Who, What, Where?
When it comes to the social media world lately, for all practical purposes I've been living under a rock. Between goings on at work and home the past few weeks, save a day or two here and there, I haven't been quite as active as I usually am. That probably explains why I missed Twitter's announcement last week about the geolocation API now being available. While it's hardly been a secret that Twitter's been working on this functionality, I've been giving a little thought today about its possible effects on other geosocial players that I'm familiar with.I've used Brightkite for quite a while, I've kicked the tires on Google Latitude but no longer really use it, and I'm just getting started with Foursquare. Honestly, without many friends in my immediate area who use any of them (I really need to get some more techie friends!), not to mention living in a smaller community that doesn't exactly have a large community of tech adopters, I'm struggling to find value with any of them outside of being something spatial to play with. I really don't have a good sense of how widely Latitude is used, but the sense I have with Foursquare and Brightkite is that Foursquare is flourishing right now while Brightkite is struggling. Certainly the element of friendly(?) competition incorporated into Foursquare adds a fun twist to the site. After all, who doesn't want to be the mayor or Dear Leader of every place they visit on a daily basis? I can see the element of fun and the chance to rub your mayorships in your friends' faces helping Foursquare in the face of increased geosocial competition from Twitter. Brightkite, on the other hand, now probably needs to figure out just what it wants to be sooner rather than later. Yes, checking in and seeing where you and friends are and have been is fun for a while, especially for geonerds, but the novelty does eventually wear off. As with so many things in the social media world, there's just no getting away from the fact that Twitter is the 800 pound gorilla in the room. Once Twitter's geolocation API functionality is integrated into more clients, I'm just not sure what incentive there will be to use Brightkite apart from apparently more fine-grained privacy control, but of course Twitter can and probably will tweak its geolocation privacy settings. In the end, people will likely gravitate toward the familiar and that to which they're accustomed. I'm going to keep a closer eye on Brightkite because Twitter's announcement may very well be a game changer for them.
After a relatively quite Atlantic hurricane season up to this point, we now have Hurricane Ida churning in the Gulf of Mexico and headed for the US after delivering a blow to portions of Central America. A hurricane warning is in effect from Pascagoula, MS to Indian Pass, FL. With many eyes on the storm as it could affect the areas under the warning by Tuesday, I wanted to share some useful resources for tracking Ida apart from the common websites many think of. I've broken the links down into several categories below. The lists are of course by no means exhaustive. Any omissions are very welcome in the comments. 
