Google Maps NYC now shows transit system

Quick posts but thought it was rather interesting.

Google maps have just added comprehensive transit info for the entire New York metro region, encompassing subway, commuter rail, bus and ferry services from the Metropolitan Transit Agency (MTA), the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, New Jersey Transit and the City of New York.

This means that people in New York have a much easier time in trying to find thier routes around NYC. If we check the Google Transit page we can see that the UK is still lagging behind. I can’t wait for this to come to London, will make life so much easier.

Youtube crumbles with Warioland Shake It Advert

This is certainly going to be one of my favourite adverts of all time..

Nintendo have obviously done some sort of deal with YouTube to get this add to interact with the page so well. In this advert we see the video play whilst the page around it starts to shake and crumble. As the video progresses the page is completely destroyed and you can even play with the rubble afterwards.

This is a great example of taking advertising to the next level, admittedly Nintendo have a massive advertising budget but this is surely going to stick in people’s minds for a long time, and end up in a ton of inboxes around the world.
Watch youtube crumble and fall as Warioland Shakes It about…
Watch the Warioland Advert

Antispore.com – Real Christian Crusade or Clever Marketing Ploy?

Unless you have been living under a rock (or simply have zero interest in video games what so ever) then you would have probably heard about a little PC game called Spore. Amongst the hype and controversy over things such as the draconian DRM or the less than stellar reviews, there is a website which has popped up called Antispore.

At first glance it seems that Antispore is exactly what it says in the url, a website that is against spore, if you bother to read the about us page you will find the following info…

I created this blog to find support for and follow my progress in letting Electronic Arts know that their biggest attack on Christian values to date will not be tolerated.

We can not allow the gaming industry to invade our homes and poison the minds of our children.

After all, their billions in revenue and all the advertising in the world are no match for the power of God.

Along with the above info on the about us page there are also posts such as “Proof EA is converting children to believe in evolution” and “The evil man behind it all – Will Wright” which makes one think that this is some crazy Christian evangelist trying to get their voice heard regarding a game about Evolution, however i am not convinced that this is all that there is to it.

If you read through all the posts the writer has obviously got quite a good grip on the bible but the witting style is also somewhat jovial as we can see in this particular post.

“21. The LORD smelled the pleasing aroma and said in his heart: “Never again will I curse the ground because of man, even though every inclination of his heart is evil from childhood. And never gonna give you up. 22. “Never gonna let you down.” 23.”Never gonna run around and desert you.” 24. “Never gonna make you cry.” 25. “Never gonna say goodbye.” 26. “Never gonna tell a lie and hurt you.” 27.”Never truly believe anything you read on the Internet. There will always be cases of Poe’s Law.”

As you can see there is a nice Rickroll (obvious Rickroll is obvious) hidden in the scriptures of the lord which i am pretty sure were not in the original old testament. So this obviously gives the game away that this site isn’t entirely genuine about being against Spore, so it seems to me that this site has been set up by some marketer who is generating a huge amount of publicity, buzz, and backlinks to the site which just happens to have Google ads on it.

It seems the first post was put on the site on September 8th just 3 days ago, if we go take a look at Yahoo site explorer then we can see that the site already has 321 backlinks pointing to it, on top of that there are backlinks from websites such as Forbes, Joystiq, and G4TV which are surely going to pass a ton of authority when Google catches up. On top of that you have people visiting the site from referrals in blog posts, imageboards, forums, chat rooms etc which are generating around 300 odd comments on some posts.

I can’t be sure if the person behind the site is just having a joke to rile people up or is someone with a seo/marketing background who realises that once they enough links they can simply do the old bait n switch and start selling the game through an affiliate scheme and no doubt make an absolute ton of cash. You could even just 301 the entire site to another domain which is already setup to sell spore through it.

Either way i think it is an exceptional idea, generate a lot of controversy, get a load of links to your site regarding a specific topic, and then switch the site to sell the very thing you were against.

I would love to hear other peoples opinions on this so leave me a comment.

Hot New Women! – Match.com Advertising Campaign

Hello all, this post discusses the ‘hot new women’ advertising campaign recently conducted by the online dating company match.com. Two adverts, the work of US agency Hanft Raboy & Partners, have been broadcast on British TV that in my opinion are simply brilliant.

The campaign is obviously focused on increasing subscribers to the match.com online dating service, but its the way its been implemented by that is really clever.

Understanding the Market Research
Online dating has traditionally and still is a male orientated market, with the main challenge for companies being to continually generate female users.

So what have match.com done?
Match.com, having the resources and ability to implement television advertising campaigns have released a series of 2 adverts. Both adverts use a mixture of hard advertising techniques (such as attention grabing alarms and repetition) that is now common place with most website ads, however it is worth mentioning that these ads are no where near as annoying as the aging Moonpig adverts.

Advert 1 – Attention Men

The first advert uses large letters and a voice over to announce that men should pay attention because match.com has too many women. Further animations of women and hearts accompany the message that their previous efforts in advertising and attracting millions of women in the past have been successful and as a result they now have too many women on their site. I remember seeing this advert only once and it was while i was watching top gear on some blokey channel such as Dave or Bravo. It did catch my attention and i remember thinking at the time that it was cleverly targeted. But the penny really dropped when i saw the second advert…

Advert 2 – Attention Women

(I will update and include the second advert as soon as it becomes available.. does anyone have a link?)

Again the advert uses Large letters, animated megaphones and a voice-over to announce that women should pay attention but this time the advert refers to the previous TV ad, stating that, they previously ran an ad targeted at men and now have lots of new guys on their site.
The clever bit is, i have seen this ad 4 or 5 times now, continually on female orientated tv channels, so what initially seemed to be an out of sync male focused ad campaign, came full circle and now continually targets women.. nice twist..

In Conclusion…
I thought this was a really clever concept and i like that even tho the ads use hard advertising techniques, they do feel conversational and almost real-time . I’m sure some people are gonna hate the ads but i think there should also be an appreciation for the thought and innovation that went into them :o)
Match.com seem to have made a step towards “Web 2.0” advertising where the TV adverts are communicating events and trends that are currently happening online on their website.

Does anyone else have any thoughts on these ads?

FriendSync: sync your iPhone contact photos with Facebook

Edit: The new Facebook for iPhone application no does friend syncing, you can check out the features in my new Facebook sync contacts post.

I just saw a new download for an application on the iTunes app store that caught my eye and decided to spend £1 to see what it was like… that application was called FriendSync and it offers you a way of Sync your friends pictures into your phonebook contacts.

None of my friends have thier picture in my iPhone because i hate them, no not really, basically i just couldn’t be bothered to take a picture of them all and put it into the phone. I assumed that this application would make it super easy for me to do and i was kinda right.

The application has a tendency to crash, infact i haven’t been able to use it once without it crashing. Also the application seems to have a rather large problem with actually matching up your contact list with your friends on Facebook. I am sure that this is due to the fact that i don’t always use the First name > Last name convention of putting people in my contacts. It seems to me that even if the person isn’t an exact match then i should be given the option of ‘closest’ matches to choose from.

Instead of that option i have to click through each person, and then type there name into the search bar, find them in the application results and then assign the picture. The other thing that is bugging me is i am sure the results aren’t in alphabetical order and some people ‘hide’ below the qwerty keyboard making it hard to select them.

It’s not all doom and gloom though because this application does still make it a LOT easier to assign pictures to people, it just needs some tweaks.

The thing that impressed me the most though was how Facebook handle application asking for your details to ‘login’. They cleverly ask you to login through the application browser (thus no info is sent to the application) and then a key is generated. This key is then put into the application which allows it to access certain things such as friends list etc. This means that no one can get access to your username and password.

The more i use anything to do with Facebook the more i am impressed with the fact that they have thought of just about everything when it comes to thrid parties and applications.

So in closing if you want to add photos to your contacts then this application is cool. It may only get a small percentage of the user’s pictures correct the first time but after you have added them all in it will remeber and update thier pictures when they update them on Facebook.

Update:
The developer of FriendSync contacted me a couple of days after writing this post asking for my feedback in finding some issues. I have been in contact with him since that time and i can assure everyone that he is working hard on fixing the issues and has sent an update to Apple, the fixes/features include…

Bug Fixes:

  • Fixed: Crashes due to a large number of contacts and/or Facebook friends.
  • Fixed: Blank images assigned to contacts.

Enhancements:

  • Faster Syncing.  Thumbnail images are now downloaded on-the-fly and cached, resulting in faster syncing.
  • Faster Manual Matching.  Default search results are displayed based on a contact’s name when manually searching for a Facebook friend.

Known Issues:
MobileMe and Exchange users who sync their contacts.  After FriendSync sets a contact’s image, MobileMe and Exchange revert the image to the original state.  We have a support ticket open with Apple regarding this issue and will provide an update when it’s resolved.

The developer has also agreed to answer some question about developing on the iPhone which i will put on the blog in around a week or so. I think once these changes get approved then this application could really take off.

You can find more info on the FriendSync Home Page