Mobile applications have long been aimed at giving subscribers information specific to their whereabouts, but now we’re seeing even more intelligent ideas. Loopt.com is a new one this year that blends our love of social networking with location-based services. It’s has been described as a ‘social compass’ as it detects not only where you are on the map, but also pinpoints your mobile friends in the vicinity. Loopt is US-centric at present, but the company says it working on looping up Europe. I personally have become a fan of FourSquare and I’ve gone many associates addict to it.  

Maps: Google street map hit the news early this year with its controversial drive-by views of people’s front doors and people themselves. But, Google doesn’t have a monopoly on innovative mapping. Openstreetmap.org is about people mapping everything from great hiking routes to off-piste ski runs or and wine tours, and it’s mapping the world.

Personal organizers: There’s no shortage of web services aimed at helping us organize our lives. But however digital our way of living, a lot of us still print out paper when we travel, particularly on business. Tripit.com & Dopplr.com solves your travel paper trail by being your ‘personal, full-service travel assistant’. They compiles your itinerary, from transport modes to dinner dates, and adds in weather reports, suggested local attractions and more. They are worth a glance if you travel and have a busy agenda; useful too for family holiday plans.

Collaboration: Slideshare.net is a useful resource for anyone in business seeking latest thinking on an area of interest and reading it in succinct, generally well-put-together PowerPoint slideshows that are rated and commented on by users. 280slides.com operates in the same field, but is a ‘Cloud’ computing application at its best. It lets you create, collaborate on, share and store a slidedeck on the Cloud (their remote server), so you can access it anywhere in the world. You’ll never be caught short again on a business trip without your slidedeck to hand.

Audio: Everyone loves audio-visual on the web, so it’s little wonder that this area is seeing new applications each day. Two that seem to fill a market gap are Songkick.com and Blip.fm. Songkick tells you where your favorite group’s next gig is based on your music library. It’s called the world’s biggest concert database, and let you ‘never miss a gig again’. Meanwhile, Blip.fm is billed as a kind of ‘twitter for music’ as it lets you create a social network based on your music choices and recommendations.

Social Media Intermediaries: There’s now an ever-growing range of tools to help us make sense of, filter and manage our Twitter world. Tweetag.com, which is billed as a search engine for ‘tweets’. With millions of people adding content each day, the Twittersphere is a morass of information and comment, some useful and some useless. Tweetag helps you search tweets for trends. It also edges towards Web 3.0 semantic search by offering up a tweetag cloud and organizing search results according to whether other Twitterers have ‘re-tweeted’ – in a sense seconded – an idea.

via Kenradio.com

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