Google Places, Google’s database of local businesses that is tightly integrated into Google Maps, just arrived on the iPhone in the form of a stand-alone application. This app also includes support for Hotpot, the company’s social review and recommendation service that is taking up the fight against incumbents like Yelp and CitySearch. Android users already had access to this feature since November 2010.
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University took a closer look at the regional dialects of Twitter users and found that they were able to pinpoint a user’s location with a reasonable confidence by simply looking at the words you use. While some reports about this study argue that this means that social networks “create their own…
I used to think that location-based services like Foursquare, Gowalla, Brightkite and all of their clones represented the next big thing in mobile. The reality, however, is that even though these companies are still growing (or at least say they are), I just can’t figure out why I should continue to check in when I…