Greece blocks Google Street View

by Catherine Bodry on

If you’ve ever been worried that Google Street View might expose your closet smoking habit, Greece might be the country for you to hang out in for a while. There, the Hellenic Data Protection Authority has banned Street View “until it provides further guarantee about privacy.” Though Street View is intended to show, well, the view of the street in a 360-degree panorama, the camera lens also inadvertently captures folks going about their every-day activities: sitting in cafés, walking down the street hand in hand with a secret lover….

Though bad habits and infidelity are not necessarily the issues Greece officials are concerned about, they do want to ensure that Street View complies with local privacy laws. Until Google can provide “further clarification … about how long it will store images for and the measures in place to make people aware of privacy rights,” you’re free to go about your clandestine business on the streets of Greece.

[Via CNN]

Stweet mashes up Twitter with Google Street View

by Jeremy Kressmann on

It seems like we can’t get enough of Twitter lately. In fact, as the service continues to add new users, the number of applications that help you use it for travel only seems to grow. Recently we learned a quirky new tool called Stweet that links up the street level views found on Google Maps with the power of Twitter.

Although applications like Twittervision already show you a real time map of what and where people are tweeting, Stweet is slightly different. Instead of showing an anonymous map, Stweet pulls the approximate location of where a person submitted their message, attaching it to a street address and visualizing the location using Google’s nifty street view tool. The app can be customized to let you view specific cities like San Francisco or London.

How would someone use this for travel, you might be saying? One potential application might be mapping a city’s potential hangout spots. Guidebooks are great at telling you about good places to go six months ago…but they’re horrible keeping up with the day a visitor happens to be in town. Sure, that cafe in Paris sounded great in your Lonely Planet, but what about this August, when you’re actually around? Twitter is great at picking up trending topics and keywords – Stweet takes that idea to the next level. You can narrow down to specific cities and neighborhoods, seeing the areas that seem to be buzzing and the local topics that have people talking.

That said, an application like Stweet has the power to backfire horribly – the data isn’t necessarily reliable and you can’t necessarily confirm that a given tweeter shares your tastes. It also seems to be struggling with technical difficulties – as of the time of this writing the site seemed to be down. Still, as more and more phones share location data and mobile devices become more powerful, you can bet you’ll be seeing more of these types of services coming soon to a phone near you.

You can find Gadling on Twitter, as well as the most of the Gadling Team: Mike Barish, Kraig Becker, Catherine Bodry, Alison Brick, Justin Glow, Aaron Hotfelder, Tom Johansmeyer, Jeremy Kressmann, Heather Poole, Jamie Rhein, Annie Scott, Karen Walrond, Kent Wien, Brenda Yun.

Twitter is watching you – and it’s cool

by Annie Scott on

Just Landed – Test Render (4 hrs) from blprnt on Vimeo.


So, you know how you can search for phrases on Twitter? It’s actually a really useful search tool; if you search Star Trek, for example or visit #startrek on hashtags, you get everything from 140 character reviews to links to longer blog posts and articles.

Jer Thorp took the search idea a little bit further — he illustrated it. In the video above, Thorp mined all the data of tweets saying “Just landed in” or “Just arrived in” over 4 hours. Then he made it pretty. Watch the video! Maybe one was you!

What will they think of next?

You can find Gadling on Twitter, as well as the most of the Gadling Team: Mike Barish, Kraig Becker, Catherine Bodry, Alison Brick, Justin Glow, Aaron Hotfelder, Tom Johansmeyer, Jeremy Kressmann, Heather Poole, Jamie Rhein, Annie Scott, Karen Walrond, Kent Wien, and Brenda Yun.

[via boingboing]

UpTake takes the pain out of finding the best travel reviews

by Scott Carmichael on

The travel world is “blessed” with quite a few review sites. In recent years, millions of reviews have been added to sites like Yelp, Tripadvisor, Fodors and more.

Of course, this means that it can be hard to find the best place for an honest review, or a site with enough reviews to help you make the right choice.

Enter UpTake – this service takes reviews from all those sources, and displays them on their own easy to use site.

They cover it all – hotels, restaurants, activities and even shops, spas and beaches. In total, UpTake claims to provide access to over 20 Million reviews.

The site itself is a breeze to use, and since everyone has a different preference for how they search, you can access reviews and recommendations in several ways. The easiest is of course to just enter your keywords. Thankfully, the site lets you find stuff with plain English queries. You can also browse by state, activity and even by theme (romantic, budget friendly, girls getaway, pet friendly, family friendly and “just get away”).

Search results are presented in a very easy to use format. The information shows you a brief summary of recent reviews, any available ratings, a map of the location, the most recent price of the location and even a list of other things to do in the area.

Once you get a list of places based on your search, you can narrow the results down by changing the price, type of amenities and theme. The results update “live” based on these requirements, making it really easy to pinpoint exactly what you are looking for.

For example, check out their page for the Westin Michigan Avenue in Chicago. As you can see, you get a great amount of information, with everything from the number of rooms to the year the hotel was built, as well as links to most review sites.

Hotels can be booked directly on the site, and UpTake even takes the hassle out of finding the cheapest rate by providing prices from multiple booking sites.

The “themes” section on UpTake is equally impressive – once again, you can search by keyword (“Pet friendly things in Seattle“) or by clicking on the themes buttons on the main page.

What I really like about the themed search results is that they gather information from appropriate sites. For example; pet friendly destinations uses reviews from DogFriendly.com.

Finally, the UpTake Vacations section allows you to do one-stop-shopping for planning your vacation. You’ll find hotel recommendations, but also links to attractions and other activities. Of course, all these destinations link to the specific UpTake review page.

All in all I’m quite impressed with the site – it offers a massive amount of information, but the tools make it really easy to find things, and unlike some other review sites, you only really get the information you need, without making the results overly complicated or hard to read.

The site is technically still in “Beta”, but I did not come across anything that did not work correctly. That said, there are one or two things I would have liked to see added – with so much information, it is hard to keep track of the things you looked at. Unfortunately, UpTake does not provide a way to easily save your results. In an ideal world, you’d be able to add search results to a “virtual suitcase”, making it easier to plan your trip and do some true comparison shopping.

Twitrans offers translation by native speakers

by Jeremy Kressmann on

Using web translation services like Google Language Tools is often less than satisfying. Sure, the service can translate any phrase or website into a passable version in another language. But it’s far from perfect – tenses are often wrong, certain words don’t convert…it’s kind of a mess.

Sometimes you just need to leave it to the experts: the language’s native speakers. Thanks to the magic of Twitrans, you can now get your message personally translated into one of 14 languages, for free, by a native speaker. How does it work? Twitrans combines the magic of everyone’s favorite microblogging service, Twitter, with the translation experts at One Hour Translation. Twitter users send any message they want translated to @twitrans, along with the abbreviations for the starting and ending languages. For instance, an English to Chinese translation would read “@twitrans en2zh [YOUR PHRASE].” The completed translation appears back on your Twitter home page, no more than an hour later.

For something so simple, the functionality of Twitrans is remarkable. It’s fast, useful and more likely than web-based translation tools to catch the subtleties of language. Still, it’s not for everyone. If you don’t have a Twitter account, you’re out of luck, although non-Twitterers can browse on over to One Hour Translation’s page for a similar translation service that charges by the word. Even if you’ve never tried the service, Twitrans provides yet another of the growing reasons to check out Twitter.

***

You can find Gadling on Twitter, as well as the most of the Gadling Team: Mike Barish, Kraig Becker, Catherine Bodry, Alison Brick, Justin Glow, Aaron Hotfelder, Tom Johansmeyer, Jeremy Kressmann, Heather Poole, Jamie Rhein, Annie Scott, Karen Walrond, Kent Wien, and Brenda Yun.