Demo Girl

Facebook Places gives you a way to virtually check-in to real life locations and see if any of your other Facebook friends are nearby. The catch? You need to have an iPhone or your mobile browser must support HTML 5 and geolocation. The other catch?  By default “Places” is enabled in your Facebook privacy settings so even if you are just testing it out you need to check who you’ll be sharing this data with first – unless you don’t care.

It’s a simple fix but something I felt should be addressed. What better way than with a screencast!  To learn about Facebook Places and see how to update your privacy settings, watch the screencast below:

When I’m searching for the best airline tickets I usually head to multiple search engines and travel sites where I spend hours comparing flight times, connections, prices, dates and alternative airports. I do all of this because I want to not only get the lowest price, but I also want to get to my destination at a certain time without dealing with long layovers and multiple connections. Yesterday, when I found Hipmunk, I was pleasantly surprised to find one site that filters all of my concerns into one search to help me find the very best flight for my money.

Just enter in your flight details and hit “search”.  Hipmunk will find the best overall flights for you based on price, duration, and number of connections.  The results are placed on a visually pleasing graph making it easy to remove certain flying times and allowing you to further filter your results by price only, duration, and departure or arrival time.

My favorite feature of Hipmunk is tabbed searching.  You can keep multiple tabs open within Hipmunk so you can easily compare different airports or dates, which is what normally kills me when looking for the best airline tickets.

To learn more about Hipmunk, watch the screencast below:

[via TechCrunch]

On most days I find myself using at least 3 different Google accounts, and with that comes the hassle of logging in and out of each one separately. Normally what I end up doing is logging into one account on Chrome and one on Firefox but somehow, and this really annoys me (or it used to annoy me), I would begin editing a Google Document, forgetting that I was signed into a different account in Gmail, and then I would suddenly get the little pop-up “you are not signed into this account. No changes have been saved. Please log out and log into this account”… or something like that.

Thanks to newly released Multiple Account Sign-in, I think those days are over.

It’s pretty simple to set up – and you can learn how by watching the 2 minute screencast below:

Rapportive is an extremely useful plug-in for Gmail (Chrome, Firefox and Safari) that pushes the online Web activity of your contacts, right into your Gmail sidebar.

Every time you click on an email Rapport will replace the Google Ads in the right sidebar with your contacts photo, occupation and links to various social networks.   Anything that has been made public on the Web can be added to the Rapport.  You can also add notes about the person that are visible only to you.

After I first installed Rapport I figured I was going to have to wait and see how many of my contacts signed up for it before I would begin seeing their info in my sidebar – but that’s not the case.  If it’s public on the Web then it’s fair game for Rapport.  When I looked up my profile on Rapport I found my photo, occupation, a link to my Twitter account, my Google profile and my LinkedIn profile.  If someone is using Rapport and I send them an email then they’re going to automatically have links to places on the Web that I want them to see.  If I was trying to hide something then it wouldn’t be public in the first place.  Of course, once you install Rapport you have the option of going in and updating your public Rapport profile where you can choose to add or remove anything you want.  All in all I think it’s a great tool that I will continue to use.

To see Rapport in action, watch the screencast below:

The original DemoGirl is very busy planning the wedding of the century, and she’s got a long list of things that need to be handled. One Web site she might want to check out is Divvyus — the site offers a simple application where you can quickly create a shared task list.

There is nothing to sign up for, but you must keep track of the URLs for your Divvy (as the lists are called). You’ll receive a public URL that can only be used to claim tasks and mark them as done. You will also get an admin URL where you can edit, add or claim tasks.

Divvyus might be helpful for my baby sister…um, I mean for DemoGirl to start delegating those wedding tasks.

To see Divvyus in action, watch the screencast below: