You can see max speeds, where the elevation is, trends, really useful stuff. I’m going to be using this information on the ride home. It’s rare that things are so useful so quickly. The full activity log can be viewed here.

Case in point, i’m biking home late at night and find a 4 block perimeter around BAM surrounded by cops. Is there some kind of self indulgent awards show going on or did something awful happen that I should know about? The cops aren’t going to tell me, they’re all self important and coy. I ask Twitter by getting tweets referencing BAM within a 1 mile reference and immediately find out it’s the former. Tracy Morgan is hosting the hip hop honors. I move on.

Tonight, I hear explosions outside. We look out the window, fireworks in New York in the fall. What’s up? Again, I ask Twitter and find out the Manhattan bridge is 100 years old. Now I know why the fireworks are going off + I know a cool fact.

Before, what would I have done? Well I might have typed my keywords into Google news, but there’s lag there and a crazy amount of duplicate content from people cutting and pasting the AP news wire. Google news worked ok for big news stories but not much else. Or more recently I would have tried Google’s blog search, counting on reporters on the ground, but that was always tenuous at best. I’d rarely get the answer I was looking for and i’m a little unclear about Google’s indexing lag.

With Twitter I find out instantaneously what is going on. With so many people using Twitter my question is part of the minutia of someone else’s life. This is why Twitter works as a news source. When people ask ‘why would I care what some stranger had for breakfast?’ the reason one should care is aggregated and indexed, some stranger’s breakfast is some other stranger’s news source.

So here’s my new Firefox toolbar with Twitter search. From now on when I want to know what’s up, it’s up there in the right hand corner.

I’ve also wanted to use Twitter not only to find out ‘what was that explosion?’ but to also find out ‘what is the thing to do today?’ I don’t feel like those kinds of more open questions are as easy to answer, yet. There’s just too much noise and no clean way to segment the data to my preferences. Apps like foursquare are trying with their tips feature and that’s the right direction but there needs to be more there. Right now that kind of manual mining is too much overhead with very little reward. I’m sure it’s coming. For now i’m really excited about getting my news from Twitter. Out of all the social media noise, this is something that I find actually useful.

In developing a new service that uses data from Twitter, I got a chance to use Switch a Bit. The service is the anti-FriendFeed. Instead of pulling all your data together (that would be aggregate-a-bit), switch a bit routes your traffic to your preferred services via rules you set up.

In my setup, when I take a photo with ZoneTag i automatically add a tag that switch a bit picks up. Switch a bit then routes my photo to Twitter where my app picks it up. A little convoluted (ok, really convoluted) but it works! That’s the important part.

I know it’s a different team and a different game, but the last time the Cs were in the finals I was ten years old, my bedroom covered with Celtics posters I had collected from the Sunday Boston Globe. Not only are they in the finals, but they are playing the Lakers! I can almost hear Johnny Most getting worked up. Remember when he set himself on fire in the broadcast booth with his cigarettes and just kept on going?

A couple of weeks ago, YRB release Fire Eagle, a platform that is both a secure, generalized way to share location and a reference to Ze Frank’s The Show. I haven’t had a chance to play with it yet, my location reports would be ‘in my apartment, in Brooklyn’ over and over again but I like what YRB is doing. Fire Eagle addresses the fractured way we currently have of telling social software sites where we are located: self reporting, as a byproduct of a third party application such as mobile maps, cell towers, gps, proximity by association, etc. Using the Fire Eagle API, Twitter, Dopplr, Facebook, etc. users, really wherever there is a demand, can report their location through their favorite sites.

Seeing some of these Fire Eagle API implementations reminds me of Dennis’ Ubiquitous Computing for Mobile Devices class where we looked at the dodgeball SMS grammar (e.g. @ace bar) and talked about the best SMS grammars to use for our application. Which keywords would clash with reserved words? Which letters are close to each other and hard to type if you don’t know T9? Right now, when everyone is talking about 3G and GPS everywhere, it’s nice to see people coming back to building SMS grammars, like dangerday for twitter.

d dangerday u Brooklyn,NY

If Fire Eagle takes off (terrible pun not intended) I think it’ll be around for a while. I don’t see any passive, technical solution on the horzion that addresses the fractured location based services market.

Also, I think my friend Marc worked on it. Nice job.

I seem to rarely post non-technical things in this blog so here’s an update. Most of my time is taken up working on my startup. Demetrie is in the MOMA and I have yet to see this show. Maybe this friday. Which is the same day Clay’s book comes out. Anna has been very busy for work which has her buying shady things on Canal street and bringing taxidermy home.

Last week I took the chinatown bus to Boston because I needed to get out of the city. The driver wasn’t phased by the blizzard.

I friended Barack Obama on Facebook.

While on the chinatown bus, browsing a random directory of Symbian applications, I discovered that my phone has a sports tracking program very much like Nike+iPod. The interface isn’t great but on the flip side it has full GPS. I turned it on while on the bus and it told me that I was running sixty-seven miles an hour. Then it crashed. (My Nokia N95, not the bus. Thanks Cory)

I’m so out of shape, i’m not comfortable making my runs public. Yet.

Today i’m bringing you a short narrative about vodka by Bernice Kazis, who was head of Russian Resettlement at Jewish Family Service from 1978 to 1992 when a large influx of immigrants came from the Soviet Union to Boston’s North Shore. My family was one of those and we owe our gratitude to Bernice as she helped us navigate this new, strange country. She found apartments, stocked refrigerators, facilitated employment for the new arrivals. She even wrote a book about her experiences dealing with the crazy Russians. Now she resides at Lasell Village where she wrote the following for a writing class:

I was an older woman of fifty-five and had never tasted vodka. But that was before I became the Director of Russian Resettlement of the North Shore of Boston. My job took me to every immigrant’s apartment the first week of their arrival, to check on the way they settled in. Newcomers needed to know how to work the shower, empty the trash, and cover the baseboards with tin foil and baking soda, to distract the cockroaches. Children needed to be registered for school, and parents had to find classes to study the English language.

The Russians are a generous group of people who thank you through the sharing of food and drink. To refuse is considered an insult. So in the first six months of my new position, I gained five pounds and learned to enjoy the feel of the colorless brew.

Pablo Picasso is credited with saying “The three most astonishing things in the past half century were the blues, cubism and Polish vodka.” For me the astonishing thing about drinking Vodka is that there is no smell of liquor on my breath, yet drinking leaves me breathless, charges as though an electrical current is rushing through my body. Once I learned to drink Stolichnaya, I never bought another brand. For this was the real stuff, produced since the 12th century and taxed by the Tsar of Russia for exportation in 1500.

In the beginning of my education in this important area, I was told by my clients, “We drink Vodka for any reason — for happiness or sadness, for winning or losing, or for a toast to you, Miss Bernice, our first American friend.” I responded “And i’ll toast you for being persistent and strong in your search for freedom.”

I learned a few rules for drinking Vodka, and I have never been drunk. A toast is made before every drink, a toast gives everyone the reason to drink. And every swallow is followed by zakuskies, small snacks of pickles, fish or caviar.

There was romance in the toasting. When I was invited to Russian celebrations, I made sure to compose several toasts that would help me through the evening. It isn’t often that we can develop new tastes late in life, that take us to new dimensions, but it seems as though I did! — I developed my ability to drink vodka, and my desire to write about it. Here are the effects of both,

On the wings of a cloud
I carried aloft
with my bearing so proud
my heart tender and soft.
I dream dreams sublime
as lightly I fly.
I dream life’s divine
and don’t question why.
The airiness, he bubbles
all surround me.
Life with its troubles
seems to distance to see.
I’m expanded and loose
as I enter space.
Then I know the ruse.
The sweetness is gone.
It’s the vodka I taste.