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Airlines Using Social Media To Relay Location In The Sky

Frank Reed — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 19:55:00 +0000

No, this is not about God using Twitter so if you have any issues around that please put them aside now. This is actually about a service that some airlines are putting in place that utilizes Twitter and Facebook to update those who care where you actually are while flying from point A to point B. Just another update on every minute of everyone’s life brought to you by social media.

Mashable reports:

We’ve seen Tweets posted by plants, a space shuttle and even a house, so we shouldn’t be particularly surprised to hear that commercial jets are now Tweeting and posting Facebook messages (sorta). In fact, we think the idea is ingenious.

Admittedly, it’s not the plane itself doing the Tweeting: it’s the airline. Lufthansa has set up a new service named MySkyStatus that automatically posts the current position of your flight to Twitter or Facebook so your friends can follow your travels (and your friends living in those cities can look up!).

Here’s a look at the information that ‘you’ are giving your friends etc.

As a father I think this is pretty cool because the kids can play along while Dad travels. Heck, they might even learn something about geography (Twitter as geography teacher, will that be a source of revenue for Biz and boys?). As it relates to loved ones this is pretty neat because it is another touch point in a personal relationship. So for just telling the world where you are, it seems to me to be more unnecessary noise in an already noisy world. There’s self promotion and then there is self indulgence. I honestly only care that you landed safely not that you are still hanging in the air at 30,000 plus feet above the Azores with nothing keeping you safe but mysterious forces that don’t tweet. Of course, this is simply my opinion and if you think differently then that’s cool too.

Now, to the point of this being a marketing tool, this quote from Pete Cashmore makes sense and I certainly can see this value from a marketing standpoint.

I stumbled on the service because one of my Facebook friends was on a United Airlines flight today. Clicking the link in the update, of course, directs you to the Lufthansa MySkyStatus page with a Google Map of the flight’s position, meaning that Lufthansa is getting free social media promotion from people traveling on all airlines. Pretty smart.

So as with all things there are pluses and minuses. I suspect that the minuses for this one don’t come close to outweighing the plus side for airlines so expect more tweets from the sky soon.

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Southwest To Try Out In Flight Internet

Janet Meiners — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 21:12:26 +0000

It’s been a year since Southwest Airlines announced they were going to test in air Internet service. Now it’s really happening. The satellite broadband will be tested on one plane first. Then they plan to expand to at least three more planes by March.

The test will run for 60 days. They will gauge demand and see how the service works before determining if and how much they’ll charge.

Southwest has already contracted with Yahoo as a partner. Yahoo will provide a home page for the airline that will include information about the flight and destination.

For long flights this will practically guarantee that I fly Southwest. My only question is, what about plugs or battery supply? As far as I know there’s no place to recharge.

Southwest has been getting a lot of milage out of the announcement on Twitter.

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Web-Based Version Of Google Sky Launches

Doug Caverly — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 20:28:42 +0000

If, for whatever reason, you haven’t downloaded Google Earth, you’ve been missing out on the ultra-nifty Sky application. Until now, anyway; Google has released a web-based version.

Google Sky At Work

All would-be users need to do is visit sky.google.com and start clicking around. A full 26 localized language editions are standing by, and different operating systems and browsers should all be treated equally.

Granted, the web-based Google Sky isn’t perfect; its presence on a computer screen hasn’t, for example, caused any grown men to cry (as far as we know). Also, a little patience may be necessary – we noticed that panning actions aren’t too smooth, and it’s easy to cause "no imagery available" notices to come up.

Still, the thing’s getting good reviews. Stefan Geens writes, "[Its] most convincing feature is its universal accessibility, the permalinkability of specific views and the ease with which you can browse to objects using the gallery strip at the bottom of the screen . . ."

Since it now only takes a two-second copy-paste, instead of a however-long download, to check Google Sky out, we’d suggest you do so.

Sky Is The Limit For Suit Against Google

WebProNews Staff — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 11:37:03 +0000

A Google contractor thinks the search ad company stole his idea for Google Sky, a popular addition to the Google Earth product.

Jonathan Cobb believes Google took his idea. He would like to take $25 million as compensation for giving Google the idea for Google Sky.

“Whether you

Google Earth Looks At New Sky

WebProNews Staff — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 23:12:34 +0000

Updated features for Sky in Google Earth arrived for the popular application, with more content added to the platform.

The dream of exploring space fades for kids once they find out that knowing all the constellations and major stars in the sky is just the start. Instead of phasers and starships and boldly going where no one has gone before, there’s a lot of advanced mathematics to learn.

Finding joy in the starts needn’t be a distant dream with Google Earth. Sky in the app displays a lot more to see, the Google LatLong blog said today.

Views of space range from the most current, using NASA space telescopes to “see” the universe at different spectrums of energy, to a glimpse from the past:

…the new version of Sky also brings you glimpses of the sky as seen by astronomers in the 17th century. Constellation maps from the David Rumsey collection and the U.S. Naval Library show the astronomical state of the art, three centuries ago (there be dragons).

If the visuals are not enough, the LatLong blog also noted the presence of podcasts about upcoming sky events in the Earth & Sky layer. These podcasts discuss visual treats like meteor showers as well as astronomical news.

The LatLong blog also announced the availability of Sky, Moon and Mars imagery in the Google Maps API. “This allows any developer to build interesting applications and websites using Sky imagery, and extend the Sky experience to any place on the web,” they said.

Google Sky Mashup Takes Off

Doug Caverly — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 15:43:36 +0000

Google offers a lot of products and services, and out of all of them, I might have judged Sky to be least in need of an update. After all, the program’s practically brand new, and furthermore, the night sky seems like a pretty stable thing to a casual observer like me. A fresh mashup will update Sky every 15 minutes, however, and it’s starting to sound like a great idea.

Google Sky Mashup Takes Off

“As of this week, Bloom and his team began feeding Google a mash-up of gamma-ray bursts discovered by NASA’s Swift orbiting observatory and the Milagro ground-based observatory; microlensing phenomena detected by the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE), which searches for dark matter within the Magellanic Clouds and the Milky Way’s galactic bulge; asteroids and optical transients from the Palomar-Quest survey; and newly exploded supernovas from surveys by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Supernova Search and ESSENCE,” according to a UC Berkeley press release.

UC Berkeley, by the way, is the university at which “Bloom and his team” – Joshua Bloom being an assistant professor of astronomy – are based. The VOEventNet mashup also has strong ties to Caltech. And as you might have gathered from the previous paragraph, these people, the sky, and Google Sky are all quite busy.

“Right out of the gate, Google Sky has become a powerful tool for the public and in the classroom,” stated Bloom. “And if it works well and gets more and more of these transient events into the system, we as researchers will be using it.”

The mashup is available through the official VOEventNet site and through the Google Sky site, as well. Hat tip to O’Reilly Radar’s Peter Brantley.

Eye Google Earth Through “Gigapxl Photos”

Doug Caverly — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 21:27:49 +0000

The big Google news today related not so much to the “Earth” part of “Google Earth” but to the new arm of it known as “Sky.” Sky’s very nifty, to be sure, and deserves all the attention. Yet there’s also a new “Gigapxl Photos” layer that shouldn’t go unnoticed.

No, I didn’t leave out the vowels – as Frank Taylor of the Google Earth Blog explains, the layer is part of the Gigapxl Project. And as the Project’s homepage notes, “It would take a video wall of 10,000 television screens or 600 prints from a professional digital SLR camera to capture as much information as that contained in a single Gigapxl exposure.”

To be less precise, we’re talking about really, really detailed photographs, and pictures of this quality are now scattered throughout Google Earth.

Just fly around the program until you come across a floating image; it’ll align perfectly with the virtual view, but offer much greater detail. And if that sounds a little strange, Taylor has made a video of the layer in action (he zooms within about four feet of San Francisco’s Palace of Fine Arts).

Again, Gigapxl Photos may not measure up to Sky. But it’s nonetheless an incredible feature that shouldn’t get overshadowed.

Google Earth Reaches For The Sky

Mike Sachoff — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 15:46:37 +0000

Google has launched a new feature for users of Google Earth called Sky, which allows people to view the sky as seen from Earth.

With Sky, users can move through the skies through Google Earth. The tool allows all Earth users to view and navigate through 100 million stars and 200 million galaxies.

To access Sky, users can click "Switch to Sky" from the drop-down menu in Google Earth, or click the Sky button on the Google Earth toolbar. The interface and navigation are like that of regular Google Earth steering, including dragging, zooming, search, "My Places," and layer section.

Sky was created by Google’s Pittsburgh engineering team by piecing together images from a number of scientific third parties including the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), the Digital Sky Survey Consortium (DSSC), CalTech’s Palomar Observatory, the United Kingdom Astronomy Technology Centre (UK ATC), and the Anglo-Australian Observatory (AAO).

"Never before has a roadmap of the entire sky been made so readily available. Anyone interested in exploring the wonders of our universe can quickly see where the stunning objects photographed by Hubble actually dwell in the heavens."

"Sky in Google Earth will foster and initiate new understanding of the universe by bringing it to everyone’s home computer," said Dr. Carol Christian of STScI, who co-led the organization’s Sky team with Dr. Alberto Conti

Business.com Sells For $350 Million

WebProNews Staff — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 11:01:38 +0000

The $7.5 million price tag for Business.com paid by two businessmen in 1999 looks like a fantastic bargain now that R.H. Donnelley has purchased it for roughly $350 million.

Business.com Sells For $350 Million

That $100 million for Dictionary.com may have been a bargain for Answers.com. If they had wanted Business.com, they would have paid three and a half times the price.

PaidContent said yellow page and local search firm R.H. Donnelley elbowed aside several competitors at auction for the domain and its connected search and directory services:

The auction was heated, and initially included IAC, New York Times, DJ and News Corp. IAC didn

7 Reasons Google’s Paid Link Snitch Plan Sucks

Rich Ord — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 05:22:48 +0000

Matt Cutts blogged that Google would like you, the average search engine user, to report on sites you feel are displaying links for cash. This created a firestorm of negative responses from the SEO, webmaster, and free speech crowd. Below, I put together what I feel are the top 7 reasons Google’s paid link snitch plan sucks. I linked to my inspirations (No payment requested!).

Worried About Google’s Link Snitch Program?

1. Links are valuable because of the Page Rank display in the Google Toolbar. Matt, if Google doesn’t like the way paid links influence search results, then eliminate the scoreboard. It’s hard to take your call-to-action seriously when you have the power to grind serious link buying to a halt all by yourself.

If people had to guess a page rank, most of their motivation for buying links would go away. Of course, Google won’t eliminate the green bar because that is the number one reason the Google search engine is at the top of most web browsers.

2. Most people that post on Digg, or add articles to Wikipedia, or work as editors at DMOZ also send paid link reports to Google to benefit themselves in some way. My point: Anyone taking the time to send complaints to Google about a paid link that hurts no one and may even be relevant, probably has unseen motivations.

One of the problems is that there is no other motivation I can see to report a paid link than to help Google out. It’s not like paid links irritate the end user like poor search results do. Therefore, the detection these reports offer will be of no value to Google.

3. It’s impossible to define a paid link exactly. Paying cash is obviously what you meant, but is that any different than a link to a client or to a buddy who helped you submit your site to 1,000 free web directories?

If I’m right with that assumption, then it’s really about determining motivation. Humans cannot determine motivations any better than the Google algorithm. It’s a virtual coin toss!

4. Payment can be proven only by following the money trail. Otherwise, it is simply a case of ‘he said, she said.’ This creates a heavy burden on Google to be correct in their assumptions.

5. Marketing Pilgrim’s Andy Beal asks: "What business does Google have in dictating the disclosure of any business relationships on others?"

Google, you are just a search engine. You should be reacting to the internet world, not trying to recreate it in your own image. Links are not evil and payment for links is not evil. The Web is based on links, link-trading and advertising, which of course is payment for links.

6. The hypocrisy of being in the business of selling links and then asking others not to sell them is a bit much for many webmasters.

7. Is this just a way to create more spending for Google AdWords? Stopping the selling of links will make AdWords one of the last ways to generate traffic from Google. If the link police can slow this to a crawl, then what will businesses do?

They’ll buy AdWords!