You may have seen the other day that GPS navigation system Waze hit 10m users. It’s a social tool that aggregates user reports on traffic, accidents and the like. I’m a recent convert and signed up a few months ago, since then it’s become a part of my daily commute. If any of you have experienced the vagaries of rush hour traffic on the A3 you’ll understand that drivers need all the help they can get.

Waze: Useful and free, what's not to like?

As a consumer my prerequisites for downloading a geolocation app have to fulfil at least 3 of the following. Here’s how Waze hits those targets:

• Collaborative – Waze uses thousands of users’ traffic reports to create a map of road congestion and allows them to send messages in real time to update each other. Its success rests on the community spirit of its users
• Timely – this all happens in real time, a boon for an audience where seconds count
• Useful – I’ve avoided innumerable traffic jams with this tool and anything that can make the daily commute less painful and for free gets my thumbs up
• Fully integrates with my existing social profiles without superseding them – this is not a Foursquare, inundating friends with useless and annoying updates. It fulfils a purpose and doesn’t pretend to be a Facebook replacement. Should the jam be particularly bad you can send your update to Twitter or Facebook to alert your wider following, but that’s it. Waze knows its limits

Download it for your iPhone, Android or Blackberry here. My username is rupinjapan, so if you see a Transit wrapped round a traffic light on the Cobham bypass let me know ahead of time.

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It’s that time of year again: lists, retrospectives, best ofs, highs and lows. Take twelve months of experience and package it up into a pithy blog post or a commemorative special issue. I am, frankly, powerless to resist. My list of the top ten albums of 2010 has been under construction for quite some time now.

Rather than bore you all with my tales of joy from this year (including Las Vegas and the Champions League final), I thought I would give an extended hat tip to a couple of my favourite blogs that have kept me entertained and informed in equal measure over the past twelve months. Digital Buzz Blog is pretty much always my first stop when I open up feedly of a morning. Written by the New Zealand based Aden Hepburn, it covers the wide world of digital activity with a deft and selective hand. Whilst I love Gizmodo and Engadget, the sheer volume of posts every day constantly leaves me feeling that I might have missed something. Digital Buzz Blog prefer to post two or three articles a day, but almost always provide something that is worthy of a tweet, a mention in a meeting or that provides a creative spark which leads to something new being concocted.

Fave articles from the past year:

Diesel Cam: Connecting Stores With Facebook

Diesel Facepark: The Analog Version of Facebook

YouTube Launches The “Life In A Day” Project

Chat Roulette: HIV Guerrilla Marketing

Heading up the category of ‘entertaining’ more than ‘informing’, I can’t get enough of Will Sturgeon’s The Media Blog. It’s a fairly UK-centric look at the increasingly ridiculous world of newspapers and their websites: the frenzy to get the latest stories, give people what they think they want and aid ailing sales. There’s a lot of laughing at the Daily Mail too, which is always nice to see. On a more serious note, Will’s articles also take in the hot PR topics of the moment, such as the muddied waters of relationships between PRs and journalists, and also how the position of the dailies is changing from being moral guardians and arbiters of taste into something much more reactionary (in both senses of the word).

Fave articles from 2010:

If you only go on one ‘trianing’ course this year…

Old alcohol bad, new alcohol good?

More evidence the Sun gets its headlines from Twitter

On a very personal note, I also love Nerd Boyfriend. Pictures of celebs looking cool ‘n’ nerdy, along with links where you can buy the clothes yourself. Nice.

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So Facebook Places finally comes out of the closet. At first read it looks pretty good, and when you go to the iPhone app it stands proud in the middle of your phone screen. What it has over other location services such as Foursquare and Gowalla is an existing network of friends who are more than likely to be the ones you would actually want to bump in to “by accident” in the pub.

For a more detailed look, have a read of Walt Mosberg’s column on the WSJ the video is worth a watch to.

Those other two location games have gained some traction and a lot of headlines, but the established nature of our personal Facebook communities combined with the weight of half a billion users worldwide, will guarantee use of Facebook’s service by a much larger volume of people. That means businesses will flock to it and now be trying to get their first Places campaigns running as soon as possible.

Facebook does appear to be being very embracing and actively encouraging Foursquare and others to access Places through its API. Facebook has also not gone down the game route, no mayorships or awards, allowing the more niche services to keep their focus unchallenged.

Right, so what can we do right now, if we live or visit the US? Here are a stream of tweets this morning from @sophysilver from the Facebook UK PR team, thank you!:

• If you don’t trust your friends it is simple to turn off. For most there is a lot of value in being able to share an experience with friends
• Places never automatically shares information on the location
• You must take an action to associate yourself with a place by either checking in yourself or by allowing friends to check you into a place
• It is not true that the primary location setting is switched on by default. “Places” tags will not automatically be shared with friends
• Where you have not allowed check-ins you are simply tagged in your friends status updates, just like status tagging works on the site today.
• Additional protection of being able to turn tagging off for Places, and to sett your own check-ins to any group you want including ‘only me’
• You also have the option of never checking in with the product in which case you will never be associated with a place
• Default setting for all is Friends Only. Minors can only share their location with Friends even if they try to widen it

Do follow Sophie on Twitter and for further news about the arrival of Places in the UK.

We will be keeping a close eye on this, especially should we be lucky enough to go on any trips to the US and when it finally arrives on this side of the Atlantic. Let us know what you think of the announcement, are Foursquare and Gowalla doomed?

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If you’re living in the UK like the team at immediate future, you’ll no doubt be enjoying a bit of classic British summertime – it’s August, and you need a coat, scarf and wellies to go anywhere. It’s frankly rubbish outside, so why not stay in and get everything you need from the online world?

We’ve been talking about virtual reality for ages, with plenty of early 90s shows like Tomorrow’s World and Blue Peter getting presenters to don a cumbersome helmet and escape the real world. Truth is, the transition to the virtual world is getting closer and is much more subtle.

3D is the current driver. Why pay massive ticket prices to sit in a cramped seat listening to some idiot spout abuse at a real football match, when you can watch all of the big games from the comfort of your living room in stunningly immersive Full HD 3D? Soon all sports will be following suit, and you’re much more likely to see what’s going on via your TV (invite a few mates round, crank up the volume and hey presto, the atmosphere is replicated too.)

3D gaming is going to be BIG, BIG, BIG. If you can box, dance and play tennis in the house, without having to deal with those aforementioned weather issues or that sweaty dude from the gym who always stares at you in the shower, well that’s good with me!

You can talk with video conferencing on Skype and iPhones. You can find out exactly where friends are and what they’re doing via social networks. Online shopping is bigger and better than ever. More and more live gigs are being streamed on YouTube. Music festival coverage gets bigger and longer every year as digital channels and online devote resource to bringing you music without any mud. V Festival has recently announced live streaming this year for the first time. Once we get gigs and festivals in 3D, there will definitely be no point in going out ever again.

OK, so you lose a bit of atmosphere, but if you’re on Twitter you can still talk to other people about the events (be they gigs or football matches), the beer’s much cheaper and there’s no chance of getting stuck in a three hour traffic jam on your way home. Sounds good to me.

• Arcade Fire join U2, Alicia Keys in streaming gig online (ctv.ca)
• Can Twitter wit replace live comedy? (guardian.co.uk)

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Having declared last week that it was not illegal to jailbreak iPhones the U.S. government effectively gave consumers the right to fiddle with their proprietary software, allowing them access to other providers or to use apps and music from sources other than Apple’s own iTunes Store. This all became possible thanks to the exemptions made to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA.)

According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF,) a selfstyled civil liberties group defending consumers’ digital rights, more than a million iPhone owners are said to have jailbroken their handsets in the past few months. The EFF hails the DMCA exemptions as a landmark victory and a good percentage of iPhone users might agree with them.

Apple on the other hand has warned that although jailbreaking may not be frowned upon by the law of the land, it won’t take the matter so lightly. Not only will jailbreaking void the warranty, but there is a risk of bricking the handset, effectively turning it into an expensive door stop. However, according to a journalist friend of mine it can be easily restored to a non jailbroken state.

If you’re after my personal opinion,  I’m torn. On the one hand, I agree that Apple should be able to protect their IP with some legal recourse, however, emotionally I’m with the EFF (who remind me a bit of the Wolverines from mediocre 80s action flick Red Dawn) who believe a handset shouldn’t be locked down once you’ve purchased it. This battle will continue to rage. Choose your side carefully, maybe grow a mullet, wear khaki, buy an AK.

Let me know what you think about jailbreaking; a digital taboo, or your revolutionary right?

mmmmm the 80s

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