MapQuest Blog

One of our favorite events of the year is the SXSW Interactive festival. Austin, Texas is a great town to assemble thousands of creative and technical people from all over the world. The conference isn't until March of next year, but already planning has begun. This brings us to the subject of today's post.

Unlike most shows, the public vote weighs heavily on what speaking panels get selected. MapQuest is jazzed to be involved in two of the panels up for voting in the Panel Picker.

Here's the panels we're involved with:

Time + Social + Location. What's Next In Mobile Experiences?

As more devices become location aware, social uses will continue to evolve beyond just who and what, to WHEN. Adding the temporal dimension creates new opportunities for social interaction. Learn about ways to leverage and use technology to add features at the intersection of temporal, social, and location.

We're happy to be collaborating on this panel with some talented experts from innovative companies in the areas of social, temporal, and location. In addition to myself, the panelists for this session will be:

Brady Becker

Founder and EVP of Creative for Brightkite

Tyler Bell

Head of Product for Yahoo! Geo, Geo Technologies

Gregory Cypes

Business Development and Principal Software Engineer for AIM

Ryan Sarver

Product Manager of Platform for Twitter

Andrew Turner

CTO of FortiusOne / GeoCommons

Social Breadcrumbing - Tying Networks Together by Phone

The integration of location-based services, phones and social networks is increasingly common. But how does this enhance the lives of users and improve their actual experiences on sites? Learn about the unique ways that sites are utilizing these services to upgrade their data and promote greater sharing among users.

Organized by our Mobile Technical Manager: Chip Millson, this panel will go deep into the impact and opportunities of data sharing and location-based services.

Vote

We're excited about these discussions almost as much as we're excited to get some Texas BBQ. Please visit the 2010 SXSW PanelPicker and give us a "Thumbs Up" if you're interested in checking out these talks. There are also over 2000 other panels to vote on. Take some time to vote on some other great panel ideas as well.

Thanks and see you in Austin!

Twitter

When our team set out to build MapQuest Local, we wanted it to be very different than the "local experience" found historically online. One of our early objectives was to make MapQuest Local more social - connect people and ideas in a local area together.

Today we've released a new social widget on MapQuest Local: Twitter. To the techie demographic of MapQuest users, this service needs no introduction, however since we have 46 million unique users a month (including my mom), here's a quick overview for the unfamiliar:

Twitter is a popular short-messaging service for people to announce what they are doing in 140 characters or less. The Twitter widget on MapQuest Local lets you see what people are talking about in their city or town. For any city you visit on our Local site, you'll see the most recent things that people in that area have posted or "tweeted." If you see someone interesting, you can then click their Twitter username to see additional "tweets" they've made or click the "See More..." link at the bottom of the widget for additional local posts.

Nobody knows Local better than locals; Twitter helps you find them and lets you know what they're talking about.

You can also keep up with articles, news and other MapQuest information by following MapQuest on Twitter.

AOL Careers

Another piece of content we're excited to announce is the addition of a widget by AOL Careers through their partnership with CareerBuilder.com. The Careers widget will store up to five different sets of search keywords for job searches. When you change your location, it'll go out and pull in job matches in that area. It's useful content whether you're actively searching for a new gig or just curious what's going on in the local job market.

The First Four Months of MapQuest Local

The feedback has been overwhelming positive and looking at the numbers, it looks like you've been finding MapQuest Local very useful. Don't forget to tell us what you think and what content you want to see added next. We enjoy working on Local, we're very excited about what we'll be adding in 2009.

Have a happy and safe holiday season!