Just as people are beginning to learn about location-based tools, Foursquare announces that it has reached 40 million checkins. Within five weeks, Foursquare’s checkins have doubled showing its increased popularity. But is the quick growth about to come to an abrupt end?

Facebook has announced that later this month, it will launch its own location-based features.  Leveraging all of Facebook’s users, this might be enough to crush the growth of Foursquare and the other emerging location-based tools such as Gowalla, Whrrl and TriOut. In late April, Trone launched an online usage study that  measured the popularity of these tools. The study showed that the tools mentioned above each had 6% top two box response when asked “how often do you use the following location-based tools on your mobile phone”.  The data will serve as a great benchmark when understanding the impact of the Facebook features launch.

As the penetration of internet-based phones increases, one thing that we can expect is that the popularity of location-based tools will grow.  In the upcoming months, it will be interesting to see how each fights for its own niche market position in combating the Facebook giant.

With April Fool’s Day coming up, I started thinking about practical jokes that companies have created to celebrate the holiday (and highlight their brands). One in particular that continues to develop funny pranks year after year is Google. What an excellent way to drive traffic to their site and increase awareness of their ever-expanding portfolio of services! 

Google’s hoaxes date back to 2000 and range across their many different platforms. Some of the ones I have found most entertaining (and at times wish they were real) include: 

• Gmail Custom Time: Never send an email late again! You can simply change the date/time and even the read/unread status of emails before sending to any recipient.
• Gmail Autopilot: Gmail learns your writing style and automatically responds to emails so you don’t have to read and respond to them all.
• Google Docs on Demand: Documents, spreadsheets and presentations practically create themselves with the help of artificially intelligent technology.
• Google MentalPlex: No need to type your query and risk carpal tunnel syndrome. Instead, just envision a picture of your search and it will anticipate your request.

With such a rich history of pranks, I wonder what Google will unveil this year. What about a “Meeting Re-scheduler” that is connected to your calendar? It could continuously monitor the weather and if a nice, sunny day was coming up, it would move that day’s meetings so you could make it out onto the golf course. Or what about a “Task Maker” that automatically generates your to do list? It could break up each project’s action items and create timelines, eliminating some planning.

Whatever gags Google comes up with, I expect they will provide some good laughs for April Fool’s Day. And maybe we’ll see more brands take advantage of the holiday to capture consumers’ attention in a humorous way. What other possible hoaxes can you imagine?

EVERYONE!

What would you do if all your data was suddenly gone? I know many people would have a nervous breakdown including me. Over the weekend a hacker was able to exploit a UK web host’s servers and erase as many as 100,000 websites’ data. Many of those customers had no backup solution in place and thus may never have the ability to recover their data due to the finality of UNIX’s “rm -rf” command.

Some 50 percent of Vaserv’s customers signed up for unmanaged service, which doesn’t include data backup, Foster said. It remains unclear of those website owners will ever be able to retrieve their lost data, he said. As a result, at least half the websites that were hosted on the site remain offline.

Which leads me to ask, “what kind of backup solutions are in place for both your computers and your web servers (if you have any)?”

Personally, I have a two-tiered backup solution for all my computers.

1. All my Macs have time machine enabled and back up to an external drive. This is a local backup solution and would be the fastest to recover data if something was lost. Time machine makes it very easy to “undelete” something that was accidentally removed from the system. However, if my house burned down, my data would most likely be unrecoverable.
2. I use an online backup solution. My service of choice is Mozy, which offers unlimited backup storage space for about $5 a month per computer. They also have a free 2gb backup solution. Mozy works with both Mac and PC. This is a secondary backup solution for me and is my “safety net” in case anything were to happen to my local backups.

My web server is another matter. Like the folks in the article above, my web host doesn’t back up my data. So I’ve set up an automated process whereby all my databases are compressed and emailed to me every night. Periodically I’ll go through and delete the really old ones to conserve space on my Gmail account. This doesn’t include the filesystem. I know that this isn’t ideal and I really should upgrade my account to include automated backups.

How do you ensure that your data isn’t lost? Do you even have a backup strategy? Tell me in the comments below!

The Twittersphere is abuzz this morning!

Everyone is talking about what J.R. Cohen, Operations Manager for CoffeeGroundz (@coffeegroundz) Cafe in Houston, TX has done. He’s doubled the clientele to his store. How, you ask? By starting to take drink orders via direct message from Twitter users.

A coffee shop (that also doubles as a lounge at night by serving beer and wine), is the perfect type of business to take advantage of this new medium of communication. The store has free WiFi which makes it convenient for people to linger. WiFi also means that people will have their internet enabled devices there, making it easy for them to simply message the guy at the counter for a drink!

This is a powerful example about how businesses can use new media and social networking to reach with their customers on a different level. They’re not marketing towards them. They’re connecting with customers and creating a relationship, which we all knows leads to brand loyalty.

How are other companies using Twitter to connect with their customers?

• @SouthwestAir – Southwest Airlines offers deals and promotions to Twitter followers.
• @BofA_help – Bank of America is using Twitter to respond and actually solve customer complaints.
• @zappos – Zapos CEO Tony Hsieh uses Twitter to offer coupon codes (that expire quickly so you have to follow him to get the deals) and to stay connected with customers that want to be actively engaged with his brand.

Using new social media platforms to connect with your customers is the wave of the future.

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Previously:  What is all the Twitter hype about?