Foursquare is celebrating! With just over a year of being active, and somewhere close to 750,000+ users 4SQ has flipped the game when it comes to location based social networks. With deals in place with Bravo, HBO and Starbucks it can only stand to grow.

4SQDay which was started on a whim by a Tampa Bay Optometrist, yes and eye doctor who dabbles in social media grew in strength seemingly overnight via Facebook and Twitter. No doubt that when the Foursquare guys heard about all this they were stoked to say the least. With 4sqday.com you can check out whats happening today in over 50 different cities, things like swarm meetups where 50 or more people checkin to a single venue to get the illusive swarm badge, to seeing what venues are promoting deals.

All of this bodes well for the location based startup, and while gowalla and brightkite are also great services, i’m finding there is a bit more heart with foursquare users, myself included. want to watch a neat little video about 4SQ? See below.

Now you can enjoy Alice in Wonderland, without all the Hallucinogenics. Can’t wait to see all the new ideas that the iPad will inspire. And I also can’t wait to stand in a very long line somewhere when it gets to Canada.

Its not a lie. I’m late to the IgniteTo party. I know, I know shame on me for not keeping up but alas sometimes there are other things in my life that I need to do than hear smart people talk for 5 minutes about things I could or couldn’t care less about. More often than not, I like to hear interesting stories from smart and clever people, so it was without hesitation that I picked up some tickets to IgniteTo’s third offering.
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I’m used to pretty rad collaborations. NIKE x DQM, Burton x Futura, Colette x GAP. But those are strictly based in the streetwear/clothing world. When I was a kid I used to grab a Popular Science magazine at the library to see what the future was to hold. Those first few pages shat showed concept flying vehicles, hovering skateboards etc. always enchanted my young mind. Even Star Trek, looked to the pages of Popular Science to blend science fact with science fiction.

Now partnered with Google, Popular Science has offered up its entire “137-year archive for free browsing. Each issue appears just as it did at its original time of publication, complete with period advertisements.”

Now get to searching and browsing some old Pop Sci!

An alarming thing happened on the way to the wonderful world of online platform playing this Sunday evening (or afternoon depending where in the world you lived).  As PS3 users around the world tried to catch some MW2 or MAG in between Olympic events and weekend chores, many were introduced to the #error8001050F message.  At first this seemed like the standard messaging, regarding the interruptions you would encounter on PSN (PlayStationNetwork)  from time to time when a user signs in.  It soon became clear that this was no ordinary connection glitch.

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Photo via Jsmerkle

Is “nice” the next big thing online? There has recently been quite a bit of coverage given to the topic. Some are embracing this more positive internet, while others feel it will lead to a banal online experience or worse. It seems that the internet is always struggling to defend its reputation.

A few years ago it was common to hear how bad the internet was for us. We were supposed to become more antisocial, overweight and depressed as a result of our online habits. The digital world was supposed to be a hostile and addicting environment – which it sometimes was and still is. But as more people went online – approximately 66.2% of Americans and 70.9% of Canadians go online monthly – the doomsday predictions lessened, and luckily we haven’t all turned into melancholy hermits. (more…)

A few weeks ago I stumbled upon a Java applet that let you track your mouse on screen live. Your co-ordinates converted into lines, your mouse pauses transformed into circles of varying sizes depending on the duration of the pause (longer = bigger) I ran this for a couple days and found great enjoyment in the results at the end of each day. Naturally I shared my results on flickr and via twitter.

The reaction to this little project by Anatoly Zenkov from his flickr feed was outstanding, so much so that its evolved into a full fledged app with the help of Andrey Shipilov

Want to see your mousing habits? How you work? Where you leave your mouse when you go to lunch?

Download IOGRAPHICA

This morning I ran across an interesting site. tputh.com a “Socially Generated, Machine Filtered, Hand Polished, Electronic Newspaper for Geeks, Designers & Venture Capitalists” Wow that’s quite a mouthful. What I noticed the most after really liking the fact that this site aggregates all my favorite topics into a single page was its clean and almost newspaper like design aesthetic, just like it says “newspaper for geeks”. The bold and funny headlines with supporting links to stories from trusted sources I’ve long been reading via RSS.

Will this site replace my RSS addiction I don’t think so. But for people who can’t jump whole heatedly onto the RSS bandwagon in fear of getting to easily overwhelmed this might be a place for you to stop in on a daily basis to get some stories about social media or tech.

tputh.com

The subtitles provided make it simpler to hear the words. Still amazing tho.

Familiar with Google street view, but don’t live in the good ol’ US of A? Be sad no more! Looks like Google have been driving around our fair city snapping photos along the way. You should check it out. Fire up http://maps.google.com and put in an address of interest, then look for the little orange guy above the zoom tools. If hes orange your in luck, not so lucky for people in Bowmanville where he is a lovely shade of grey (means they haven’t scoped out your neck of the woods).

Drag that little dude to a street on the map and you’ll get a nice street level view, complete with virtual roads overelaid on the image with arrows you can click to move down the street. Keyboard arrow control of “driving around” and “click and drag” to look around functionality.

Already are the links pouring in of places mid garbage strike from this past summer. Find a lucky snap from the Google van? Please post a link in the comments.