Phil Spray

The BBC streamed 5.3m programmes to Apple devices in July, according to statistics released by the broadcaster.

TweetWhen I was a kid, my mother used to tell me I could be like Bugs Bunny if I ate my carrots. I don’t know why the prospect of being like a smart-arsed cartoon rabbit would be a persuading factor to eat my veg, but I suppose it beat the seeing in the dark trick. Well [...]

Following on the conversation from today’s post from my good friend Scott Gould (and his mate Ian) I share with you my 3 productivity tips for today!

1. Reading something inspiring keeps the mind active, it gives you focus and direction.

I am currently working through the wonderful 80′s classic book “Money, Sex, Power” by the fantastic pastor Richard Foster (author of Celebration of Discipline) – just picking up a couple of nuggets that get the brain juices flowing on a daily basis is sometimes all it takes to get the creativity and productivity flowing.

2. Think about getting an iPad (or some useful desktop widgets!

Using “Things” on the iPad has completely consolidated my mish-mash approach to task management up until now, and Evernote being always with me makes finding things much easier.

Also check out some of these great little nuggets:

• DropBox – File sharing made easy
• Focus Booster – Break your time down into 25 minute chunks
• Doomi – Handy Adobe Air To Do List App
• OmniFocus – Heavyweight To Do App
• The Pomodoro Technique – What Focus Booster is based on!

3. Knowing how to turn things off is crucial.

What I mean by this is knowing that things do have a Off button, and you can choose to press it. You change choose to tune out. And you should.

We often forget that the world will not end if we don’t check in, tweet, email or text for a couple of hours, or even a couple of weeks.

The more we learn to switch off for appropriate amounts of time, the more productive we are when things are turned on!

Over to you…

What makes you more productive? What tools do you use? Are you more creative when you are being productive or more productive when you are being creative?

Related articles by Zemanta

• Pomodoro Technique: How Does It Help Your Productivity? (shankrila.com)
• Top 6 Adobe AIR Apps That Will Increase Your Productivity (dumblittleman.com)
• 3 Productivity Systems and the Tools That Go With Them (webworkerdaily.com)
• 6 Personal Productivity Tools Guaranteed to Up Your Game (freelanceswitch.com)
• How a Tomato Can Make You More Productive (losethattyre.co.uk)

If the holiday weekend excitement took your attention away from the BBC director general, Mark Thompson’s MacTaggart Lecture at the Edinburgh International Television Festival, you can find a handy summary of the main points c/o of the BBC here and a media overview here.

But in the midst of the gladiatorial BBC vs Sky debate, what I noticed in the Guardian’s extract from his speech was the mention of Twitter; how the news about BBC cuts “provoked an extraordinary rash of Twitter feeds…” and that “some of those ‘I love the BBC’ Twitter feeds trended in the top five in the world”. And all because “they care about British television and …will be prepared to fight for it in their thousands and perhaps their millions”.

Is this the first time a BBC director general has acknowledged the influence of social media on shaping decisions made in higher places? Clearly, the references to Twitter had to be carefully chosen, knowing the surgeon-like precision with which  this year’s MacTaggart lecture would be dissected.

It’s one thing - as the BBC does - to use social media as a channel, but quite another to recognise it as a world-wide driver of opinion to be taken seriously.

I wonder what James Murdoch makes of all that? And, if he does Tweet, does he do it (as the article at the end of the previous link would suggest) standing up?

Hurts and Manchester novelist Joe Stretch have created a wonderfully unique experience on Spotify in which you get to play the protagonist.

Narrated by actress Anna Friel, ‘Don’t Let Go’ is an interactive audio novel which utilises Spotify in a completely new and unexpected way. Each chapter of the novel has been published as a track on Spotify, and can be located by typing a unique code into the search field.

After listening to each chapter of the story you’ll be offered a choice of what to do next, along with the unique code for each action. Your mission - should you choose to accept it - is to stop arch villain Guy Lockhart from distributing his heartbreak cocktail and condemning humankind forever to a loveless, empty existence.

Along the way you’ll also hear extracts of music from Hurts’ brand new album “Happiness”. If you manage to get to one of the story’s eleven possible endings without dying, you’ll be rewarded with an exclusive preview of an album track. So choose wisely…

Posted by Doug Aberdeen, Software Engineer

People tell us all the time that they’re getting more and more mail and often feel overwhelmed by it all. We know what you mean—here at Google we run on email. Our inboxes are slammed with hundreds, sometimes thousands of messages a day—mail from colleagues, from lists, about appointments and automated mail that’s often not important. It’s time-consuming to figure out what needs to be read and what needs a reply. Today, we’re happy to introduce Priority Inbox (in beta)—an experimental new way of taking on information overload in Gmail.

Gmail has always been pretty good at filtering junk mail into the “spam” folder. But today, in addition to spam, people get a lot of mail that isn't outright junk but isn't very important—bologna, or “bacn.” So we've evolved Gmail's filter to address this problem and extended it to not only classify outright spam, but also to help users separate this "bologna" from the important stuff. In a way, Priority Inbox is like your personal assistant, helping you focus on the messages that matter without requiring you to set up complex rules.



Priority Inbox splits your inbox into three sections: “Important and unread,” “Starred” and “Everything else”:



As messages come in, Gmail automatically flags some of them as important. Gmail uses a variety of signals to predict which messages are important, including the people you email most (if you email Bob a lot, a message from Bob is probably important) and which messages you open and reply to (these are likely more important than the ones you skip over). And as you use Gmail, it will get better at categorizing messages for you. You can help it get better by clicking the or buttons at the top of the inbox to correctly mark a conversation as important or not important. (You can even set up filters to always mark certain things important or unimportant, or rearrange and customize the three inbox sections.)

After lots of internal testing here at Google, as well as with Gmail and Google Apps users at home and at work, we’re ready for more people to try it out. Priority Inbox will be rolling out to all Gmail users, including those of you who use Google Apps, over the next week or so. Once you see the "New! Priority Inbox" link in the top right corner of your Gmail account (or the new Priority Inbox tab in Gmail Settings), take a look.

A massive array of shimmering advertisements for Foursquare has been erected in New York City’s Times Square. This picture just appeared on Flickr; it’s pretty impressive. The ad towers over American Eagle’s Times Square retail store.

Foursquare reportedly did not pay for the ad space. That means American Eagle is open to promote multiple location services; it’s also one of the retailers using Shopkick, a location-based rewards service.

It seems like just a short time ago that these location services were only used by a few hardcore web tech geeks. Now they’re so mainstream that they’re taking up a chunk of the New York skyline. Did you see that coming? If so, you’ve been ahead of the curve.

---

Reviews: Foursquare

More About: advertising, american eagle, foursquare, location, manhattan, Mobile 2.0, new york, photo, pic, times square, trending

For more Mobile coverage:

• Follow Mashable Mobile on Twitter
• Become a Fan on Facebook
• Subscribe to the Mobile channel
• Download our free apps for iPhone and iPad

The Streak – Dell’s first Android device for the UK – offered exclusively by O2 – has suffered from a noticeably ageing OS since it launched running Android 1.6 in June.  However, new and existing owners will be able to upgrade to (the much improved) version 2.1 from the 1st September (Wednesday).

Update: O2 are running late with the release process, but it’s still coming.

I’ve been one of a privileged few to try the device with this software ahead of launch…

We’ve also got one of the devices to give away to a UK-based reader – see the bottom of this post for all the details.

There are plenty of good reviews of the Streak as originally released, so lets focus on what’s changed… Well, here’s the official list:

Added: 720p video recording from the rear facing 5MP camera.
Added: Native multi-touch support including gestures such as “pinch-to-zoom”.
Added: Document editing via the QuickOffice application.
Added: Support for ‘live wallpapers’.
Added: Support for multiple mail accounts including Exchange email and contacts sync.
Improved: Look and feel of phone dialer for managing calls.
Improved: Application compatibility with apps in the Market requiring Android 2.0+.
Improved: Many speed and performance optimisations.

First thoughts

After a few days of real-world use I’d say the speed and the improved app compatibility are the real winners. The interface is fast, fluid and I felt I was getting more done. Some of this is an actual speed improvement, but much is also attributable to how refined the built-in Google Apps are now (especially compared to the Blackberry plug-in I used daily). I found myself using multi-touch without even thinking about it, having spent so much time with an iPad recently… It’s almost second nature here and its presence will make iPhone users feel at home much more quickly.

For me, tablet devices are still to prove themselves – there’s plenty of hype around now but it’s early days. Having appreciated the iPad’s size and convenience when travelling recently I was dubious about the much-smaller Streak (with its 5 inch screen), which feels like an over-sized phone in comparison. However, these doubts were quickly forgotten and I found myself choosing the Streak in favour of phones or the iPad regularly without really thinking about it – that’s always a good sign. Email and tweeting really doesn’t need huge amounts of screen space and this upgrade gives access to a much wiser range of apps in the Android Market so I could now use all my favourites. Most coped well with scaling to tablet dimensions and the new Tweetdeck beta was… well… very good.

Getting multi-tasking back (after some time in iPad-land) reminded me how much I had missed it and how excellent Android’s notification system is relative to most. The improved speed also made it painless to flip between apps – mirroring much more closely the way I work on a laptop than I do with any other OS. Widgets also feel more useful with the greater screen estate and speed, although too many network-intensive ones can munch through battery.

I’m still not quite sure who the target market for the Streak is apart from early adopters (of course!) but this upgrade will certainly broaden the appeal. It’s now a viable sofa-surfer, media player, laptop substitute for travellers and even mobile-working solution (via Exchange sync).  It doesn’t have the cachet of the iPad, but if you don’t already live in the iTunes ecosystem it warrants serious consideration – especially if (like me) your life lives in Gmail.

The challenge for all these devices is not whether they are useful, but whether consumers will pay for intermediate devices or will opt to save the money and stick with phones or laptops.

That 2.2 Question…

It was sure to come up…

As far as we know Android 2.2 is still coming to the Streak later in the year. Dell have promised it, we see no reason for O2 to prevent it. However, it’s not ready yet…

2.1 is a great intermediate step whilst owners are waiting for all that 2.2 goodness. The Streak’s not lacking in the speed department already so the changes in 2.2 will be most appreciated for the improvements in battery-life that are anticipated.

(Epic) Win a Dell Streak

In addition to giving us early access to latest software update for the Streak, O2 have given us a brand-new one – worth £399 – to give away to a (UK-based) reader.  All you have to do is post a comment below or tweet a link to the this post and we’ll pick a winner at random on at midday UK-time on Monday 6th September.

We’re sorry we can’t send this device overseas as it is SIM-locked to O2.

Amazon have just relaunched the Kindle e-reading device in the UK, with a new model, which looks rather spiffy.

Mine is one of the old, white ones – but I still love it. The new one features a new layout which makes the device smaller overall but keeping the same sized screen. The Kindle now supports wifi, which is cool – mine can only use 3G networks.

As John Naughton writes in his Observer column on the subject:

In the end, however, it’s not hardware that matters, but the effectiveness of the overall system in which the device is embedded. That was the great lesson of the Apple iPod: although the hardware was lovely from the outset, it would never have had the impact it had without the link to iTunes software on the PC/Mac and thence to the iTunes store. Other companies had made nice MP3 players, but none had put together a seamless system for getting music from CDs or online retailers on to them. Apple did and the rest is history.

The evolution of the ebook business reveals the same kind of pattern. First up, in 2006, was Sony, with a beautifully crafted device that had one crippling drawback: the difficulty of getting stuff on to it. A year later, Amazon launched the first-generation Kindle, a device inferior to the Sony product in every respect save one: it had wireless connectivity to the Amazon online store, which meant that purchasing and downloading books on to the device was a breeze. After that, it was game over for Sony and, indeed, for all the other companies that had piled into the e-reader market.

There are a number of cool things about the Kindle, some of which are unique to it, some that aren’t. Here are my top three.

1. Instant books

As John points out in his article, the iTunes-like ability to buy books right away is remarkably powerful. It’s like the difference between ordering a CD online or downloading an MP3 – why wait a day for it to be delivered when you can have it now?

2. Social reading

One thing the Kindle allows you to do is to set bookmarks in your e-books, and also to annotate them with notes. In addition to this, you can also highlight passages to make sure you remember them.

A social layer has now been added to this, in that you can now see what other people who have that book on their Kindles have highlighted. It’s a bit like seeing how many other people have saved a web page in Delicious, and is very cool.

3. Syncing

As well as the Kindle e-reader device, Amazon make applications available for other hardware to read books on, including Mac, Windows, Android and iPhone. This enables you to download books to other devices and keep reading even when you don’t have your Kindle on you.

Most obviously useful for phones, the really great thing with the Kindle is the way that when you open a book in one of the apps, it opens on the last page you read on your Kindle. Likewise, when you then open the book on your Kindle, it catches up to where you got up to on the other device.

Possibly related posts:

• Some recent reading
• Bookmarks for April 11th through April 16th
• Kindling
• Bookmarks for July 3rd through July 7th
• Websites I love: Project Gutenberg

I subscribed to ForAppleVideos’s channel on YouTube.

I subscribed to ForAppleVideos’s channel on YouTube.

The other week Hitwise came out with stats questioning whether Facebook’s growth was beginning to slow in the UK. This was on top of US figures from June showing that the uptake among 18-44 year olds had dropped.

Now more evidence, this time from emarketer and Inside Facebook.

The latest figures for the UK show that Facebook fell in June and rose by only 1.8% in July, meaning that on 1 Aug there were less British Facebook users than two months previously. US growth however seems to be back on track, albeit slightly at 2.4% from July to August.

Do these stats give any indication that Facebook is likely to fall out of favour anytime soon? Not at all, Hitwise’s Robin Goad says it might actually be a sign of Facebook hitting maturity in the major markets of the US and UK and not really being able to hoover up any more users. As a result, trends from now on may well be more seasonal in nature.

For example, in July 44.2% of UK residents visited Facebook, an astonishing number when you think about it. Only the US at 42.1% penetration comes close. As the Google of social media, Facebook is becoming pretty ubiquitous, and if you are a marketer unavoidable.

By comparison, emarketer says that France with 30% visiting the network offers much greater growth potential. As a result those double digit annual growth figures will still be happening. Just not in Facebook’s largest two markets.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Facebook nears saturation point in UK (newstatesman.com)
• Is Facebook hitting saturation point? (liesdamnedliesstatistics.com)
• Facebook’s UK growth tails off – where now for Zuckerberg’s Billion? (thenextweb.com)

Just venting a little here. For years, I’ve done a lot of my work in various Starbucks, Pret A Mangers and other coffee shops in London and/or wherever I happen to be on the planet. I’ve been doing it for five-six years, before the trend caught on a couple of years ago. This year I’ve spent even more time at coffee stores, thanks to the advent of free wifi in many, and the general inability to work at home anymore. I am currently trying to complete a writing project by Friday, and I’m in the process of starting my third company in seven years. So I have a lot to do.

The concept of working out of a Starbucks is romantic for sure. Many of you will be tethered to desks somewhere ugly, and you might dream of taking your laptop to a Bucks or Pret and writing a book or starting a business. It’s a nice idea. It doesn’t work however when seemingly the entire universe has descended on London and proceeded to absorb every single seat, table and electricity point in the entire capital! I spent an hour walking around central London earlier, went into something like 10 branches of major coffee chains (sadly the independent coffee stores don’t tend to encourage you to sit down for three hours to do work) and was completely unable to find a place to sit and work.

I managed to find a half-empty Starbucks near the BBC Radio headquarters at the very top end of Regent Street, so I’m back to productive now. But the time lost, and frustration caused, by this endless search for a table to work on for a few hours, has a knock-on effect on the rest of the day. So think twice before quitting that job to pursue your passions from a coffee shop – you’ll be much more effective and successful if you can find an affordable office space.

I was casting my eye over the Facebook Places logo this morning, yes I know I have no life, and noticed something a little odd. Under the pink marker there is definitely a number 4 inside a square. Go on have a look yourself.

Now this could be a mere coincidence or one of the following:

a) Mark Zuckerburg showing the middle finger to the current/former rulers of the geo location market

b) Mark Zuckerburg joking around with his users and the media in general

c) Mark Zuckerburg revealing that he is behind Foursquare as well as the most popular social network on the planet

Or, depending how you look at it, that could be an oblong and not a square. Anyway something for you to think about over your cornflakes.

Good pictures leap from a page to celebrate, amaze and tantilise.

Poor pictures shout loudly. But not in a way you’d like.

One source of good pictures is the website Flickr which has more than four billion images. It’s something I’ve blogged about before.

What’s on there? Think about any subject and there will be pictures. A whole heap of them. And Flickr groups too. It’s the civilised corner of the web where people are constructive and are happy to licence their images through a Creative Commons licence.

Residents have self-organised and are daily taking an avalanche of brilliant pictures.

It can be a community around a love of countryside. Or of cats. Or a geographical community brought together by an area.

In Walsall, a borough of 250,000 near Birmingham in the UK that’s expecially the case. There are more than 100 members, 5,000 images and a vibrant Flickr group.

People like Steph Jennings, Lee Jordan, Stuart Williams, Beasty, Tony M, Nathan Johnstone and others do brilliant things.

At Walsall Council, we looked at their shots we wondered aloud how good it would be to showcase their shots on the council website.  After all, people taking pictures of the place they live and seeing them showcased on their council’s website HAS to be a good idea.

Our head of communications Darren Caveney and web manager Kevin Dwyer picked the ball up and ran with it.

As part of a web refresh, Kev designed a Flickr friendly header that woud apply across all pages.

Next the pictures. A comment was posted on the Walsall Flickr pages to flag up what we were looking to do. We asked people to add the tag ‘walsallweb’ to each individual picture if they wanted the shot to be considered.

We were staggered to get more than 400 shots tagged for consideration in three days. An amazing response that showed the community support.

The postbox shape of the header ruled out scores of images. We also steered clear of people shots because of any problems with permissions.

The first shot was a canalside image. By linking back from the council site to the original Flickr image we embraced the web 2.0 approach of sharing.

The image got more than 150 hits in just over two weeks.

This is the revamped Walsall Council website that celebrates our residents’ work.

SIXTEEN THINGS WE LEARNED…

1. Ask permission. Photographic copyright by default lies with the photographer. Even if there is a creative commons licence available I’d still ask. Just to be on the safeside.

2. Ask permission to name and link back to the original picture too. For some people photography is a hobby they don’t want publicity for.

3. Rotate images. Try and use pictures from around the borough. Not just the photogenic park.

4. Rotate photographers. Share the love around.

5. Use freelance pictures too. But ask permission. The licence you may have originally negotiated may only be for print use, for example.

6. Be seasonal. A cornfield in summer sun looks great in August. It may not be so at Christmas.

7. Change the shot regularly. Two or three weeks is enough to freshen up the site.

8. Stage a competition to encourage participation.  Post a topic.

9. Use Flickr images across the site. A cracking shot of a park would work well on the park pages, for example.

10. Be aware of your policies towards people. Do you need to get permission forms signed in order to use the image for publicity.

11. Join Flickr. Contributing to the Flickr community is a good way to build bridges and understand how it works.

12. Acknowledge using a shot via a comment under the picture from the council Flickr account. Comments are a social part of Flickr and a way to give praise.

13. Create a gallery. A page on the council website to gather the header screenshots.

14. Stage a Flickr meet. Generate content and allow residents to take shots of their landmarks and building.

15. Showcase your area. It’s a chance to really show off.

16. Skill up. Make sure there is the skills base for several team members to add content.

LINKS:

bccdiy.com - A website for Birmingham put together by bloggers that uses Flickr images brilliantly.

Lichfield District Council – Some lovely shots of the Staffordshire city of Lichfield using Flickr.

San Fransisco’s District Attorney’s Office – Great blog on how a US office is now using photo sharing.

LGEO Research - Good blog by Liz Azyan on how Lichfield used user generated content.

Coventry – How Coventry City Council use Facebook to showcase official images.

Lest anyone try to convince you otherwise…

More people listen to the radio now than ever in the past ten years
Source: RAJAR – Q2 2010

90.6% of us consume radio every week: that’s more than any media except television
Source: RAJAR – Q2 2010

Radio is popular with young people: 72% of 15-24 year-olds claim it’s part of their daily routine
Source: RAB ‘The Big Listen’ – 2009

69% of 15-24’s agree that “radio gives me ideas of what music to load on my iPod”
Source: RAB ‘The Big Listen’ – 2009

75% of 15-24’s say that radio is the number one place to discover new music
Source: RAB ‘The Big Listen’ – 2009

48% of UK smartphone owners have installed a radio application to their phones
Source: ‘Radio Futures 2010’ RAIN/Vision Critical – 2010

31% of UK smartphone owners listen to radio on their phones every week
Source: ‘Radio Futures 2010’ RAIN/Vision Critical – 2010

82% of all listening of any sort is to radio (including listening to our own music or online services)
Source: BBC Eartime Research, Radio Academy Podcast July 2010

Any more? Pop them (sourced, please) in the comments… this might be a useful resource…

---

Permalink | 7 comments
Post tags: radio
These are my personal views | Full disclosure

If O2 was a comedy club (and sometimes I’m not entirely convinced it isn’t) then giffgaff would certainly be the equivalent of Open Mike night…

Or Amateur Hour.

When giffgaff launched their service last November I said “Watch this space to see giffgaff become a tremendous success… or a horrific disaster” and unfortunately 9 months later it pains me to say that it seems to have ended up the latter, at least from my point of view.

Once giffgaff announced their Goody Bag bundles I decided to embrace the service and ported my main mobile number to them – everything went completely smoothly and I was initially very impressed – after I ported I even had a call from a friendly giffgaff staffer to make sure everything was OK. Then we ported my girlfriend’s number so she could ditch her SIM-only contract and take advantage of the free giffgaff data on her iPhone… everything went quite well but she didn’t get the courtesy call once she ported.

Happy with how well things had gone so far I started to recommend the service to other people, I ordered some SIMs so I could hand them out and the first 3 went almost instantly. I even signed up a couple more for myself so I could use them in secondary handsets (for testing etc).

Then I recommended one to my friend Will. Will is a developer with a keen interest in mobile and VoIP, he currently works for a telecoms company and was keen to try out the free data service on giffgaff. I sent him a SIM.

Will’s SIM wouldn’t activate and he had the most calamitous customer support experience trying to get it working – stupid questions from giffgaff support about supplying his username and information about how he performed his first top-up (impossible since he couldn’t activate his SIM) followed by instructions about signing up before activating (in contrast with their website which has a big “Activate a SIM” button which doesn’t require signing up). Eventually I got in touch with giffgaff’s Robbie Hearn (Member Experience Champion) who explained to me that there were a small handful of SIMs that were broken when they were sent out and that it was so rare that the customer service guys hadn’t been trained how to deal with it (it doesn’t quite explain why they seemingly took pot shot guesses as to what was wrong though).

Then Will messaged me to say “Hey, good news! my SIM card started working but their system won’t accept my payment”. Apparently they claimed his address didn’t match his card even after he rang his bank and confirmed the spelling of his address and was finally told that he’ll have to buy his top-up in store. This was the deal breaker and he rightfully decided to stick with his current provider.

Next up is an old friend and colleague of mine, Jay Fenton. He’s a smart chap and even holds telecom infrastructure patents – he couldn’t get payment into giffgaff either and found their customer support lacking to the point that he threw the SIMs into the bin and sent me a bit of a snarky e-mail.

Basically these are two professional people who trusted my recommendation and were let down, making me feel like a bit of a lemon for recommending giffgaff but today was the last straw.

Today at around 4-5pm the giffgaff network appeared to completely die for at least 30 minutes. No calls or texts in or out for that whole period. When I checked, the giffgaff forum had a handful of member posts complaining and speculating about the issue – some people suggested it was an O2 issue but calls from an O2 SIM were working fine for me. It’s now 11pm and there has been no official mention of any outage on the giffgaff blog… not even a “something went wrong, we don’t know what but we’re looking into it” and that is completely unacceptable. As is this Twitter apology which is lacking somewhat:

It doesn’t matter how good your offering is, how “fluffy” your ethics are or how friendly your staff are, if your service is half-assed then you might as well pack up and go home and that’s my advice to giffgaff “Gaffer” Mike Fairman – drag your staff into a meeting and tell them to up their game…

If they don’t then pack up your things and go home, there is no room for amateurs here. However, cute your adverts are.

On Wednesday evening Facebook launched Facebook Places, an event of some significance. I spent some time over the weekend trying to pull together all the best information into one place, which I share below. I’ll also be regularly updating this post as things develop, so be sure to bookmark this post and check back often.

This video from Facebook is a good place to start getting your head around how it works from a users perspective (especially if you’re outside of the US, the only country with access to the service currently), as is Walter Mossberg’s early review. Inside Facebook have a good guided tour of the features and privacy settings and also bring news of how friends’ check-ins appear on your events page. However, Kunur Patel describes her friends’ initial reactions to being checked in by her when they were out for dinner, which implies the product is going to take some getting used to (update: All Facebook draws attention to a brewing Facebook Places backlash).

The Wall Street Journal points out how this opens up competition between Facebook and Google, specifically the Google Places product aimed at local businesses and Nick O’Neill paints a grim picture of what this means for Foursquare while Techcrunch tries to decipher what Foursquare themselves think.

What Marketers need to know
Inside Facebook has a great hands-on guide to how marketers and businesses can start using Facebook Places and Facebook themselves have put together a FAQ on Places for Advertisers. Michael Lazerow looks at what opportunities Places opens up in terms of app development, Debra Aho Williamson has done some thinking about the long term implications for marketers, Josh Constine looks at its potential to change how people find and use real-time information and Tom Cummings puts it all in context. However, in the short term, it looks like the introduction of Places has slowed natural Facebook page fan growth by over 50%.