Social Media On The Sidewalk

Social media is having more and more direct effects on “real life” and in real concrete ways. Services like the twitter taxi that Ariel Schwartz writes about on Fast Company:

Green Tomato Cars, a taxi service in London, has already garnered attention for its use of eco-friendly vehicles–the service is even the taxi company of choice for Queen Elizabeth II thanks to the cheaper upfront cost of using Green Tomato’s hybrids. Now the cab company has caught our attention with its Twitter cab-booking service.

–Green Tomato Cars Lets You Twitter for Your Taxi Ride

Or real world tagging services such as HashCeratops that MG Siegler of TechCrunch goes into detail about:

HashCeratops (yes, that’s really the name) is a group being led by Buzzd, the service that finds hot places in cities based on other location services. One main feed Buzzd looks to for its data is the Twitter stream. The problem is that without a standard for naming locations, it can be hard to parse tweets to find out exactly where people are. Hence, HashCeratops.

The idea is to create a community-driven database of hashtags for various places in various cities. So, for example, if I’m going to the local cafe Epicenter, I might use #epicenter to say where I am. (You can submit requests for formally make place hashtags on HashCeratops’ site.) Of course, if it’s just one service doing this, the likelihood that it will take off is pretty small. But Buzzd has a number of partners on board including Coovents, Geodelic, Xtreme Labs, Yipit, and SocialGreat.

–HashCeratops Aims To Formally Add Place Tagging To The Twitter Stream

It’s obvious that social media is taking a foot hold not only online, but in the world we walk through every day. Geolocation based services, combined with social media, means relevant information about where you are as you get there.

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