How the Moves App Can Track Your Steps, Places and Commute

Ever since jumping feet first into the Fitbit fanclub last year, I've been quantifying just about every step, finding excuses to take a walk, parking further away, and generally being more active. I lost 30 pounds from my peak weight, and have found many people doing the same, as we battle on the weekly leaderboard for the most steps. If I don't have my Fitbit tracker on, my activities simply don't count. But on top of my daily Fitbit habit, for the last few months I've been tracking my comings and goings with the Moves app for Android, and have found it a strong companion that tells me information about where I've been, even if it lacks the social component that has Fitbit play such a big role in my need to be competitive.

Unlike Fitbit, which requires a dedicated device, be it a tracker or armband, to glean data from your walking, running or cycling, Moves leverages the built-in accelerometer and GPS data from your phone to pick up on your step count. So if you're someone who doesn't want to carry yet another device, and you just want to keep tabs on your own activity, Moves does exactly that.

      A Big Day On Moves Shows A Long Walk on the Steven's Creek Trail
Moves initially didn't get a lot of interest from me for three reasons, after colleague +Scott Knaster introduced me to the app. The first is that when using Fitbit and Moves in tandem, Moves almost always counts 10 to 20 percent fewer steps than does Fitbit, for the same ground covered. Having been a staunch believer in Fitbit's data, and always wanting the higher numbers, Moves lost. Second, Moves always requires you to have your phone on you, so if you run low on battery, your steps don't count. Fitbit's battery goes for days and that's never been an issue. Third, Moves is done in complete solitude. There's not yet any ability to follow people or share with them your activity - which is a keystone of Fitbit's intrigue.

You Know It's Bad When It Takes an Hour from Mountain View to Milpitas

With all that out of the way, Moves gets more interesting for what it does do. As I move from place to place, Moves makes a best effort to find destinations along my path. If I go to the office, Moves taps into Foursquare's map data to find the office building. If I am on a scenic trail, again, Moves taps into Foursquare. And Moves is smart enough to know, based on my speed, whether I am walking, running, cycling or driving - which is labeled as transport.

The latter bit, transport, now makes it easier to show my wife just when I left the office, or how long I was in the car, or can be shown to demonstrate just how ridiculous traffic is getting in South Bay with the tech economy doing so well.

Two weeks ago, Moves made its first move (see what I did there?) into making their data get out of your phone and possibly onto the Web (like Fitbit) and into new applications with their launch of accounts and connected apps. One can easily see a future with your historical data on the Web or sharing with friends by email or other connected services, including Moves Export, which promises to take the activities you're already doing and take them to RunKeeper or compare with Facebook friends, further bringing the two apps closer.

You can find Moves free on Google Play. If you're an iOS user, don't fret, Moves is on the App Store for 99 cents too. It may be double counting for me to track all my steps twice, but as you can see, there's a good reason. Even if you already use Fitbit, check out Moves. And if you don't, there's really little reason you shouldn't give it a shot.

Disclosure: It could be assumed Foursquare Maps compete with Google Maps, and yes, I work for Google. But then, I don't see how that makes this post biased more or less. I just like writing disclosures.

Google Hotpot Launches Social Place Reviews, Ratings

The transition of location based services from simple game-oriented exercises to valuable review repositories is well under way. From the promise six months ago by product manager Siobhan Quinn that Foursquare's value would be from friends' tips to Yelp and Facebook Places, people are sharing their thoughts and experiences about places they shop, eat and visit. Monday night, Google jumped into this fray with both feet with the simplest, most lightweight platform I have seen yet, called Hotpot. The extension to Google Places, embedded in an update to the Maps application for Android, can be accessed through the Web or mobile.

On the Web, Google hotpot starts with your home city, or places from your Web history, if that is enabled, and displays local businesses. You can rate each place with up to 5 stars, or can even present a medal if you absolutely think the place is the "best ever". When you provide a rating, the flashcard-like places flip front to back and offer a place for you to write a simple review. Then it's on to the next card. Don't want to review an establishment? Just click "not interested" and move on. I found it only took a couple minutes to rack up about a dozen reviews, probably as many as I've ever logged in Foursquare.

Rating Fry's On Hotpot via the Web

Rating Restaurants on Hotpot via the Web

While some folks are projecting a massive social service from Google to take on Facebook, Google has instead referred to adding social layers to its many products. Hotpot itself presents a social layer as well, letting you connect with friends to see places they have reviewed, and cutely, posting a leaderboard, with the most active individuals at the top. The option to add friends, instead of being a "everybody in the pool" synchronization with Gmail contacts or any other database, feels more like Google Buzz - with a screen offering you the option to connect to the people you e-mail most often.

The Google Hotpot Leaderboard Early On

Rating Sunnyvale Restaurants Via the Mobile Widget

When on an Android device, assuming you have loaded version 4.7 of the Google Maps app, you can add a widget to rate places for Hotpot on the fly. Dependent on your location, you can rate businesses, or do a quick search (for example, restaurants near Sunnyvale). Find what you like, and as with the Web site, you can post 1-5 stars, and add a comment.

For the most part, although I am sure it is not universal, it seems the majority of Foursquare users choose the app primarily to check in quickly, not to leave detailed reviews and guide to friends. This will probably remain the truth until game mechanics are introduced that push reviews. But for Hotpot, it's not about checking in that you were somewhere, but all about the reviews and providing recommendations to friends. It may have been a quiet little release pushed out from the Mountain View giant after 7:30 pm Monday night, but it could be a big deal. I have added the Rate Places widget to my Android home screen, and expect to be using it a lot.

Want to find my recommendations, just get connected through my e-mail address: louisgray@gmail.com.

Google Buzz Mobile Moves Beyond Latitude/Longitude

In addition to the morning's news that Google had launched Buzz as a major social push for Gmail, the company, in parallel, announced a new Web application for mobile devices, supporting both Android and iPhone platforms, that not only brings Buzz to the mobile phone, but also adds Buzz to the company's existing Maps application, showing Buzz from activity in your specific location. Leveraging the years of investments in Google Earth, Google Maps, Google StreetView and other location-based services, Google Buzz immediately ships with an advantage - determining the true identity of a location, beyond simple longitude and latitude coordinates.

As the much-hyped Foursquare and Gowalla applications have shown us over the last year, an individual's location is often as relevant as whatever activity is taking place. Google Buzz for mobile taps into the vast Earth, Maps and Street View database the company has been building over the last half-decade, and lets you post to Buzz with your update attached to the place where you are located, not just with a latitude/longitude coordinate, or even worse, an IP address.

"In the digital world, few have gotten this right," said Vic Gundotra, vice president of engineering at Google on Monday. "We don't want latitude/longitude, we want the colloquial term. We have solved this problem, of a conversation in a world of places, and mobile phones make it possible."

As Gundotra demoed to me at Google headquarters Monday on his Android-powered Google Nexus One handset, speaking into the phone made an automatic transcription, which could be posted to his Buzz, attached to the location he had selected. Tapping into Google's deep archives about places, establishments feature images of the location, details about that location, and relevant data, such as restaurant reviews, if applicable.

By selecting the "Nearby" option in his Buzz-enabled Maps application, Gundotra could also see what people were Buzzing about in the surrounding area.

The move to add geolocation is one trend that is growing for mobile applications and Twitter clients, although not many Twitter users have enabled such data sharing. If they do, and they pull their Tweets into Buzz, the product doesn't yet pull in that information to Mobile Maps, but it soon will, Gundotra promised.

Will Mainstream Adoption of GPS Reduce the Need for Google Maps?

Last week, for the first time in a while, I finally went gadget shopping. On my short list of things I wanted to possibly get was a GPS unit for my car. With my traveling more frequently to various meetups in the evening, combined with my notorious penchant for getting lost, having a GPS unit on hand has practically become a necessity. And unfortunately for me, Robert Scoble's having been an early adopter didn't mean that one came with his hand-me-down car. So when I spotted a Garmin Nuvi 265 unit in a gadget vending machine for a reasonable price at the local mall, I pounced.

And now, with handy directions on my dashboard to practically anywhere I need to go, I know I'm going to stop going to Google Maps. So gone are the days of my having piles of papers printed out from Google Maps from trips since past.

Like most Web consumers, I slowly made the move from Mapquest to Yahoo! Maps and eventually to Google Maps. Google continues to expand their geo-team with Google Earth and Google StreetView, but for me, this little unit from Garmin means I don't really care all that much. So what will happen next, assuming that all vehicles going forward, and eventually all smartphones, will have this data? I understand that Google data could power each of these devices, but the actual process of going to Google Maps, putting in a starting location and an ending destination, as we have done for years, is decimated. It's just not going to happen for me.

Today, I'm solving my need to find out where to go, step by step, with a dedicated unit - an interim step before GPS is an embedded, standard feature in my car. It's part of a natural progression, one I don't see reversing. If you have a GPS unit, are you using Google Maps any more?