Google Announces Winners Of Street View Trike Contest

About five months ago, Google started a contest to determine where its Street View trike would take pictures in the U.S.  Today, Google released some impressive stats concerning participation, and also announced the winning locations.

Let's start by establishing how many people took an interest in where Google will send its trike.  A post on the Official Google Blog explained that nearly 25,000 suggestions were made, and that a whopping 238,000 folks cast votes.

Unless everyone was just trying to send the trike "somewhere else," this counts as significant indicator of Street View's popularity.  Which is a bit interesting in light of the speed bumps the program's hit in Europe.

As for the places the trike will wind up, they include the Rochester Institute of Technology, the Faneuil Hall Marketplace in Boston, the National Mall in D.C., and the Detroit Zoo.  Then the Boulder Creek Path (a Colorado bike trail) is the last member of the group.

Google intends to photograph at least some of these locations in the near future.  If you live close to them, either start planning a memorable getup or eyeing good hiding spots as you see fit.

Google Getting Wrong Kind Of Buzz

The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) has filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) alleging that Google's new social networking service Buzz violates federal consumer protection law.

The EPIC complaint calls on the Trade Commission to require Google to make the Buzz service fully opt-in, to stop using Gmail users' private address book contacts to gather social networking lists, and to give Google users more control over their personal data.

"This is a significant breach of consumers' expectations of privacy," said Marc Rotenberg, EPIC, Executive Director.

"Google should not be allowed to push users' personal information into a social network they never requested."

Google introduced Buzz on February 9, and activated it for all Gmail users. When users began viewing the service, they were automatically listed as "following" post from their most common email contacts. Participation in the service also created a profile publicly displaying the list of common contacts.

To its credit Google has made changes to Buzz twice in response to widespread criticism, but EPIC maintains privacy violations remain.

The EPIC complaint argues email providers have a responsibility to protect the personal information that users provide and Google has not fulfilled this responsibility.

Google says it is still working on Buzz to improve it based on user feedback. "We quickly realized that we didn't get everything quite right," the company said in a blog post.

"We're very sorry for the concern we've caused and have been working hard ever since to improve things based on your feedback. We'll continue to do so."
 

Google Getting Wrong Kind Of Buzz

The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) has filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) alleging that Google's new social networking service Buzz violates federal consumer protection law.

The EPIC complaint calls on the Trade Commission to require Google to make the Buzz service fully opt-in, to stop using Gmail users' private address book contacts to gather social networking lists, and to give Google users more control over their personal data.

"This is a significant breach of consumers' expectations of privacy," said Marc Rotenberg, EPIC, Executive Director.

"Google should not be allowed to push users' personal information into a social network they never requested."

Google introduced Buzz on February 9, and activated it for all Gmail users. When users began viewing the service, they were automatically listed as "following" post from their most common email contacts. Participation in the service also created a profile publicly displaying the list of common contacts.

To its credit Google has made changes to Buzz twice in response to widespread criticism, but EPIC maintains privacy violations remain.

The EPIC complaint argues email providers have a responsibility to protect the personal information that users provide and Google has not fulfilled this responsibility.

Google says it is still working on Buzz to improve it based on user feedback. "We quickly realized that we didn't get everything quite right," the company said in a blog post.

"We're very sorry for the concern we've caused and have been working hard ever since to improve things based on your feedback. We'll continue to do so."
 

Yelp Adds ‘Check-Ins’ To Reviews

The review site Yelp has been interesting to watch over time. It gets a lot of interest from different businesses like Google who was interested buying it. Then it gets more investment from VC’s when those deals don’t pan out. It has been vilified for business practices and then has worked to make the service more ‘balanced’ as well. Regardless of your point of view of the service it certainly has established itself as the leader in the small business online review space. This month’s Inc. magazine’s cover story is on the service (take note of the what not to do story that opens the piece ….. creepy.)

Now Yelp is looking to make the service even more interesting by adding a location based feature that allows reviewers to show how many times they have “checked in” to a location that they have reviewed. Mashable tells us more

Last week, the battle for your check-ins took an interesting new turn as Yelp rolled out a set of location features for its iPhone app. Today, Yelp’s expanding the feature to include check-in information alongside user reviews on its website.

With that small step, you can see exactly why check-ins are such a big deal for Yelp and a big threat to upstarts like Foursquare and Gowalla. We’re told that Yelp just passed nine million reviews, and now, with the ability to connect check-in data to individual reviews, the company is hoping to add further credibility to its users’ ratings.

According to the article this feature is only available for iPhone apps but versions for Android, BlackBerry and the like are on the horizon. Here’s a look at how these check-in appear in a review.

They also show up in a user’s profile by their reviews. This is important because it gives some level of participation to the site by giving users the ability to add more depth and credibility to their reviews if they have repeatedly “checked in” from that location.

Mashable’s Adam Ostrow makes an interesting observation about this feature as it relates to the level of competition this service could provide to a much smaller high flyer of late, Foursquare, which is a location based ‘game’.

……..the most interesting aspect of Foursquare is not the game, but seeing where your friends are, and Yelp’s doing that too. Given Yelp has a big headstart, it’s hard not to see it representing a big threat to the startups — though Facebook and its expected location features still loom large as well.

I am not a participant in any of these location-based activities personally. There are a lot of reasons for it and I explain a few here. Whether I use it or not though is obviously not the point. There appears to be a real growing wave of moving toward filling this apparent obsession of knowing where everyone is at all times and letting them know where you are. It’s like a location tweet of sorts.

As marketers, there could be tremendous value that will be discovered with time. Who will be the players that really take advantage of it and allow themselves to ‘stub their toes’ early on in the ‘monetization of location’ game should be fun to watch.

Are you seeing any real effective early adopters marketers who leverage location based services out there? Do tell.

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