find

Diaroogle helps you find clean public bathrooms

When you've gotta go you've gotta go. Unfortunately, finding a place to do that when you're in New York, one of the largest cities in the world, can be difficult unless you've got some local knowledge.

Human-powered search engine Diaroogle is up to the task. It'll help you find the nearest toilet based off its user-generated database. Like Mizpee, which does the same thing but with a much cuter pretense, it's got user ratings for general cleanliness, the rules of gaining entrance, and occasionally even pictures snapped by users to show how good or … Read more

Buzz Out Loud 743: Fablessly 'splensive pigeons

Today's show is a bit of a tongue-twister. Really, the entire show. We just can't get the words out. And in other news, the whole Internet hates Metallica. Again. We find out the truth about Microsoft's Xbox 360 recall, how Disney totally gets the Internet for music but not so much for movies, how much Google engineers make, and how pigeons can solve the U.S. broadband Internet problem. Listen now: Download today's podcast EPISODE 743

Buzz Out Loud San Francisco Meetup! June 12, 2008. http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/780695

Metallica to bloggers: don’t … Read more

FindWhere: Your GPS gizmo is your phone

The other day my esteemed colleague Leslie Katz mentioned a lightweight gadget you can slip into a car's glove compartment or onto a pet's collar to locate the things you care about wherever they are. If the device doesn't provide enough stats for your detail-hungry brain or seem adequate to cover human cargo, FindWhere offers a similar tracking service using a gadget that your teen/workforce/elderly parent most likely already has--a mobile phone.

Like the Zoombak Universal GPS Locator, FindWhere offer worriers no-go zones whose border crossing sends text message or e-mail alerts to whoever's … Read more

FindMe, an irritating GPS for Facebook friends

The new location-based service FindMe is a straightforward app that uses cell phone towers to broadcast your general whereabouts to Facebook friends, saving you from updating Facebook manually with places you frequently travel. In beta, FindMe installs on your cell phone and updates your Facebook status when it senses you've changed locations. For each new cell area FindMe detects, you'll be able to tag it "Work," "Home," and so on, and you'll only share addresses you manually enter yourself. As you change zones, FindMe updates your bearings, going "dark" when you … Read more

McDonald's is lead sponsor of Olympics-themed ARG, 'The Lost Ring'

For anyone who follows alternate-reality games (ARGs), it should come as no surprise that the latest entry in the genre, The Lost Ring, is the brainchild of, among others, Jane McGonigal.

Until now, it was only suspected--though with extremely high levels of confidence--that the game, which is centered on helping a fictional amnesiac woman named Ariadne discover her identity, was a promotional vehicle for this summer's Beijing Olympics.

But McGonigal, who is keynoting at the South by Southwest Interactive festival in Austin on Tuesday, confirmed to me that the game was in fact designed in collaboration with the International … Read more

Olympics-themed alternate-reality game goes live

As I predicted Sunday night, the Web site for a new alternate-reality game that seems to be tied to the 2008 summer Olympics in Beijing went live Monday.

The game, known as Find the Lost Ring, is built around a story line in which a young woman named Ariadne says she woke up on February 12 in a South African corn maze with amnesia and knows nothing about who she is or where she comes from.

The game's conceit will be to have players help Ariadne find her identity through a complex series of online and, most likely, real-world … Read more

Track down stolen iPhones and loved ones with Twitter

Erica Sadun over at The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) has come up with a useful mobile application/hack for the iPhone. It's called FindMe, and just like the name suggests, it's a location-based service that helps you find your stolen or misplaced handset, and potentially whomever is in possession of it.

It works by auto transmitting your phone's location in the same way the iPhone currently does for the Maps application--by using the location of local cell phone tower or Wi-Fi signal. In this case, the catch is that the service employs Twitter to send the status … Read more

iPod swapping? A great way to find new music

When I was a kid I was always going to my friends' houses to check out the latest additions to their record collections. We'd sit around playing new records, getting high, eating crappy food, and generally having a great time. As we got older that happened less and less, but we started to trade mix cassettes, and more recently mix CDs. Mixes are hit or miss in terms of finding good new music, but now that everybody has an iPod, it may be the best ever way to tap into my friends' music collections. I figured that if I … Read more

Find It! for BlackBerry tells you where to go

Google and Microsoft haven't quite cornered the market on mobile search and directions apps, at least not yet. Infospace Find It!, built with the BlackBerry in mind, gives users multiple entry points to search businesses, people, and directions while squeezing in features not yet stocked by competitors.

To satisfy variant search methods, Find It! sorts searches by name, by category, and by maps and directions. When choosing to search by name, you can look up a business or person in or near a location. This wasn't always successful during my tests, nor was the reverse phone number lookup, a feature unique to Find It! among its better-known and more prosperous rivals. However, when Find It! did strike gold, it didn't skimp in doling it out. Upon locating an individual or business, users can click-to-call, view a map, get directions, save the entry to the address book, and see what else is nearby.

I should mention that both Microsoft's Windows Live Search for Windows Mobile and Google Maps for Mobile had their fair share of data holes--one didn't even register CNET after a search, the brute--so Find It!'s defaults are common to still-youthful mobile search.… Read more

Start-up to Google: OpenSocial's too close to our name

A small New York-based social media start-up called FindMeOn intends to send Google a letter asking that it change the name of its OpenSocial initiative, CNET News.com has learned. FindMeOn founded a project called OpenSN (Open Social Networking) in 2006, and according to founder and CEO Jonathan Vanasco, the similarity of its name to Google's newer project is getting in the way of business.

The company also has tentative plans for legal action.

FindMeOn, which develops technology to aggregate profile data from various social-networking sites, created OpenSN as a way to convert a profile from one social network … Read more