Google Local Business Center is now Google Places

Once again, I got a surprise logging into my LBC this morning.  Google has changed the name of "Google Local Business Center" to "Google Places."

This could mean any number of things.

• Is Google moving away from a "business only" concept for their listings?
• Are they changing the demographic they're going after
• Or is it simply that Google Places is less of a mouthful than Google Local Business Center?

Personally I think it's the last one.  Any thoughts?

Google Local Business Center How-to Webinar or You're Never Done Learning

I'm in the middle of Google's Local Business Center How-to webinar and I wasn't actually expecting to learn anything. I'm in the LBC many times throughout the day working on my customer's listing. I thought that I had a complete understanding of all the tools and tricks that you can use in it, but I learned something new today.

In the "Additional Details" section, website addresses that you enter in are live on the listing. The specific examples that they used were a link to a pdf menu and a link to a restaurant's "Reservations" page. While going back through some of my customer's listings, I noticed that I had done it by accident in one of my customer's listings, linking back to her old (not done by me!) website and domain name.

It's a cool trick with a lot of functionality. Now I have to go back and implement it for dozens of customers!

New Addition to Google Docs Suite - Google Drawings

I logged into Google Docs today, as I do everyday, and a little pop-up came up notifying me that a new type of document was now available: Google Drawings.

I've been playing around with it a bit today, as time allows, and, for me, the most useful application would be as a replacement for Visio. It comes with all the objects and many of the options that I used to get from Visio when I worked in it, albeit this was more than 5 years ago. I'm not up on the latest incarnations of Visio at all.

Another feature is that, like in all Google Docs, you can work on a drawing in real time with another user. I can see how this would be very useful for trying to develop a flow sheet with some of my overseas vendors.

Yet another cool toy from the folks at Google, and one I've been needing.

My Newest Timewaster - foursquare

I was doing my due diligence last week, reading up on the latest and greatest in Local Search when I came across an article about a cool app to put on my phone called foursquare. It's a game / tracking tool that you can use to track where you've been, leave tips about places, and follow where your friends have been. As you use the app you unlock badges, little rewards to motivate users to use it more often.

The thing that drew me in is this article that Google is crawling foursquare for local citations. The way this site is set up is tailor made to improve your local search results. The "Add Venue" option requires businesses to provide their name, address, phone number and a cross street. Local search lives or dies by a businesses NAP (name, address, phone number), and this is a strong place to put it.

On top of that, it's fun. The person with the highest amount of "check-ins" is declared the "mayor" of a place (I'm mayor of 2 currently) and you can compete with your friends, or track your results in comparison to the entire city you're in.

I'm in the process of making sure that all my customers' locations have been added to this site and I'm having fun in the process. What more can you ask for?