Here’s one (view on slideshare):

Enter “new house <location>” in maps.google.co.uk and find real estate. Should Funda get scared?

Apple is expected to release a new version of the Apple TV. Google already has shown us the Google TV recently. Will this result in Google and Apple taking over your television also?

Will we end up with only a couple of main OS’es that rule your digital world? Turn on your iPhone, Macbook, iPad, Apple TV, .. your Google Chromium PC, Android Phone, Android ‘tablet, Google TV, ..

What will be next? Cars? The iCar? The Google Car?

What would you do if you were Sony or TomTom or Garmin, Philips, Nokia, Samsung, etc..? It seems too late to jump on the “my own OS bandwagon”..

But who is winning the social network battle? What network will we be on in 10 or even fewer years?

I think it has been clear for some time.. but checkout the nice World Map of Social Networks. If this were Risk who do you think is winning?

And actually when you’re holding a meeting.. play Bingo! and don’t forget to turn on the meeting ticker :).

Ever got a friend on Facebook that was using a Facebook Application called Farmville or Mafia Wars? Good change you have.. Since Farmville has around 69.000.000 monthly users and their mobile version is also called a ‘smash hit‘. So if those are unique users, a smashing ~20% of all 350.000.000 Facebook users is using this game. Of your (average) 130 friends there is probably one that uses it.. not even including Mafia Wars (26.000.000 monthly active users :)).

But.. for everybody who has never used Facebook or has no friends I included a screenshot below.

As you can see on the screenshot, Facebook gives you the possibility to ‘hide’ the message. This actually has been proven extremely useful (at least..for me). I don’t want to know if somebody just “completed level 1 of Strawberries mastery”, “found a pig in his backyard” or even “killed a neighbor farmer because he stole the pumpkin that I grew for seven years because I had nothing better to do”.

But recently I got the following in my Twitter stream…

Aaaaaaaah.. people that normally tweet interesting stuff now tweet an overload of uninteresting messages. Obviously this is in the interest of Foursquare and some people might find it very interesting.. but not me. I don’t care if you have finally got the “I’m constantly drinking coffee at the Startbucks”-badge or you “are the mayor of a trainstation”. Seriously.. if I want to know I will start using Foursquare, become your friend there and start sharing also.

Coming to the conclusion: Twitter should make the ’source’ part of a tweet useful and allow users to block or hide certain sources like Foursquare, Gowalla or even more spammy ones!

Until they have implemented this.. I probably have to unfollow all Gowalla and Foursquare users.. or..
People that want to earn badges, become mayor or the local cafeteria, or something.. could not automatically share those messages via Twitter.
People that want to share a location, could use geo-tagging. Please also stay tweeting interesting stuff.. I don’t care if you’re “taking a sh*t” geo-tagged somewhere.. except maybe here.

Ads for their Business Center..
I haven’t found localized versions of those ads.. but probably they exist already.

New ways of promoting your business
They recently introduced new ad units for local businesses. Those ads appear on both google.com as on the maps.google.com. They are just local listings (as in address info).

Furthermore they’ve put ads on the iPhone Google Map

Aggregating info from other pages and creating their own
And last but not least Google has introduced Places pages. They get information from the web (eg. from Yelp, etc) and put it on their own page. These pages then pop up in the search results.. so they directly compete with the pages the information is aggregated from (Yelp, ..).

So Google is doing some interesting stuff in the area of Local Search that is going to make it harder for the old traditional Yellow Pages companies but also for the new hip and UGC sites like Yelp, Truvo, Qype, TrustedPlaces, YelloYello, ..

PS. Don’t know if ‘warpath’ is actually a word.. but you Dutch people know I mean ‘oorlogspad’

What will the future of local search look like? How much information will we have ?