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For something a little more rude, try Justin Halpern’s hilarious feed. Now a book and soon to be sitcom!

So, let’s take a look at how some big brands are using Foursquare…

Zagat

Zagat is the go-to guide for restaurant and hotel reviews, and their embrace of numerous social media channels is noteworthy. The type of service Zagat offers is particularly suited to Foursquare, and they use the network like an individual user would – by leaving food-related tips about locations.

Zagat leaves tips and recommendations in the Foursquare system and Foursquare users can submit their own suggestions for activities and dishes to order at a particular restaurant, which will pop up when their friends “check in” on Foursquare from that venue.

But the Zagat partnership adds a slightly different layer to the content by incorporating recommendations culled from the company’s repository of reader reviews. For example, users who check into a Zagat-ranked restaurant will receive suggestions about great dishes or the best dessert on the menu.

Zagat’s Foursquare account is an obvious way to reinforce everything the brand is known for, and perhaps tap into a new demographic of diners who may be reluctant to carry around a paperback guide in addition to their smartphones.

MTV

Fans can keep tabs on the favorite haunts of stars from Jersey Shore and The Hills, driving the social connection to these personalities beyond the TV and into our everyday lives.

Not only can users see where the stars have been, but also what they did, enjoyed, and recommend.

The History Channel

When users check in around various U.S. cities, they can find historical tidbits about their location and unlock the limited edition History Channel badge (below).

The account leaves tips at various sites, including interesting historical background on the locations. It’s trivia, but with a real-world and educational context.

This is a clever use of indirect marketing. The History Channel doesn’t have to promote its shows or link back to content to remind fans why they enjoy the programming. More than 47,000 followers are already enjoying the historical tips left by the account, since its launch in April.

Conde Nast’s Lucky Magazine

Launched in time for New York Fashion week, the collaboration offers Foursquare users tips for the best places for a cocktail, WiFi, coffee, etc, near all show locations. So if you check into a show location on Foursquare, Lucky will give people tips on where to go near these big venues in-between shows. Each location will be hand-picked and recommended by Lucky editors.

But, just like the other recent Foursquare partnerships, there’s a long-term angle too. This takes the form of a Lucky Shopping Directory which is a list of about 700 stores maintained inside Foursquare. If you pop into one of these locations, and check in on Foursquare, you’ll get tips and incentives like discounts or deals plus the usual Foursquare badges.

New Yorker Magazine

New York Magazine uses Foursquare to drive home its coverage of city-specific culture and targets the social New Yorker with tips on retail stores, bars, and public spaces.

The tips offer details on pricing and goings-on, and provide links back to the New Yorker website for deeper coverage. In this regard, New York Magazines’ approach to Foursquare is akin to the Twitter strategy of many publishers, with the added value of location.

The best method of illustrating how it works is through using this video, presented by Matt Cutts of Google. As well as understanding how search engines work, you’ll also learn a bit about PageRank, indexing and paid for adverts. Enjoy!

The example will come first, followed by the explanation…

*red hat with green stripes* = the exact phrase

bar covent garden -leicester square = bars in covent garden not leicester square

+sock =  only the words sock, not the plural or any tenses or synonyms

define:seo = definitions of the word ’seo’ from around the Web

red * blue = the words ‘red’ and ‘blue’ separated by one or more words

(p.s. the ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ button takes you directly to first web page returned for your query)

Happy searching!

Google has announced that, from September 14th, it will allow resellers, sellers of component, replacement or compatible parts, and informational sites (such as review sites) to use third-party trademarks in their ad copy, regardless of whether they own them or have approval from the trademark owner.

Any advertisers that do not fall into these categories will not be included in the changes.

In line with the US, Google has opened up the market to hundreds of thousands of third-party sites that have previously been restricted in what they can say within their copy.

Some, through being affiliates, may already have agreements in place with brands to use their trademarks within paid search campaigns, but the policy change negates any necessity for others to make such agreements – if they have relevance to the keywords they’re bidding on, of course.

Likewise, department stores and review sites will have more options open to them.

Google, which first rolled out the changes to ad texts in the US last year, expects the policy change to make ads more specific and relevant for users.

Peter Fitzgerald, Google UK’s industry director, said the change in the US has helped its users and advertisers by reducing the number of “overly generic” ads.

“We believe the user experience is improved if, for example, they conduct a search for a particular brand of TV and see ads which give them more detail about where they can buy that brand, where they might be able to fix it, buy component parts or read reviews.”

Finally, after months of office whispers, rumors and speculation, the world’s largest apple store opened last Saturday – practically opposite GA HQ.

Legions of apple fans queued overnight to be the first to enter and experience the Covent Garden homage to all things ‘Apple’, housed in a fabulously refurbished Grade II listed building.

The retail space is spread over three floors, with larger devices and accessories displayed on wall-mounted displays and smaller gadgets on wooden tables. It also features a set-up room where customers can ask for help to get started with their new devices.

The new store is Apple’s 28th in the UK and will employ 300 staff. As well as housing just about every Apple product under the sun the store will also host regular events, workshops and presentations.

Click here for more information and a schedule of workshops and events.

Anyway, back to the matter at hand and I decided that while I might be a little bit geeky, that doesn’t mean I understand all tekkie jargon. So, I thought that once in a while, I would take some tekkie speak and translate it into plain English for those of you who like to read about geeky things but might not necessarily be a geek!

Today, I want to talk about HTML5. It’s being talked about a lot at the moment and if you read the post ‘Web design and the iPad’ you would have come across it.

To give you a bit of background, HTML ( which stands for HyperText Markup Language and is the predominant and universal markup language for web pages) was developed by the W3C  (the World Wide Web Consortium) until 2004, when members of the HTML working group became unhappy with the direction the W3C was going with HTML. They felt that the W3C was not paying enough attention to the real-world development needs of the language and focusing too much on XML and XHTML. So they formed a new group called Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG) devoted to evolving the Web. They started by working on a new specification of HTML – HTML 5.

HTML5  incorporates features like video playback and drag-and-drop that have been previously dependent on third-party browser plug-ins such as Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, and Google Gears. This is important because, as you may have heard, Apple is no longer compatible with Flash, choosing instead to adopt HTML5, CSS and Javascript.

Here is a brilliant explanation in the form of an infographic…

Apple is currently soaring on the sales success of the iPad, and the consumer technology giant has smashed Wall Street expectations after profits surged on strong demand for new products – including the iPad.

The company, which sold almost as many of its new iPad tablets as Mac computers, said revenues jumped 61 per cent to $15.7 billion (£10.3bn) in its second quarter. Profits rose 78 per cent to $3.25bn. So far, it has sold about 3.3 million iPads during its first three months on the market.

While it remains to be seen if the iPad’s initial success can be maintained, it is possible that this nifty device has the potential to be a game changer in computing, and the way in which we browse and design for the web.

The launch of the iPad can be seen as a significant step towards the advancement of consumer computing, locking away the complexities of a powerful operating system beneath a streamlined, polished user interface. Although the iPad is a fully portable device, it’s totally different from a laptop, and boasts a large touch screen and 10 hour battery life. This makes it the ultimate tool for enjoying the web. So, with the iPad being different from everything that has come before, how should you approach designing for it?

Should conventional design for desktops apply? Or should designers draw on insight provided by mobile projects? We predict that from the launch of the iPad will emerge a new design hybrid, one which combines aspects of desktop and mobile design.

However, whether the iPad is able to change the world or not, is not the issue of this article. The fact of the matter is that the iPad is here and that, with 3.3 million of them already sold, we must design for the web whilst keeping it in mind. So, what do we need to consider?

Bright screen

The iPad is so bright that long term use can fatigue users. Therefore designers should consider colour contrast. Perhaps use light greys instead of white and dark greys instead of full on black. The backlit iPad screen is not ideal for long term textual consumption, so do your users a favour and mix up photos and video to make for a less strenuous experience.

Pixel density

The device’s pixel density, combined with screen dimensions that lie somewhere between a desktop and mobile phone, mean that neither downscaling desktop sites nor upscaling mobile sites is ideal.

Links and Hover Effects

Most important is the fact that the iPad is a large touch screen device. This is a fundamental long term difference and a move from mouse to finger. Just think, there are a number of complexities in rendering an interface that defines hover and mouse in/mouse out features on a device that has no pointing mechanism!

As the primary method of user interaction with the iPad are the fingers, all those hover effects that were favourable for pointer-based devices will be a hurdle in user experience on the iPad. As, when using a finger and touching the screen, you loose the hover state.

Also the links can no longer be concealed in a text and left for the user to dexterously click upon. Therefore you might want to resize the links so that the user experience does not suffer. Also consider the concept of mousing (and Fitts’ Law). Will users be as accurate with their finger as a mouse cursor?

The Fold

The iPad changes the nature of the fold. The ability to change orientation makes the fold exist twice – and in two different places. Hopefully, this will stop people worrying about whether users will scroll because, if there ever was a device that makes people want to scroll, the iPad is it.

Device orientation and fluid width design

As some iPad apps lack consistency between modes (sometimes only some features are available in landscape mode) it would not be advisable to have different designs for different orientations. Two designs may also confuse users when they switch modes. It’s also worth thinking about how a user might hold the device and the fingers they may use to navigate a site.

As the iPad has no right way of viewing websites, you can view pages either in landscape or in the portrait mode. But for the designer that means two completely different layouts for which to design. It is for this specific reason that the iPad highlights the need for smart fluid width design. Using a smart combination of CSS and Javascript the User Experience can be made to improve drastically.

HTML5

Every new Apple mobile device and every new Mac (along with the latest version of Apple’s Safari web browser) supports web standards including HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript. The iPads strong support for web standards may also benefit designers in another way, especially with the release of the OS4. Apple’s iAd platform is based around HTML5, which offers opportunities to anyone well versed in the technology. Revealed by Jobs last April, iAd aims to provide media rich in-app mobile advertising that (according to Apple) will provide the emotion of TV with the interactivity of the web. With Google openly adopting HTML5 for Youtube, it is only a beginning of the things to come with HTML5.

Additional benefits

Although unconventional in interface terms, the iPad is a good citizen when it comes to webs standards. Safari for iPad is one of the most advanced, standard compliant browsers around. Also, WebKit (an open source web browser engine and also the name of the Mac OS X system framework version of the engine that’s used by Safari) is the only browser engine. WebKit is appealing to designers because they know exactly what they are designing for and don’t have to worry about how a design may appear on a range of different browsers. This allows for more focus when creating an iPad specific site.

Two sides of the argument

Designers are not united regarding optimisation for the iPad. Some say that there is no need unless iPad users are your core audience. However, if you can make something look good on the iPad, it is likely that it will look good on a desktop too.

Others say that designing specifically for the iPad will mean that users are not left in the lap of the Gods. Removing the need to zoom to read text, or ensuring that text links are large enough to be easily ‘clicked’ by a finger will remove a barrier between the users and your content. You don’t want uses to have to constantly adjust viewing behaviour because your content does not arrive formatted for easy consumption.

Nevertheless, it would be bad practice to develop a website specifically for the iPad platform – just as we no longer create sites specifically for the Mac or PC. Think of the iPad as another step in the evolution of the way in which we design for the web. As with every new device that comes out, we must take into account the subtle differences and play to its strengths and weaknesses.

Chequers – 47 Bedford Street
A sandwich mecca. Buy a huge sandwich of the day and get a cup of soup for free. Watch out for the lunchtime queue that often stretches all the way down the road!

The Master’s Diner – 32 Henrietta Street
Sometimes, only a good old fashioned fry-up will hit the spot. This great little greasy spoon also makes a mean sandwich.

Food For Thought – 31 Neal Street
Something for the vegetarians. Food for Thought makes delicious veggie food – but be prepared to wait. Sharing tables is the norm and the service can be slow, but the flavoursome food is worth it, so try a take-away instead.

Wong Kei – 41-43 Wardour Street
Great food in generous portions. However, this little Chinese gem is famed for it’s rude staff and brash service! Take it all with a pinch of salt and you’ll eat a good, hearty meal.

The Mediterranean Salad Bar – Earlham Street Market
For £4 the friendly staff working behind the Mediterranean Salad bar will give you a big box stuffed full of delicious goodies – from salad to olives, sun dried tomatoes and hummus. You’ll also get a massive hunk of bread to go with it.

Rock & Sole Plaice – 47 Endell Sreet
Voted one of the best fish and chip shops in London, this establishment is always packed full of tourists, luvvies, suits and trendies – but no one cares when they’ve got chunky chips and crisply battered fish in front of them! Outdoor tables come into their own on a balmy summer’s evening.

Itsu – 41-44 Great Queen Street
Yes, it’s a chain, but they do do the best sushi, soups and salads. There’s also indoor and outdoor seating.

For sit down eating try Sophie’s Steakhouse and Joe Allen.

If you’ve been keeping on top of all things digital, you may have come across something called Foursquare.

Well, if you’re wondering what Foursquare is, what it does and how to use it, then look no further, because our handy GA guide is here to explain (in plain and simple English!).

A bit of history

Foursquare is a location based social networking game co-founded by Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai. It was launched in 2009 at the South by Southwest Interactive festival in Austin, Texas.

Prior to the launch, both founders were heavily involved in geolocation based games and apps. In fact, Crowley even sold a Foursquare predecessor called ‘Dodgeball’ to Google for an undisclosed sum in 2006. Dodgeball sent text messages to friends when you checked into specific places and was described as “a networking service that helps co-ordinate location based social interactions between mobile users”. However, in 2007, Crowley quit Google and met Naveen shortly after.

What does it do?

Foursquare allows you to share your location with friends. So, when you walk into a bar, cafe, restaurant or shop, you “check-in” (Foursquare’s term) on your mobile device, and your friends will see where you are on a Foursquare map. It’s also a game too as you earn points and “badges” for checking-in frequently, or at a certain time. If you raise enough points you become “mayor” of a certain area.

How many people use it?

Foursquare has surpassed 500,000 registered users, and had its biggest day ever on March 11th, with more than 275,000 “check-ins.”

What do users get out of Foursquare?

Users can connect with friends, earn badges, and various perks from the places where they check in. Foursquare also gives you access to your check-in history, which gives you a snapshot of where you go, who you meet there, and what you’re spending money on.

How does it relate to other businesses?

Foursquare is being taken very seriously by big name brands. Starbucks is the latest and most prominent company to sign a deal with Foursquare — you can earn a “Barista badge” by checking in five times at the coffee retailer.  Starbucks is testing Foursquare as part of its customer-loyalty program, and other companies are also using it to reward frequent visitors. Foursquare is rolling out a free analytics program that will give participating businesses detailed information on who is checking-in to their locations, and give them the ability to communicate with the visitors.

Foursquare says it now has 1.4 million venues logged in its system, with 1, 200 businesses offering special deals to people who check-in via Foursquare.

Is anyone else doing something similar?

Yes. Geo-location based games are massive right now. Gowalla is foursquare biggest competitor and Yelp, Twitter and Facebook are also vying for a piece of the “checking in” market.