/places.q(’europe’)?appid=[yourappidhere]
The WOEID for Europe is 24865675. Next we need the WildlifeNearYou identifier for red pandas, so we can figure out the correct machine tag to search for. We re-use the codes from our custom URL shortener for our machine tags, so we can find that ID by looking for the “Short URL” link on http://www.wildlifenearyou.com/animals/red-panda/ (at the bottom of the right hand column). The short URL is http://wlny.eu/s2f which means the machine tag we need is wlny:species=s2f
Armed with the WOEID and the machine tag, we can compose a Flickr search API call:
http://api.flickr.com/services/rest/?method=flickr.photos.search&machine_tags=wlny:species=s2f&woe_id=24865675&api_key=…
That gives us back a list of photos of Red Pandas taken in places that are within Europe.
The interview also asks what Flickr could add or do better, to which Simon replied he would like to see an OAuth-style flow for selecting photos:
I’d like to (for example) redirect my users to somewhere like
http://www.flickr.com/pickr/?return_to=http://www.wildlifenearyou.com/selected/and have Flickr present them with a full UI for searching and selecting from their photos. Once they had selected some photos, Flickr could redirect them back tohttp://www.wildlifenearyou.com/selected/?photo_ids=4303651932,4282571384,4282571396and my application would know which photos they had selected.This would make integrating “pick a photo / some photos from Flickr” in to any application much, much easier.
WildLife Near You was previously featured in the Flickr blog, which you can find here.
The interview is an interesting read, and those using the Flickr API are likely to pick up something new. For more examples of the Flickr API in action visit our Flick API profile, which lists over 500 Flickr mashups.
