Greetings, everyone. Congratulations if your team/country/whatever won the World Cup. It’s over, right? It was impossible to do anything online without running into a billion Qatari construction horror stories for a while there, and we haven’t seen any of those in at least a week. We aren’t big soccer people at Local Viking, but we are aware of its apparent popularity in those parts of the world that have adopted the metric system. We’re throwing all of your centimeter lovers a bone to respond to a few people who think we focus too much on the United States.
This week’s newsletter mostly has Local Viking and Local Brand Manager updates. For those of you who have already embedded our GeoBooster javascript snippet on your websites, you should know that we just updated it. The code is shorter and more powerful now. It will simplify your life. You’ll need to remove the existing snippet and paste the new one in to take advantage of this, of course, but that should be easy. You just did this. There’s nothing new to figure out.
We’re also going to add some UI that allows for category and state filtering next week.
Another thing worth pointing out is that our GeoGrid searches are working the way they’re supposed to. They have been all week. The same cannot be said for competitor platforms with similar functionality. Surviving an assassination attempt by a tech giant makes you think long and hard about how to code functionality in a way that doesn’t topple over in the face of external disruption. We’re not naming names and we’re not (explicitly) saying we’re better than anyone. We’re just stating facts here.
A bunch of people have asked us to take a hard look at the Twitter Files. The requests we’ve had about this are frankly unprecedented. We get a decent amount of feedback when we send out a good newsletter, but getting asked to cover a topic is something that doesn’t happen often. For this, we got emails to our team email account, personal email, Discord DMs (how did you people even find me?), unrelated work email addresses, you name it. It was just wild.
Here’s the thing. No. Just.. no. We bend over backwards to be as politically ambiguous as possible. We can’t figure out a way to do that with this topic. All we can say is that we think it’s absolutely bananas that Matt Taibbi is getting attacked for being some kind of right wing stooge. Read his books. We have– all of them. Characterizing him that way is categorically ridiculous.
The Google Local Guides YouTube channel put out its first video in like two years on Wednesday. Even if you’re not a Local Guide yourself, it’s probably not a bad idea to watch it. A lot of you will find it somewhat remedial, but there are a few worthwhile Google Maps tidbits in it. Here’s the link.
One last thing to make everyone aware of is that we’re planning a fairly long form year in review newsletter that you’ll all get in a few weeks. It’s going to cover a lot of this year’s biggest stories: the Metaverse, the Twitter ownership transition, ransomware, data breaches, Apple’s privacy enhancements, and more stuff like that. We’ve had to rush the newsletter more often than we’d like to lately and hope to make up for that with something pretty substantive.
Like we mentioned last week, you can find this newsletter on the Local Viking blog from now on. That’s all for now. Have a great weekend. We’re going to.