The FBI has a stockpile of tools that it uses to aid in their search for the nation’s most sought after criminals. Recently, the FBI unveiled a couple of their newest and coolest tools to be used on social networking sites.

The first tool is a self-updating video widget that the FBI uses to broadcast up-to-date content about the criminals they are searching for. Users are able to include this widget on their own web pages, or within their own blogs. The content is updated automatically by the FBI.

Are you destined to be an FBI Agent, or is the analytical approach to national security more your game? Users can find out by taking the FBI’s new Facebook Quiz (located on the FBI’s Facebook Page). This quiz will ask the user a series of questions designed to help them find their best career path within the FBI.

Finally, iPhone users will find cool new updates to the already extremely popular FBI’s Most Wanted iPhone Application, one of which allows the user to geolocate the FBI office nearest their present location. The FBI’s Most Wanted iPhone application keeps users up to date on the Most Wanted list as well as issues to do with missing children and terrorist threats. The FBI stated that since its inception this application has been downloaded over 670,000 times.

Post By Lewis Van Tassel
Lewis is an Education Manager for
Omnistar Email Marketing Software

Foursquare, for the past several months, has been working to expand its service in more and more cities around the country, but they were simply unable to expand fast enough to meet demand and have, therefore, decided to offer their services worldwide. In addition to going global, Foursquare has been working on some other pretty fantastic upgrades to their services which we will detail below.

Probably the greatest change is that Foursquare has made there services available to more users, not simply by going global, but also by rewriting software to make it compatible with more operating systems. The iPhone and Droid have had exclusivity in the past, but users of the Palm Pre and Blackberry can now also take advantage of Foursquare’s many services. Foursquare has, in addition, revamped both their iPhone application as well as their webpage and both seem to load and run much more smoothly than previous versions.

With the move away from cities and onto the global stage, Foursquare had to make some changes to its badging capabilities, and has done so by way of expanding them. Badges are, of course, items that users can collect, which are received upon completion of a certain task, or after visiting a certain location. One example is the “Gym Rat” badge which a user can win after tracking so many visits to a gym. These items are quite popular with Foursquare users so it is no surprise then that Foursquare would include them in the list of services they chose to upgrade.

Foursquare also has overcome the issue of users collecting multiple badges for completing the same task. In the past, a user who visited multiple gyms would receive multiple “Newbie” badges. As Foursquare has gone global, the tracking of these activities will no longer be linked to specific cities, thus ending the issue of multiple badges. Users will still find they have to visit a certain city to get some specific badges.

As users obtain badges they rack up points. This lends itself nicely to the gaming atmosphere which surrounds this application. As part of their upgrades, Foursquare has point leader boards which will list who is in the lead (point wise) for certain activities. These leader boards will be based on distance to a certain location, i.e. within 20 mile radius of Chicago.

Finally, users who wish to add a new venue will be able to do so without the use of an address. Users will now be able to tag the location of their event using GPS coordinates. There is some concern that this change will allow for a frenzy of false or incorrect venues, but it is a necessary change given the move to a global service platform. Another issue of concern is the use of GPS tagging indoors, which does not seem to work all that well. That being said, technology is growing and adapting at such a pace that Foursquare believes its services will be able to use alternate methods (wifi triangulation) to overcome this issue.

Post By Lewis Van Tassel
Lewis is an Education Manager for
Omnistar Email Marketing Software

Come and learn about the top SEO ways to increase sales for your business. Our marketing director will be presenting a webinar on Wednesday, January 20th, 2010 and he will cover the best strategies that you can implement to increase sales.

The webinar will be at 2pm - 3pm EST.

Sign up at this link http://www.omnistaretools.com/webinar.htm

Have you ever been chatting with a friend on Facebook and had them throw a foreign phrase at you? They’re so smart aren’t they? Well…thanks to Google, you can throw smart right back at them. Firefox v3.5 has teamed up with Google in the area of machine translation. Essentially, you’ll be able to type that foreign phrase into Google’s new toolbar and get an instant translation. Not only that, Google takes it a step further, offering you suggestions of websites and sponsored links it considers relevant to your search.

Google’s new toolbar, which is synced with the Private Browsing mode of Firefox v3.5, will allow you to search without keeping records of your activity. In addition, it disables PageRank, Web History, and Sidewiki.

Google introduced Sidewiki last week, as its newest web annotation system that, coupled with the new translation capability, means more power for web-users who like to voice their opinions. Sidewiki lets web-users comment on whole pages on the web, or on a specific line or more of text, and then share the link to their comment with the world via email, Twitter, Facebook, or any number of other social networking sites. Users will be able to vote up or down on posted comments, and the more up votes a comment receives, the more it is seen. Add the language translation component to Sidewiki, and users are now able to comment on pages that they would have even been able to read previously.

Posted By Lewis Van Tassel
Lewis is an Education Manager for
Omnistar Email Marketing Software