Location, Location, Location. Google's Watching...

Greetings everybody, welcome to the Wednesday, April 19th, 2017 episode of Free Webinar Wednesdays. This is Eric Cook with WSI Digital Marketing, where we work with businesses and organizations on helping them better understand and leverage the power of the internet as a strategic business tool. You can learn more about me and all the cool stuff we do here at WSI online at www.poweredbywsi.com. With me this week is my good friend and Free Webinar Wednesday partner for— did we say 6 years, 7 years, 8 years? I don't know. Mr. Jeff Simpkins from Community Bank Consulting. Jeff, say hello to everybody out there in Free Webinar Wednesday world.

Yeah, we're gonna have to look again. I can't remember what year. Probably, probably 8. I would guess 2009.

There we go.

So anyway, greetings everybody, this is Jeff Simpkins, and as Eric said, I'm with Community Bank Consulting Inc. You can learn more about me and Community Bank Consulting Inc. online at www.communitybankconsulting.com.

Sweet. So what's new in your world? How's your last week been?

My last week has been busy. I have been launching a project and, uh, Spent the last part of last week and the first part of this week building a project plan, and I finished it this morning, and I think it came out to be 17 pages.

Dang.

So, it was time consuming, but time well spent.

Very cool.

What about you? Good.

Well, I'm, I'm celebrating the arrival of Warmth and enjoying some what looks like to be some sunny, almost 70-degree weather coming up. So getting our new team kit for our cycling team out on the road and spending some time on the bicycle. So enjoying that. And from a work perspective, we've got a couple of pretty cool marketing automation projects underway. And I know that it's a little bit on the geeky side, but when you start getting into visitor tracking and data and workflows and all sorts of other kind of geeky business stuff, I get pretty excited. So, so that's been kind of fun.

So I do as well. I love working on work projects. It's fun seeing them come together and Seeing results and being part of a team to make it happen.

Absolutely. So, well, today I guess let's do our housekeeping stuff. So as a reminder, I'm looking through the attendees and I see some new faces and I don't wanna say old ones 'cause I don't wanna offend anybody, but some recurring faces. But as a reminder for those of you that have been here before and as a notice to those of you that are joining us for the first time, Free Webinar Wednesdays are recorded and made available at freewebinarwednesdays.com. So if something Jeff and I talk about today strikes your fancy and you want to go back and check it out or replay it or share it with a friend or a colleague or a coworker, you can certainly do that. And we like to keep these conversational and interactive, which means if you are attending live and you have a thought or a comment that you would like to share, please feel free to do so in the chat function and we'll keep an eye on that. So, I got a phone call earlier this week actually from one of our former guests who's getting in kind of working on creating a podcast and had some questions about kind of maintaining longevity and the fact that you and I have been kind of going as long as we have.

Yeah.

I think we do some things right, and I know that there's some things that we could do better. But the thing that kind of makes us unique versus what he was kind of thinking from a podcast perspective is recording the podcast and doing a lot of post-editing and trimming. And those of you that have been part of the show for a while know that this is live. And if we trip on our tongue or we go to a site and it doesn't load or something else happens, There's no post-editing. We're kind of flying without a net. And he says, well, I don't think I necessarily want to do that, but, you know, I think the fact that you've been going for as long as you have has been kind of cool. So, but I do enjoy the interaction between the audience when we get some feedback from folks, which is kind of cool. So hopefully we'll get some of that today.

We've never tripped on our tongue before. Oh, geez.

I don't want to belabor the issue, but I didn't put my foot in my mouth once. I actually, I think, went all the way to my thigh bone. We'll just leave it at that and just kind of move right along. But you know exactly what I'm talking about. So anyway, one of the quaint little things that makes Free Webinar Wednesdays somewhat of a unique experience. So like that box of chocolates, you just never know what you're going to get, right, Jeff?

You know, when someone uses that phrase you just used, I no longer think specifically of Forrest Gump. I think of the skit they did on Saturday Night Live a few weeks ago.

Yeah.

Oh, too funny.

So, um, well, today, um, and you may have started noticing, Jeff and I are kind of doing more of a show up and see what we're gonna talk about. And not to say that it's always gonna be that way, but, um, at least for the past few shows, that's kind of been our MO, um, as things kind of come up. And, uh, you know, this is almost like a box of chocolates as well. You just don't know what you're you're gonna get. But today I've been kind of touching and I played with it a little bit the other day and I found it to be kind of cool. Because I don't know if a lot of people use Google Earth. I know that Google Maps gets used quite a bit. But Google Earth got a pretty significant update recently and there's some areas in Google Earth that are actually now 3-dimensional, and it's scary to think whoever came up with the concept of Google Earth, if what it is today was even in their vision of being able to literally browse the world and kind of jump right into things. So I thought today we would kind of revisit Google Earth, kind of talk about some of the new functionality that it added. I would encourage you to download the app on your phone because that gives you Some interesting ways to interact with the map and the different places, and then share a couple of other services that have been out there, but maybe some things that you may not realize that are part of Google Maps itself. The ability to create your own maps and put pinpoints and directions. It's one of the things my wife and I have started doing whenever we try to book a trip with our little RV is kind of map that out to see where things are at so it can help identify where we want to go, but it also gives us kind of a neat little kind of go back. And then you can see in one of the tabs there, I've got a service called Glympse. Google Maps has recently added the capability to do something similar to what Glympse had done. And so we'll talk a little bit about that and kind of why that's important and what Glympse does. So let's just kind of jump right in. I'm showing everybody kind of an aerial view. I just went ahead and I just typed in the word home. I'm logged in to my Google account and it just automatically knows where I'm at because I have that as a saved place. When you open up Google Earth for the first time, it'll walk you through kind of a tutorial and then give you a high level, here's kind of some of the new things that are going on. So I've already gone through that process. So you'll want to make sure you pay attention to that, and it kind of shows you some things. But within the Google Earth now, I'm going to go ahead and just close this little card out. You have the ability to sign in with a Google account, which is kind of cool. And then any of the saved places that you have can be available. But you've also got different ways you can change the map style. You can add specific places to Google Earth. beyond just what you've got in your own Google account. There's a Voyager functionality that I think is kind of cool, and then of course search. So if I went in here and, I don't know, give me a place that you want to visit, Jeff. Let's travel the world and we'll just start with a basic search.

Oh, Amsterdam.

So we'll go to Amsterdam. In the Netherlands. So it zooms out from Michigan, pops over across the pond, and now we zoom into Amsterdam. What's one of the newer features about Google Earth now is as you're exploring these different areas, you can see that it's coming up with these little cards that give you some additional information about the destination that you've chosen. You can jump right to it. Of course, we're already there, so that really doesn't necessarily matter. I can go ahead and I can flag this and save it to my favorites. I can click on it to get a little bit more information, and that opens up kind of some additional details so I can learn about the area. And then you can see you've got points of interest. So if you're somebody that likes to travel but maybe doesn't have an opportunity to do it as much, there's a lot of other different ways. So if we wanted to just take a look at the Anne Frank House, We can click on that, and then that zooms right in. And you can see now as this renders, and it takes a little bit of a while for it to render, but now you can see the 3-dimensional component that exists. And on your mobile device, one of the cool parts about the mobile device is you can use your fingers on your screen, and you can change Kind of zoom right into the front door of the Anne Frank House, and you could— so I, I don't have an easy way of manipulating this on my computer screen. But you can see now that the actual— if you were on your mobile device, you could use your 2 fingers and swipe up or down to modify the perspective. And instead of looking at everything from an aerial view, you can now actually drop yourself down almost a street view and look directly at the building as you would as somebody that's walking on the street or driving by in a vehicle. And literally, it's, you know, be prepared to spend a good amount of time because once you find one area, it hasn't rolled out on all areas. So for example, my home, I don't have the 3D view on that, so there's no 3D rendering there. But in your bigger metropolitan areas and the places of interest, their satellite imagery has basically created this. And I don't know how— if they're blending Street View with Google Earth to create this 3D experience, but it's really pretty amazing. You'll notice that I clicked on kind of the other elements. So now you've got these cards that give you the ability to So if you've got children that are doing reports or, you know, you're planning a trip and you're going to be going to Amsterdam and you want to just kind of check out some of the things, you've now got the ability to kind of scroll through. So if Van Gogh, I can go ahead and click on that, brings up the Van Gogh Museum. And so now you can get a perspective of what else is around there. Really pretty mind-blowing. So I don't know if you previously had spent much time in Google Earth, Jeff, but if you haven't been here recently, my suspicion is this view is probably considerably more mind-blowing, I guess is the word that I can think of, than what it had been in the past.

Yeah, I'm actually following along. On my desktop and pretty awesome.

Yeah.

So I can see, I can see my house down to the chair sitting by the swimming pool. Yeah.

A little, somewhat a little spooky. And I think part of this conversation may end up going into privacy. You know, is it good that all of this is available for us with a click of a button. But the Voyager element is also kind of cool. So if you're kind of wondering, you know, what to do or where to go, the Voyager gives you the ability to kind of pull stuff in. So if I wanted to go to check out Machu Picchu or maybe I wanted to explore Paris, You know, I can go into Voyager, and this gives you some examples of where you would want to go. So if we pop back over to Paris, this kind of gives you an idea. And now instead of kind of expecting you to do your own kind of finding in these Voyager episodes, you can see that This has got kind of some other stuff. You've only got 1 day in Paris, you know, or 2 days or 3 days, you know, where would you basically want to spend your time? You can go in. This kind of gives you a list of all the different places that you may want to think about going to. And so when this opens up, you can click on the different links, check some different things out. So there's the Arc de Triomphe. And what's kind of cool, my wife and I actually had an opportunity to get to Paris a few years ago. And just, you know, hopping in and seeing some of this is actually bringing back some kind of cool memories. It's pretty mind-blowing what you've got the capability of doing here. So here's the Eiffel Tower. We were just in Vegas this past week for a quick trip and stayed at Paris and got to see the mini version of the Eiffel Tower in Las Vegas. So not nearly as large as the real one, but still kind of cool to check out. So if you haven't played around with Google Earth yet, again, I don't know as if there's a lot of legitimate business functionality around it unless, you know, you're planning a trip and you're going to be someplace for business and looking for some areas that you would want to spend some time in. But just the mind-blowing nature of what Google Earth now has the capability of doing. There's also a little dice where you can go in and you can basically just hit that and that's the I'm feeling lucky. Google has a similar function within its Google Search as well. And so they have brought that functionality to Google Earth. So now you can go in and you can just say, take me someplace. And who knows where this is going to go. And so I don't even know. Looks like we're someplace, I would suspect, maybe in Spain. And this shows my— woefully inadequate knowledge of global geography and important—

I ended up in Chile in my roll of the dice.

Yeah. So, yep. So anyway, kind of, oh, I'm going to the Serengeti. So I'm going to go to the Serengeti Plains. So, and then the last little item here, this little My Places, I did go out and I visited the Colosseum in Rome, and I went ahead and, and saved that. So if I just go in here and let me see. I think if I click on that guy.

Alright.

Remember when I said Freelander Wednesdays is live and sometimes things work and sometimes they don't? Well, here's a perfect example. All right, so the Coliseum. So maybe I've got to click on the little blue button. There we go. So apparently they work only when it's— the user actually knows what the heck they're doing. So— The bookmark did come up and you click on the little airplane to travel to the Colosseum. So that gets you there. So anyway, there's some cool places that you're looking to visit at some point in your lifetime. This might be kind of a neat way. And so you can go and zoom in and kind of get a pretty amazing view of what's going on in the area. So first little item there, Google Earth. Check it out. I think you'll find it kind of cool. The next thing that I wanted to share, and some people may realize that this is happening, some people may not. And I believe there are settings that you can turn this off. But you can see in my phone, and I use an Android phone, but if you've got Google Maps installed, you have the ability To turn on location history. It's under your settings. You can turn location history on. And when you turn on location history, it gives you the ability to have different places that you visited recorded, and then you can jump back to those. And you can tie in other— so if you've taken pictures, if you, you know, whatever it was that you were doing. And you can see recently, here's the trip that we just got back from Las Vegas, and Romulus is the area where the Detroit Metropolitan Airport is located. So Google has automatically created a little trip for me from Romulus to Las Vegas. And if we go ahead and we kind of click on that, that's just going to go ahead and it's going to pull up kind of where we were at, where we actually went. So it just kind of shows you all those kind of different things that were part of that trip and kind of travels through. So you can see— whoops. If we go here. So on Thursday, this is where we were Wednesday. On Thursday, we did travel. On Friday, we probably did a lot of walking around, went for a run. Saturday, I went out and did another run. So lots of walking around. So just can kind of give you the ability, and then you can see if I took a picture. I ran down to the Stratosphere, checked out the Circus Circus and Slots-A-Fun, which are kind of some of the old-school places, but kind of gives you a little bit of a running history of where you've been, almost like your little travel guide. So. If this freaks you out and you don't like Google knowing all the information about you and, you know, kind of having that information available, you'll want to double-check and make sure that this functionality is turned off. But for me, I've enabled it and it's one that I actually use. Every once in a while it'll come back and it'll ask me, were you recently here? Did you travel to this place? Because it's doing some checks. I've noticed Facebook has started doing that as well. If you've got location enabled on your phone, you go to a restaurant for dinner or you go to a park, Facebook will sometimes come back and say, hey, were you recently at, you know, Malia, or did you recently go to Pizza Hut? And it'll ask you, you know, do they serve alcohol? Are they open on the weekends? Is there enough parking? So they're starting to crowdsource some of the information that goes into these pages and allowing people to help contribute information back to those to kind of make the experience better for everybody. So I don't know if you've noticed that in any of the location-aware programs that you've been using, Jeff, where they'll come back and they'll kind of ask you some questions to confirm some data or get a little bit more information about the places that you're visiting?

I have not. Remember, I'm not using a Google device, but as you and I were talking on the, on the pre-show call, I do use Google Maps pretty much exclusively on my phone, but I have not been questioned about any of the locations.

Okay, so double-check and see. Whether or not you have location tracking turned on. Some people just turn it off by their nature, and if nothing else, today's webinar should at least make you aware that these apps are tracking you and wanting to know where you're at. You don't necessarily have to have an Android device. You may have the Facebook app installed and have given Facebook permission to monitor your activity and where you're going. And so if it's, if it's something that you're not comfortable with, just make sure you double-check the settings and kind of know what's going on in those, in those areas.

This is kind of funny. One of my favorite features that's been added to Google Maps in the last A couple months, I think. Of course, as most folks that tune in regularly know, you're the Android guy and I'm the iPhone guy.

Yeah.

I live very close to the border of North Carolina and South Carolina. And when I cross the border now, typically within a mile of crossing the border, Google Apps will say, welcome to South Carolina, or welcome to North Carolina. I said Google Apps, I meant Google Maps.

Yeah. Cool. So let's go into the My Maps. I want to share that as well. And if you've not created one, you can go to google.com/mymaps and it'll redirect you to this maps page. But when you create a map, You have the ability to search for different places. You can add them to pins. You can see we've started a map for customers and prospects and other friends of ours that live around the country. So as we travel, we kind of know where people are if we want to pop in for a visit. We've got some test ones that we've done here. You can see here's a trip that we did last year with some friends of ours, and we traveled up the coast of Lake Erie. We're going to go to Niagara Falls, but we ended up not because we started too late in the season and strangely enough, there weren't a lot of campgrounds in northern Ohio open towards the end of October. So we ended up heading back south. But this kind of gives you an idea. We were to go in and just create a new map. We can go ahead and give it a name. You can categorize the different pins. That you add. So, you know, let's say I wanted to, you know, add Disney World. I could go ahead and add Disney World in Orlando, and then I can add that to a map. It shows up over here. I can give that a name. So I can do vacation destinations and then click on save. I can go in and I can change the, you know, add different things. Let's say while we're in Orlando, I might wanna visit SeaWorld. So I can go SeaWorld in Orlando. Now SeaWorld shows up. I can go ahead and add that to the map. I wanted to visit Busch Gardens. So the cool part is you don't even really need to know the actual address. You just need to know kind of where that's at. It's pulling in some of the Google reviews. If you wanted to make some notes, so let's say you had a coupon code for Busch Gardens that you wanted to make sure that you could use, you can go in and you can click on the pencil. You can add whatever notes that you want here. If you took a picture, you could go ahead and you could add photos to this so you can kind of personalize it yourself. So if I just did Florida vacation spots, and then you can give it a little bit more descriptive information there. So we can go ahead and kinda zoom back out, and then that gives us our map of where everything is at. And then from here, you can create Driving directions. You can draw lines. You can add additional markers. You can create measure and distance. So it's kind of a cool little tool. You can also take this map and you can actually embed it in a website or you can share it with other people. So we're planning on going to Florida and we wanted Jeff to come down for a visit. I could actually take this map And I could add this and I could share it with him so that he'd be able to access it. I can control whether I can let Jeff add some spots. So maybe if Jeff says, well, there's a really cool spot in Lakeland that you might want to check out, or here's a place down in Kissimmee. So you can give other people the ability to contribute to that as well. So from a travel perspective, the My Maps are kind of cool and these are available. You can pull them up on your phone and you can get access to them that way. So kind of a neat little thing.

Can you go over again how to add My Maps? I haven't found that.

Yep. So if we go back to google.com/mymaps, now you may have to log in with a Google account. So if you're not logged in with a Gmail or an email account that's registered as a Google account. I'm using my G Suite account here for Powered by WSI.

But found it. I just did maps.

Yep, so my maps.

I just did maps and that didn't get me there. There you go.

So you can see anybody that's shared a map with you is visible. You can explore around to other maps that other people have shared. You can sort things. But now you can kind of get an idea of how to create a map, which is, which is kind of cool. So give that a shot. It's a very mappy day today on Free Webinar Wednesdays. So the next couple of things I want to talk about, and it's got somewhat of a cycling bent to it. In the sense that when I go out for a bike ride, we had an unfortunate situation in the Kalamazoo area. I think it was last year. We had several riders that were basically mowed down by a driver that didn't really have any business of being on the road, and unfortunately they were killed. And ever since then, anytime I go out for a bike ride, understandably, my wife is a little concerned just to make sure that I'm safe. And I keep an extra eye open on traffic, and I've been riding now with extra daylight blinkies. So I've got a red tail light and a white front light that blink and draw additional attention, just so that— you never know, somebody might be paying attention to their mobile device or whatnot. But one of the things that I had started doing even before that from a bicycle perspective is I had used an app called Glimpse that shares your location with other people and gives them an idea of what your approximate arrival is going to be. And I know that Glimpse actually got integrated into one of the messaging apps through Verizon, but this is a standalone app that you can use. I think this is one of the ones that Greg McPherson told us about a couple of years ago, actually. It's an app that you can install on Android or iOS, and you can use it to send somebody an email or a text message where they get a link that they can use to pull up your location, and it allows them to follow you while you're in transit. And when you send them a glimpse, you'll have the ability to determine how long you want to send them the glimpse. You know, if they have the ability to share it with somebody else. And, and so I've used that on a couple of occasions when I'm running late and I want to make sure Alicia knows that I'm on my way. So I'll send it before I hop in the car, and then that way she kind of knows where I'm at. And if I'm stuck in traffic or whatever the case is, it just kind of gives her an idea. So Google, and I believe Apple has a service It's probably a little bit easier to use from what I've heard from my Apple friends, and maybe I just haven't spent enough time in the Google Android platform to figure it out. But sharing your location on an iPhone, I think, is a pretty simple process. But you had mentioned, Jeff, that you use Google Maps quite a bit, and Google used to have a separate service called Latitude that was very similar to Glympse in the sense that you could take any of your Google contacts and you can share your location with them through Latitude and they can see where you're at. And they've since moved this over into the actual Google Maps functionality just natively. And so if we go over to maps.google.com, Okay. in the actual navigation menu, Now when you go into Maps, and if you're doing Google Maps on your phone, Jeff, you may want to double-check on your app on your iPhone if you'd like to. But in the menu area, you now can see that you can jump directly to Earth if you would like to. But they've just recently added this location sharing capability directly within Google Maps. So if you're already using Google Maps, and I kind of suspected that this would be the direction Google would go since everybody kind of uses Google Maps. And it was a little cumbersome to open up Google Maps to track my path to get home, but then also open up Glympse. Now you can do that all basically in one shot. So you can have Google Maps in place giving you directions to where you want to go, but now you also have the ability to turn on location sharing. And if the person that you're sharing the location with has a Google account, you can basically leave that location sharing on indefinitely. So I've got this turned on so that Alicia knows where I'm at. So now, and this kind of comes back to the bicycle example, while I'm out riding my bike, she can hop onto her phone and she can hop in and look at the location and she can see where I'm at, what my speed is, if I'm on my way home or if I'm on the other side of Marshall, and get a little little bit more sense of kind of where I'm at and how big of a ride I decided to go on. If it's not a Google account, I think the maximum that you can share is up to 3 hours. And you also have the ability, regardless of whether it's a Google account or a non-Google account, is you can set a time limit. So you can say, I only want to share my location for the next hour or the next 2 hours, and it'll go ahead and— Stop sharing your location after that's done. One of the programs that I use as a cyclist is a program called Strava, S-T-R-A-V-A. And in their premium, I guess, program or their premium subscription, they have an option in Strava where when you start your Strava timer and you go out for a bike ride, your friends on Strava, you can identify kind of emergency contacts. They'll get a notification that you've actually headed out for a ride, and they'll have the ability to track you. And so I'm seeing more and more kind of tracking, kind of live-time tracking capabilities. The good news is, you know, loved ones kind of know where you're at and they know what you're doing. The challenge, of course, is, you know, you launch Strava, you launch Google Maps, you've got an activity tracker that's monitoring your steps. You know, before you know it, you— I use charity miles to be able to collect donations. So when I take off to go for a run or a bike ride, I've got 3 or 4 little programs running in the background that are gobbling up battery capacity. So by the time I get to, you know, the 30 or 40-mile mark, unless I've got a little battery pack with me, I may end up burning through, burning through some battery. Which can be a little bit of a challenge. So, but this is kind of a cool little option where if you're already using Google Maps and you want to be able to kind of tie friends and family together a little bit more, be a little bit more location aware, I wanted to just make sure that everybody knew that the location sharing functionality now is available in Google Maps, and you can go ahead and kind of check that out. So here's where you can also get access to the timeline as well we talked about earlier. And then they've got a functionality where you can opt in to be what's known as a contributor. So if you visit places and you say, I want to be able to offer reviews and ratings and kind of feed content back in, you can opt into the contributor status. And that just gives you the ability to, I guess, be more involved in helping Google make sure that its information that it has about businesses and other organizations is as complete as possible. So, Jeffrey, had you ever used Glympse, or do you ever use any sort of a location sharing service in your travels? To let your doggies know when you're on your way home?

I don't tend to use location sharing services. If I'm meeting someone, the iPhone actually has a feature in the text messaging app that allows you to send your location to someone. I've used that. I was just looking at Google Maps, and I have to say I'm fascinated because I didn't realize it was tracking a history, but there's a history of all sorts of things that I've done over the last many months.

Yeah, and you're referring to the timeline?

The—

And it may not be called Timeline on mobile. It might just say History. So it wouldn't surprise me. But yeah, that—

Actually, I had not turned on Timeline, but what I was seeing history of was everything that I've used my phone for. Google Maps on my phone for over the last number of months.

Interesting. Hmm. So, so I guess, yeah, so I said it was probably gonna be a Maps day, and that's, that's kind of what it was. So just Take a trip. Head out. Go to Google Earth. One of the other elements, and I'm not totally comfortable, not that there's anything that I'm like ashamed of, but there's also the ability for you to find out from Google what your search activity has been. If you go to My Activity, you'll be able to get access of how often you're using like your Android device, what you're doing for search. No, this is, this is, this is okay. So I just, I pulled it up in another screen just to be safe because you never know. I might be shopping for a secret present for my wife or something, and I don't want the world to know that. But if you go to myactivity.google.com, You can see that some of the activity, what devices you're typically using, if you're using the search assistant, you can see visited Google Earth. So it's kind of tracking some of that activity. You do have activity controls there. So again, maybe more so from an awareness perspective that if you go to myactivity.google.com and you see things in there that you don't want Google knowing about you, or you're not comfortable with that, And granted, you know, you can only see the data. This isn't information that's being shared for the rest of the world, although it does fall under Google's privacy policy. And my suspicion is they have at least some high-level access to this information that is helping to enhance search. And we've talked about that in the past as well. I'm much more of an advocate of I would rather Google know that I'm going to be going to Las Vegas or I'm going to be going on an RV trip, so it presents me with relevant information around what it is that I'm going to be doing as opposed to just random stuff that actually has no bearing in my life. But some people are much more private and don't want anybody knowing what's going on. And if that's the case, I would suggest just don't use the internet.

Don't use the internet. Don't have internet access into your house. Yeah, yeah.

I think there was an episode we did a couple of weeks ago talking about internet service providers now being able to actually sell your data and your search activity, and even an incognito or private browsing session isn't going to protect you. So the days of privacy and whatnot, to a certain extent, have kind of gone out the window. So You just gotta, I guess, rethink the definition of privacy. Um, yep, as to what does it really mean.

They don't even send a person to read the electric meter and the water meter at my house anymore. I'm not sure if that's true everywhere.

Yep, yep.

So, uh, I actually was not familiar with this myactivity.google.com, and I'm looking at it. I actually find it really helpful.

Yeah. Well, and there's certainly some positives around that. You know, if you had looked up something in the past and you couldn't remember what was the name of that restaurant or what was the name of that store or what was the name of— and depending on your level of, I want to say commitment, but To the extent that you've given up your life to Google by using a Google account, by being logged in, I'm using a Pixel device, which is, you know, obviously Android, Google-focused. So in my history, I'm actually seeing things like what apps I've opened and when I looked at the clock on my phone and when I use my phone and when I use my phone. It even tells me what phone number I dialed. And so, you know, it's gathering a lot of that information for me. So it could definitely be seen as a positive, and you do have search capability within it as well. So if I wanted to go into my activity and kind of say, well, you know, when I was in Las Vegas, I took a picture, or I visited a restaurant, or or I went to a particular club, you could go in and when you search, it gives you the ability to filter out your search results. So let me go ahead and I'll just kind of pull this back over. But when I clicked on the search in my activity, you can see if I wanted to only look at news that I looked at related to Las Vegas or shopping that I had done or looking for specific videos that I had watched. You've got the ability to kind of, you know, filter out all that information and really kind of narrow down your digital life and see kind of where you were. So if nothing else, it would be interesting for, you know, you as the audience to kind of go through this and just see what Google knows about you and whether that makes you totally comfortable or freaks you out a little bit. Or maybe a little bit of both. So like I said earlier, I've pretty much given up to the Google overlords, and I know that they are— it's just an inevitability in my world. But some people may not be that comfortable.

I'm not quite as open with my information as you, but overall, I'm very similar. Yeah, so, um, will you do sort of a summary of some of the things that we've talked about? I've been making some notes and I got the myactivity.google.com. Uh, will you review the, uh, the creating maps and so forth?

Yep. So the, the first thing was the earth.google.com, and again, the first time that you visited on your desktop, you you'll get a tutorial that will walk you through some of the things that you can do. I would also suggest if you just go to earth.google.com on your phone, it will prompt you to go out to iTunes or Google Play and download the app. And then when you're in the app, it's gonna give you some even more creative ways of interacting and kind of checking things out. The timeline functionality, if you go to your Google Maps, And you go into— hit the hamburger and reveal. So this is the little hamburger menu here. You can go into your timeline and you can review that to determine whether it's been turned on and timeline is tracking your activity or not. So timeline is something that might be kind of cool to at least take a look at. The personalized maps can be found at google.com/mymaps. And then it'll redirect you to this maps/d, which I'm not exactly sure what that means, but google.com/mymaps. And then that will give you the ability to create a map. You can go and explore and you can check out other maps. So when we kind of scroll through, you kind of see there's different ways that you can convey the maps. So there's topographical, there's traditional Google, there's It's kind of a Google Earth style without topo added. So it kind of gives you some of that. You can kind of scroll through just to see what other sorts of maps might be out there. America's Highway Oral History, you can click on that. Kind of a— I don't want to say a low-tech version of Google Earth, but my suspicion is some of this data is probably finding its way into Google Earth. So kind of some cool things. Extreme places around the world, that might be kind of cool. So probably a lot of bungee jumping and other sorts of unusual places.

Just an FYI, Eric, this is going to make you smile. Google Earth for iPhone is not available yet.

Oh my goodness.

You're always bitching about not having an app on the Android. Well, You got to have an app first this time.

Wow, I'm amazed. So my regrets and apologies to the folks in iPhone world. So even, even when an Android or a Google service comes out, oftentimes it'll get released to an iPhone crowd first. So, so this is one instance where I've actually got a leg up on you, Jeff.

So yeah, when you, uh, go to, uh, when you go to, uh, earth.google.com on the iPhone browser, at least I'm using Chrome there, it gave me an opportunity to volunteer my email address to be notified when it's available.

Gotcha, cool.

Which is kind of funny because I'm signed in on the Chrome browser anyway, I guess, uh, They didn't really need to ask me for my email address.

Too funny. So you'll see an example while we were talking. I went ahead and I, I just pulled up the staff pick for extreme places around the world. And while not nearly as interactive and 3-dimensional as what you found with Google Earth, this does give you the ability to kind of check some things out. So you can see that there's one place that this map has identified in the United States as being an extreme place. So if I was curious as to what that was, you can click on these and then it kind of comes up. And apparently the Wave in Arizona might be kind of a cool little place to visit.

Arizona.

So, and then anybody that has taken photos at that location get crowdsourced into those and are made available. For other people to kind of check out. So that kind of gives you another way to do a little bit of armchair exploring and just kind of see what's going on. And apparently—

You didn't mention this. One of the things I noticed while this is loading, I'll talk about, is within maps, when I did have history loaded, if I had taken pictures that were uploaded to photos.google.com, they actually showed in my Google Maps history.

Yeah, and I think in my timeline when I pulled that up, it did have the photo of me kind of down at Slots-A-Fun and Circus Circus. So, but I may not have mentioned specifically how the timeline in Google Maps and location history were all kind of interconnected with one another. But yeah, you can elect to, if you have Google Photos, and that's a free service, so you can get photos for any device and synchronize those up with a Photos account. And as a Pixel user, I've got unlimited cloud storage for the native kind of full-resolution versions, but you can also allow Google to kind of res those down a little bit. It's still going to be a super good quality image. But Google will store those photos for you online through your Google account, and then you can elect to have location tagging turned on. It gives you then the ability to go ahead and see where you took those pictures and kind of travel back in time, check those out. So here's just a handful. Looks like the pictures have loaded up. So you can see the people that have taken the photo. So the names— looks like there's just a couple of individuals. But, you know, when you can kind of scroll around and check some of that information out, which is kind of cool. The last 2 items that I talked about was Glimpse. So it's a third-party app that you can use to share your location. I know, Jeff, you had mentioned that the iPhone makes that capable. You know, one of the messaging capabilities within Verizon has Glimpse. Or Glimpse-like functionality built within it. The native Microsoft— or not Microsoft, where'd that come from? The native Android app, I haven't seen where that's been available, but in Google Maps you can go in and you can actually share your location that way. And so then if you're in transit or on your way or just go out for a walk and you want your significant other to know where you're at and when you're going to be home, you can go ahead and do that and kind of create some So that's my recap. How was that, Jeffrey? Did you get your— you fill in the holes in your note?

I did.

Cool. Well, good. So, well, that puts a bow on another Free Webinar Wednesdays. So we'll finish just slightly early ahead of the 60-minute schedule, but hopefully we've shared some cool ideas and I'm curious to know if any of these are ones that you folks would use or are scared of or are already using, so feel free to let us know either in the comments or post a little note to the blog after we get the recording of today's show up at thefreewebinarwednesdays.com. So with that, I think I'm done. Anything, any parting comments on your part, Jeff?

Great information this week. And I will have to tell you some of the things that you shared last week. I have already become a big advocate of Zapier. I've got doing some cool stuff for me. And a couple days ago, I added the free version of Grammarly and really liked that. So yeah, you've shared some great ideas in the last couple weeks.

Cool.

Good deal.

Yeah, like I said, the new interface for Grammarly, I honestly thought they somehow got my credit card and upcharged me to the paid plan because it was giving me a completely different interface and actually pretty darn cool. So I'm glad that you've been able to put that to use. So, and if you're wondering what the heck we're talking about and weren't on the show last week, hop on over to freewebinarwednesdays.com and check out the apps and programs. To make your life easier. We talked about some cool stuff. So cool. All right, Jeffrey, always a pleasure, my friend. You have yourself a wonderful week.

And, uh, do the same.

Well, yeah, we'll look forward to seeing everybody else back here next Wednesday at 1 o'clock here on freewebinarwednesdays.com. Until then, have a great week, everyone. Take care. Bye-bye.