OK, last google-related post of the night.

Last week, Google Maps added a feature that I really like and have been wanting for a while. It lets you search for locations and directions at the same time. It sounds confusing, but some examples make the usefulness pretty clear… you can now enter searches like: Grand Central Station to Carnegie Hall (gives directions, no need to look up the address separately) or Lehigh University to beer (it gives a list of places to get beer and how far they are from LU).

Sadly, the Carnegie Hall directions don’t mention anything about practicing…

A month and a half ago, Google Reader started allowing you to share items with friends. This means that whenever I mark an item as shared in Reader, it’ll show up in my friends’ (i.e. gmail contacts’) reader streams. A few friends have already shared items with me, which I found to be cool (and different than the usual drivel that I read). I got into the habit of sharing items as well. These are basically things that I think are interesting or funny, but I don’t really have anything to say to justify its own post. The headlines from my recently shared items show up on the left side of my blog, too.

If you’re using reader and wany my shared items to show up, let me know. I don’t post a huge amount of them.

You can view my recently shared items as a web page or subscribe to the feed, too.

A while ago, I promised a “mega rant” about facebook. After some writing, rewriting, and thought, I’ve decided not to write a mega-rant.

I don’t think I’ve been on facebook for any appreciable amount of time in at least a month. It’s just not an effective use of my time. Communication on facebook is less effective than outside (as I’ve already explained). Facebook is a really well-designed system, but it’s not really well-designed to quickly get you to the information you want. Easy example: notification that someone has written on my wall doesn’t contain the actual message from the wall, I’m forced to waste my time to go to the site just to find out that someone wrote “LOL” to me. Replying on facebook only adds to the vicious cycle. It seems like these things are changing with time, but until it does, there are plenty of other things for me to use.

Also, I couldn’t care less about being bit by a zombie.

Anyway, one facebook app I find really useful is Birthday Exporter. It takes all your friends’ birthdays and exports them to Google Calendar, iCal or whatever. With this, I can see all the birthdays in a nice calendar interface that’s already integrated with my schedule. Useful!

Now, if only I could export all my facebook contacts to gmail without getting banned, I’d be set. Hopefully things like this will work cleanly someday..