Google Street View has made a few headlines at RWW lately – once for getting itself into hot water in Europe and once, notably, for bringing Street View’s photo-tour features into retail outlets . Now, we’ve learned that Street View will also begin to feature user-submitted photographs. According to a recent Google Lat Long blog post , “We began integrating user photos into Street View last year. User photos allow you to view locations from entirely new perspectives, whether through the eyes of a talented photographer with a knack for capturing architectural detail, or simply taken from locations we couldn’t get to… We’re making it easier to navigate through these images in a way that should feel similar to how you’re used to exploring within Street View.” Users can submit pictures from Picasa, Panoramio and Flickr that show different views, times of day or pedestrian-only areas. Sponsor Users can submit pictures from Picasa, Panoramio and Flickr that show different views, times of day or pedestrian-only areas. Here’s an example of what the interface looks like; the square in the top right corner indicates there are user-submitted images for that area. And here is the photo navigation interface. Users can also navigate through photos using new click-and-drag controls to see images from nearby areas, or different angles or crops of the same area. Some have speculated that Google has chosen to highlight and integrate this feature because of competition with Bing. The Next Web recently called Microsoft’s Photosynth, a similar product launched in 2008 and integrated into Bing Maps, “the killer app of the Bing suite” that differentiates Bing from Google in a positive way. “The feature,” wrote Jacob Friedman , “displays collections of photos stitched together into a panorama The results, to put it bluntly, can be spectacular.” While Google’s offering may not have the 3D-esque quality of Photosynth, allowing for more creative images and photos from a larger geographical area to be shared in Street View is a smart move for the company. Let us know what you think in the comments. Discuss

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We’ve recently come across an app that literally brings its users “talking pictures.” Essentially, Fotobabble attaches an audio caption to any image you can upload. It’s a cute, fun way to share and narrate photos with friends, and could even be useful for certain kinds of online businesses – for example, photographers who wanted to explain more information about a particular shot or online retailers who wanted to give potential customers details about a product. Can Fotobabble accomplish these tasks better with audio than conventional text-based captions do now? Read on and tell us what you think. Sponsor Here’s our example. It took just a few seconds to create. Currently, users can choose to share their creations across a wide variety of social networks or email; however, autosharing is not built in. The app is available as a web app for PC/Mac/etc. and as an iPhone app . We do wish that Fotobabble would let users audio-caption pics from Facebook, Flickr photo streams or elsewhere on the Web. Ensuring ownership would be easy enough, as well, through Flickr’s API or Facebook Connect.While we’re on that subject, account creation should be possible through Facebook Connect or Twitter OAuth. Ideally, we’d also want to be able to create slide shows and sets or groups of pics. What do you think: Can you see yourself using Fotobabble? If so, how would you use it? Let us know what you think in the comments. Discuss

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Last year, Foursquare was called the break-out mobile app of the conference by more than one tech journalist. This year, a new contender has appeared – Austin’s native Gowalla . And Brightkite is still hanging on to the LBS community, if only by a thread of loyal users – but they still offer more features than some of their better-known competitors. Which do you use now? And when your attention is at a premium during one of the year’s most popular geek conferences, which app or apps will you use to collect badges, connect with friends, and find out where the party really is? Sponsor Gowalla’s main weakness might be that they haven’t yet developed an Android or Blackberry application. WordPress Bible author Aaron Brazell noted that while many see the iPhone as the “Jesus phone,” that doesn’t change the fact that “any company who has a business model built around… iPhone is nucking futs.” While many of us use the mobile version of the site and patiently wait for a native app for non-iPhone devices, Foursquare’s been our go-to check-in service for quite some time. And their response to us on Twitter suggests they may see themselves as a comfortable incumbent at this point. Both of the services we’ve mentioned also have special, built-in incentives for users at SXSW. Gowalla in particular has announced an interesting promotion. For their flagship “Tiki Room” event, the app will “be scattering hundreds of Tiki Room Digital VIP Passes around downtown Austin. The only way to get yours is to check in with Gowalla at other Austin venues and SXSW events.” Last year, Foursquare also had special badges for SXSW , such as “Panel Nerd”, “Karaoke RV” and “Porky” (for BBQ lovers, in particular). They even made a custom badge for attendees of Digg’s party and Diggnation live show. And while Brightkite may not have the game mechanics and rewards of other apps, it does give us the ability to upload photos in addition to text when checking into various locations – a tool we’ve found very handy when screening new venues for ambience. So, which app or apps will you be using during SXSW? Vote in the poll, and let us know the “why” of your choice in the comments. What Mobile Apps Will You Use for SXSW? poll Discuss

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You know those time-lapse videos that compress days, weeks or years into minutes? The ones with flowers budding, blooming and then withering in seconds? Or late-1990s Silicon Valley startups getting venture capital, blowing it on espresso bathtubs and Dr. Pepper fountains, and vanishing into receivership? I think Twitter may be the same thing, except for language. In spoken English, it can take decades – even centuries – for new words to emerge, become part of common parlance, and then fade into disuse. Sponsor But on Twitter, hashtags can live that entire lifecycle in the course of a day or two. A news story breaks, and competing hashtags vie for dominance. Then a few influential folks adopt the same one. Suddenly the conversation coalesces around it, the term trends, the spammers start using it, and then the conversation peters out as we move on to the next topic. Is that the pattern? And how closely does it map onto the ways that words and phrases earworm their way into spoken language? Maybe some up-and-coming linguistics student is already mapping the ways hashtags rise and decay, and getting ready to publish a dissertation… in 140-character increments. Meanwhile, people, seriously – “snowicane”? More Noise to Signal. Discuss

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Cloud computing means many things, but almost all definitions include some key value propositions: scalable on-demand resources, a metered pay-per-use model, access over the Internet, and infrastructure management and optimization that is better than most data centers. At a more conceptual level, cloud computing abstracts away all the undifferentiated IT tasks. Most businesses don’t add any value to their customers or create any competitive advantage for themselves when they buy, build, configure, and manage servers and storage. This is doubly true for disaster recovery equipment and data centers. Sponsor Conversely, poor performance in these tasks can cost value and competitive advantage. There is no benefit in doing these tasks well, but there is cost to doing them badly. This is like the opposite of a financial call option – lots of downside risk, but no upside. For companies planning their first disaster recovery data center, with the associated selection, build, and maintenance tasks for servers, storage, and networking, cloud computing seems like an obvious fit. They can trade the capital expense that buys them no new value, for a no-commitment operating expense that probably buys better operating practices than they could achieve themselves. Solutions are beginning to grow up around this idea of cloud recovery. The name is a little optimistic because most offerings today are traditional backup solutions, with little or no ability to actually recover in the cloud. Although a lot of vendors in the backup industry are making cloud announcements, they are mostly just letting users store backups in the cloud. In order to really deserve the cloud recovery title a solution should have the following features. The ability to recover workloads in the cloud : The cloud can offer more than just a place to dump your backup files. It can provide the computing systems to run your recovered systems, and after a production system fails, the ability to quickly restart a complete replacement with data, applications, and complete configuration in the cloud. Effectively unlimited scalability with little or no up-front provisioning : A few vendors can offer rapid, off-site recovery, but they don’t really qualify for the cloud title unless they provide lots of stand-by capacity with no up-front reservations or configuration. While this seems like a lot to ask, this is the promise of cloud computing. Pay-per-use billing model : A defining characteristic of cloud computing is that we only pay for the things we use. Use a little this week and pay a little; if we use a lot next week then we pay more, but only for that specific week. Infrastructure that is more secure and more reliable than the one you would build yourself : When we decide to outsource any part of our operation, we worry about the security and reliability of our vendor. The best cloud providers have not only large scale equipment, but also large scale expertise. This means that they can be much better at security and reliability than any of their customers, and their data center is better than one we might build for ourselves. Complete protection and automated recovery : Non-expert users should be able to recover everything they need by default – the current crop of solutions is shockingly bad at this. This is the cherry on top because it makes everything so easy. No one wants to go through a “run book” full of recovery procedures and bring in experts for each system to assist with getting recovered systems back online. Depending on the type of disaster, experts may be scarce, and the run book is probably out of date. Why not make the run book part of the automated system? Instead, simply push a button that says “recover now”, wait for the files to copy, and then log in to the perfectly configured system, running right in the cloud. In summary, the trouble with traditional backup solutions is that they are really focused on dumping the data onto tape or disk (and now onto cloud storage), and maybe restoring it back onto the original hardware. If you must recover to different hardware or a different virtualization platform, they don’t generally do much to help with the inevitable incompatibilities. And for equipment failures, you really have to have some hardware standing by. So while cloud computing means many things, it is fair to say that any cloud recovery customer who doesn’t get all five of these features will be disappointed. Photo credit: Suresh Discuss

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