geotagging

There's a new geo-location app on the market, and the name is SCVNGR. Yes, all caps. But don't confuse it with the likes of Foursquare or Gowalla, SCVNGR has something else going for it — game play. Want to know more? Here, I'll tell you the difference between everyone's favorite check-in app and the new kid on the block.

Foursquare
You've met my friend Foursquare, right? It's the app that lets you check in to locations, rack up points, find out where your friends are, and maybe if you frequent a special place enough, become its "Mayor." There are some real-world rewards to checking in on Foursquare as well, like discounts and freebies if you're a "Mayor," along with bragging rights for how many badges you unlock. Foursquare is available for free on your iPhone, Android, Palm, and BlackBerry devices.

Find out how SCVNGR works after the break.

Twitter recently rolled out its locations feature, allowing tweets posted from the web to include your location. While this functionality has been available to developers for a while, you weren't able to geo-tag your tweets from Twitter.com until this week.

You have to turn the function on to use it, so there's no risk of accidentally including your location if you don't want to. If you do enable the function, the line beneath your tweet on Twitter.com reads "x minutes ago via web from [x location]." The location text then links to a pop-out Google map detailing your general location. This could be useful for tracking breaking news, or if you're at a conference or other event where you're traveling between cities or even neighborhoods. . .but it's just more information that could potentially be an overshare — or even a security risk.Twitter is the latest service to launch this location-based function, on the heels of Facebook's announced plan to do the same. Can we officially say that location-based features have jumped the shark, or is it just the next big thing?

People have been buzzing about Twitter's upcoming geotagging feature for a while, and now the feature is finally here. The function is available through the API only, which means geotagging will not be available through Twitter.com. Although it will be available through Twitter clients like Birdfeed for the iPhone, Seesmic Web for your desktop, and Twidroid for Android phones, which are already supporting the new feature.

If you use one of the clients that supports geotagging, your location will be revealed with your tweets — exciting functionality for reporting breaking news, finding out what's going on near you, or just adding context to tweets from friends. Because it's an API, the functionality is only limited to developers' imaginations, so it'll be exciting to see what they come up with!

One final note (since I'm generally wary of programs that disclose my location), you have to turn on geotagging functionality when using any of these programs, so there's no chance of accidentally disclosing information you don't want anyone to see.

Google has just announced the latest version of Picasa, its free photo-editing software for Macs and PCs. What's great about this new version is that it can scan your photo collections and create groups of similar faces (similar to Picasa Web Albums and iPhoto). All you have to do is add a name tag to a set of faces (if you're signed into Gmail, it will auto-complete names as you start typing), and then Picasa will suggest pictures that it thinks match faces in your albums and put those into the appropriate "people" groups.

To learn more about Picasa 3.5, and to see a demo video of it in action, just read more