Notes of cocktail glasses
beside rooftop pools
do leave vast impressions
but not the ones you hoped.

As neighbouring as it is
your flat is in Shepherds Bush
about as Holland Park
as Romford’s the East End.

If your holiday is so great
why are you in your hotel
so logged on to work
that you’re basically home?

Any level of coolness
iPad bus journeys hold
get immediately overwritten
as you read the Metro app.

To endlessly talk diets
to anyone who will listen
isn’t really the point
to being vegetarian.

Ascot tux’s look glam
less so on tubes home
tinted by mustard stains
of a late night kebab.

A less waffly version of these thought crumbs features on the Outside Line blog

I check in regularly via Foursquare which updates my Twitter feed. I find it a quick and useful way to share somewhere interesting I’ve attended with my real life friends that I chat with via tweets. I favour Foursquare and its automatic updates to Twitter rather than Facebook Places and updates to my profile’s wall because I like the light entertainment of badges and points, find my iPhone’s Facebook app a little unwelcoming and occasionally enjoy browsing Foursquare’s user generated tips.

You wont see me shouting about being at the local takeaway in the early hours or sitting on a park bench, but you’ll find me putting my virtual flag in the digital ground of interesting gigs, museums and great restaurants or bars. When I get back into work after the weekend or catch up in person with friends that follow me online, location has proved to be a catalyst for conversation. ‘I saw you checked out that new bar the other night…’, ‘How was that new band you watched?’ and so on. Cynics will challenge the benefit of that over just starting a conversation from scratch in person and have a point, but they’re also some of the same people who said Facebook status updates would never take off and were pointless because people like being private and wont feel inclined to broadcast their thoughts.

Ultimately, social media activity’s often about showing off. People using location treat it as another outlet to present themselves through in a way they’d like to be seen. I want people to see that I went to a Rakim show this month so they associate me a little more with decent, historic rap music and knowledge. So I checked in at the gig. I don’t want people to know I munched through an all you can eat buffet at Pizza Hut because I”m a bit ashamed and would rather people not know I’m unhealthy and live off grease from time to time. So the phone stayed in my pocket.

In terms of what location can offer brands, I think this will increase with time and new developments in tools and functionality. At the moment, location’s a fairly separate aspect to social media activity, homed in its entirety on a lone platform (Foursquare) or a little hidden in iPhone app tabs and busy news feeds (Facebook Places). If Facebook were to put a leader board at the top of every user’s profile page showing the places they’ve visited the most or most recently, there would suddenly be a permanent, prominent place for a brand’s name to be championed to a user’s private network. I think that’s when critical mass will pick up location more and people’s inclination to check in at locations will increase. Then brands can start promoting themselves to more people at a louder volume.

Here’s a video by Twitter about their new photo, video and hash tag features.

It looks like you wont be seeing the likes of yfrog and twitpic for much longer. Rejoice!

You’ll soon be able to attach an image or video to your tweet directly from Twitter.com without the involvement of an external site. This will soon be possible from phone apps too.

There’ll be top video and top photos on the right hand column and you’ll be able to see a gallery of sorts on top of tweet stacks when you explore a hash tag.

Users will own the photos and video they upload.

It’ll be interesting to see how brands might use this;

• Photo and video competitions and campaigns,
• Aggregators of multimedia content around a particular event, topic or theme.

More information’s available at Twitter and Mashable.