This might sound like a little thing, but the lack of the mouse lock feature holds back browser-based games. Here’s the problem: Unless you’re using a plugin, the way that browser-based games handle the mouse is clunky. Let’s say you’re trying to play a shooter like Quake III in the browser. Because the game can’t “grab” the pointer, when you scroll too far outside the game screen it sends your cursor outside the browser window and disrupts game flow. (And probably gets you fragged.)

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But it’s not just for games. This would also be useful for apps like Google Maps, so that the map doesn’t stop scrolling when users hit the corner of the screen. That’s the physical screen. If you try Google Maps you can hold down the mouse button and keep scrolling even when the cursor leaves the window, but it stops when you hit the edge of the screen.

Note that mouse lock is different than mouse capture, because mouse capture ends when the mouse button is released. The mouse lock holds the pointer until a special key binding or gesture is used, and sends input “regardless of mouse button state.” It also hides the cursor, whereas mouse capture does not.

So Scheib and others are working on providing a mouse lock that will enable all sorts of applications to be on par with their native client counterparts. David Humphrey is all over an implementation for Firefox, and Scheib says that developers can test it out in the Chrome Canary builds right now.

It will be a few more releases (Scheib says no sooner than Chrome 19) before it’s shipped without a developer flag. Actually, it’s available in Chrome 16 or later for Native Client apps, but not for other applications. Right now, the feature only works in full screen, and Scheib says that it will also need a security review before it’s ready to go. (Grabbing the mouse would give spammers a pretty annoying tool to work with if left unchecked.) Since Firefox folks are also on this, it might not be too much longer before we can seen cross-browser apps that make the most of mouse lock.

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It seems pretty basic, considering all that we’re capable of doing in tech. But as anyone who has been put on hold for tech support, received a robo-call about suspicious activity on their credit card, or tried to deal with sudden travel changes can attest, dealing with customer service still seems to be stuck very much in the pre-Internet age.

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That’s where the Microsoft and 24/7 partnership comes in. Together, they will develop a Pedictive Experience (PX) paltform capable of handling 2.5 billion online and telephone customer service interactions each year.

“From speech to touch to gestures, consumers expect and demand more natural and intuitive ways to interact with technology,” Zig Serafin, general manager, Online Services Division at Microsoft, said in a statement. “This same demand will change how consumers interact with businesses, and it creates an inflection point for how people will expect businesses to provide customer service. “

The firms say not only will they help companies link customer service over multiple platforms, but they’ll help companies figure out what your preferred platform is and make it easier for you to get the fixes you need.

“All of us are quickly coming to expect companies to communicate with us in proactive, more natural and intuitive ways, and on the devices we use in our daily lives,” Serafin wrote about the deal on Microsoft’s official blog. “We should expect businesses to reach out to us when we need service, and to do so in a way that anticipates how we want to be communicated with; whether that’s through our smartphone, our PC or through our TV if we happen to be in the living room.”

Of course the deal isn’t all about altruistic good will to consumers: the market for customer service applications like the ones proposed by Microsoft and 24/7 is huge and expected to grow. The announcement also follows a long-building trend of Microsoft working to offer more, specialized b-to-b solutions.

The deal also includes the shuffling of some Microsoft employees, as well as Micrsoft taking an unspecified ownership stake in 24-7, according to ZDNet.

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Technology Services Pro in Phoenix Seeks to Better Serve Local Clients by …
PR.com (press release)
With the assistance of Prospect Genius's Search Engine Optimization (SEO) program, Metro Computer Networks is more visible and accessible for clients who search online for anything from computer repairs to IT consultants. Jason Alford, owner of Metro …

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Like Hootsuite, you can schedule your tweets in advance and the free service allows you to access five different social media accounts across Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. You can schedule up to five messages per hour for the free service. There are numerous charts and graphs to show you various statistics, such as the number of LinkedIn posts per day as you can see below:

Gremln has lots more to it than just stats, though. It works with Brev.is or Bit.ly to shorten and track your URLs in your Tweets, you can add RSS feeds to your dashboard, and it even has a UI that looks a lot like Hootsuite, if you don’t want to leave that behind.

There are various paid plans that start at $6 a month and expand the number of Tweets per hour scheduled, the number of saved report templates, and that add the ability to include Web analytics so you can track the results of your social networking campaigns to see if they actually resulted in increased Web traffic. And there are ways for work teams to share and jointly manage their accounts, something that Hootsuite isn’t good at. If you are obsessive about your Klout score, you can link to your account and watch it ebb and flow as the company tweaks its algorithms too.

You can sign up here on the Gremln site and try it out.

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openPR (press release)

Technology Services Pro in Phoenix Seeks to Better Serve Local Clients by …
openPR (press release)
With the assistance of Prospect Genius's Search Engine Optimization (SEO) program, Metro Computer Networks is more visible and accessible for clients who search online for anything from computer repairs to IT consultants. Jason Alford, owner of Metro …

and more »

View full post on SEO – Google News

Last week, my esteemed Internet ReadWriteWeb-y colleagues Jon Mitchell and Curt Hopkins cooked up this insanely hilarious story about the grossness of amateur food porn. Amazingly, every single photograph in his story was shot by an amateur. And every single time, the food looked totally disgusting. The amateur food photographer is not trying to make their food look gross. In fact, quite the opposite, this person is just trying to share the food that they think is delicious and beautiful. But no matter what, the food photos just don’t communicate that sentiment.

“You need a light source from the side,” says Stephen Hamilton, a Chicago-based professional food photograph. “You need to bring up the detail of the food, which you can’t do with a single light source.”

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Amateur food photographs exist in part because of social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. People sync up their Facebook and Twitter accounts to their smartphones, shoot a photo and feel compelled to share it with their friends. Crappy lighting usually accounts for the horrible photo.

“You’re in a dark restaurant, you have to use a single frontal flash, it looks like shit,” Hamilton says. “Not even a portrait looks good when you’re taking a photo of friends.”

To prove that it is possible to take better food photos from a smartphone, Hamilton goes out to restaurants every week and shoots food photos with his iPhone. Then goes back to his studio and touches them up. He documents the entire project on his blog, The Restaurant Project. Here’s a short video he produced with tips for taking better food photos. Some of the ideas: Avoid incandescent light. Blow out the background. Use simple light and propping.

“The majority of people who are posting photos to Facebook and Twitter are doing it for the pure pleasure of it. They’re not getting business out of it,” says Hamilton. “Whether it’s going to a restaurant like NEXT or going to McDonald’s, they’re still Facebook-ing about it.”

Instagram Filters Won’t Help You Make The Photo Less Food Porn-y

Jon and Curt decided to take this food porn idea too far, creating a horrible Tumblr blog full of all the bad photo photographs you’ve ever dreamed of. A photo I shot has been added to this Internet hall of shame. Here it is.

It’s gorgeous, right? That’s what I thought. So, I tweeted it to Jon and Curt, looking for some sort of approval. “I would argue that this is not food porn,” I said, proudly. I could single-handedly beat food porn.

Curt replied with a typical, quotable Curt line: “GOOD GOD!” “It is to food porn as amateur porn is to porn – even worse.”

Shocked, I tried a few other similarly desperate tweets. Then at last, I admitted defeat: “@curthopkins @jonmwords Nooooo! I’ve cornered myself into an art food porn-ified corner of hellish green triangles.”

Then Jon added my photo to the Tumblr food porn hall of shame.

Why did this photo become food porn? The rest of this conversation occurred on Facebook with ReadWriteWeb’s Editor-in-Chief, Richard MacManus after I commented on his horrific photo of bean slop.

I think we can all agree that those beans look disgusting. But Richard admitted to purposely making the food look more horrific, for Jon’s benefit.

After I asked him, he honestly explained to me why my green cake looked gross.

“It was very artistic, I’ll give it that I think the green is what creates the opposite effect…” he FB commented to me. “Well, artistically the photo definitely works – the triangle shaped table, the brown / green colors, etc. In terms of whether the photo makes the cake look more edible, honestly the Instagram filter makes the green look a little sickly (color wise) and it also somehow heightens the sugariness of the cake (it’s shiny and kind of glistens,” he said.

I appreciated his honesty. Interestingly, in this case, it was my seemingly awesome use of an Instagram filter, which I thought might save this from amateur food pornification. Instead, it was the very thing that actually sent my photo straight to amateur food pornland.

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But there’s another frontier of mobile mapping that matters, and the exploration has just begun. Indoor mapping of big buildings – like airports, convention centers, museums and stores – is the El Dorado of mobile location. Google has begun its expedition inside buildings, and businesses can sign up and offer their floor plans. But there’s another option: Use a platform like Meridian and build your own inside map. Which is better for business?

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Google Maps: Just Hand ‘Em The Plans

Google launched interior maps in November. It’s currently only available on Google Maps for Android. When it launched, it came with a bunch of partners, and it offered any business owner the ability to submit a floor plan for inclusion. After that, the business owner doesn’t have to do a thing except submit updated plans if things change. Google handles the rest.

Business owners have enough to think about, so letting a service provider handle all this mapping stuff could be a convenient choice. Google has a vested interest in presenting the most attractive local business listings it can. But are they always the most accurate? In October, Google decided to take responsibility for updating business listings into its own hands, asking owners about changes only after the fact.

If you need fine-grained control over how your business appears online, you might want a more custom solution.

Meridian: Roll Your Own Map

When a location releases an app built with Meridian, it’s a grand affair. It announces partners one at a time, such as the launch of the Oregon Convention Center app yesterday. Unlike Google, Meridian is in start-up mode, but it raised $1 million last year on the premise that the best location-based business apps are built by the businesses themselves.

Meridian has offered consumers interior mapping longer than Google has, but only for a few participating locations. That’s not a shortcoming, though; Meridian is a platform. For consumers, it’s an app that lets them navigate inside favorite museums, stadiums and stores (currently mostly in Meridian’s hometown of Portland, Ore.). But for businesses, it’s a way to build and control a 3D interior map of their own location and offer a custom-branded app for it.

It has its own Web-based editing tools, so owners can move around contents of the map like store displays or museum exhibits. You can include audio tours or featured products that display prominently for the user. It will even push pertinent information to the customer’s device.

How Should Businesses Handle Maps?

If you own or work for a business with a building you want mapped for smartphones, think about priorities. Is it better for you to ship off location data to a service provider who will handle it for you, or would you rather have constant control over the experience? Do you just need to be on the map, or would you like to build the app?

Whichever option makes the most sense for you, it’s exciting to have such choices. The power of the mobile Web to enhance the world for users and raise the profile of local businesses is only just starting to kick in.

Which location-based services do you use, whether for work or for fun?

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SEO NEWS: When 2 Isn't Better Than 1
SubmitEdge SEO News
A debate has been raging on between SEOs, SMMs and almost everyone else in the online world as to whether or not two SMM teams are better than one, returning actual benefits to clients. Since it works in some areas, why not this one?

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But like on any social network, it just depends on whom you’re following. On Pinterest, you have fine-grained control over what pins appear in your feed. In fact, for all Google’s efforts to figure out how to control unwanted social stuff with Circles, I daresay they got it backwards. Pinterest is the reverse of Google+ circles, and it’s better for users.

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Pinterest has been around for a while, but lately it has caught on intensely. The statistics suggest that lots of women use it, but lots of non-women and businesses also use it. It’s inspiring blatant imitators, and Alexia Tsotsis even thinks that Google wants to buy it. Why all this interest all of a sudden? Pinterest is visually driven, which makes it easy and pleasurable to use, but I think its mechanics as a social network are more interesting than that.

Facebook’s Smart Lists and Google+ Circles have popularized the idea that we need the ability to share different things with different audiences. That lets us have fun with some people and be boring with others without having to maintain two profiles. But neither of those networks offer much control for the person on the receiving end.

Facebook’s News Feed algorithm is a bit of a magic soup. You can tell it you want more or fewer updates from certain things in certain situations, but for the most part, if they’re sharing it with you, you’re going to get it. Google+ lets you turn down the volume on your circles, so you can adjust the noisiness of groups you’re following, but the people in those circles are just sharing wherever they share. The recipient has to do her or his best to keep all the senders organized.

Pinterest Is the Reverse of Circles

But Pinterest nails the mechanics of this. On Pinterest, users create “boards” for different things they want to share. When you follow a person on Pinterest, you follow all their boards. You can also follow individual boards. If someone you like has a board for “desserts,” which you like, and a board for “spaceships,” which you love, but they also post to their “cute puppies” board all day long (and you hate puppies), the solution is simple: You unfollow “cute puppies,” and everything else remains.

Both the pinner and the follower only have to think about their own tastes. They don’t have to guess what other people are like. People are more likely to enjoy themselves that way. Because hey, if Pinterest teaches us anything, it’s that we have impeccable taste.

Do you use Pinterest? Do you need an invite? Let’s get some invite gifting going in the comments.

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Smart Hoteliers Embrace Google+ For Better SEO
Hospitality Net
Starting now smart hoteliers need to begin embracing Google+ as a major component of their Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Those who move quickly will have a significant competitive advantage over the laggards. Rand Fishkin at SEOMoz provides a short …

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