Cool. Creepy. Google in your browser, in your email, in your phone, on your TV, in your car. 

I wonder at what point Google will start to face serious antitrust pressure from the Department of Justice. Would you bet on it? I would. It seems like it's just a matter of time now. Sometimes I wonder if their embrace of open source software is entirely genuine, or merely a strategic position to help mitigate antitrust pressure. I'm guessing it's probably a little bit of both, and I'm wondering if it will work.

Service areas: If you travel to serve customers, you can now show which geographic areas you serve. And if you run a business without a storefront or office location, you can now make your address private.

A new, simple way to advertise: For just $25 per month, businesses in select cities can make their listings stand out on Google.com and Google Maps with Tags. As of today, we’re rolling out Tags to three new cities — Austin, Atlanta and Washington, D.C. — in addition to ongoing availability in Houston and San Jose, CA. In the coming weeks we'll also be introducing Tags in Chicago, San Diego, Seattle, Boulder and San Francisco.

Business photo shoots: In addition to uploading their own photos, businesses in select cities can now request a free photo shoot of the interior of their business which we'll use to supplement existing photos of businesses on Place Pages. We've been experimenting with this over the past few months, and now have created a site for businesses to learn more and express their interest in participating.

Customized QR codes: From the dashboard page of Google Places, businesses in the U.S. can download a QR code that’s unique to their business, directly from their dashboard page. QR codes can be placed on business cards or other marketing materials, and customers can scan them with certain smartphones to be taken directly to the mobile version of the Place Page for that business.

Favorite Places: We're doing a second round of our Favorite Places program, and are mailing window decals to 50,000 businesses around the U.S. These decals include a QR code that can be scanned with a smartphone to directly view the mobile Place Page for the business to learn more about their great offerings.

If you have a local retail business, I can almost guarnatee this is the best $25/mo you can spend.

Wondering how that barista knew your name before asking you? Check-in-based social networking game Foursquare has taken another step toward relevancy by adding analytics tools for businesses that participate. The new dashboard feature, still in alpha testing, gives data such as total number of check-ins, unique visitors, gender comparisons, and breakdowns by time. It also shows how people are sharing (over Twitter, for instance) and can differentiate between customers and staff members.

It's not that hard to imagine the barista in a coffee shop running this dashboard while you're in the shop and knowing how (and where) you spent the rest of your day. And you better hope that you don't attract the attention of a real creeper, because he or she will pretty much be able to know everywhere you've been and all the places you like to go.

I think I'm going to start checking in at strange places, late at night, just to throw people off. I can be the Foursquare bandit—dominating Wall Street late at night. Maybe there's a special badge for that.

A fully interactive map showing everyone who follows BBH Labs (@bbhlabs) on Twitter. Also visualized as a heatmap.

Twitter is still something of a mystery to those of us in advertising and marketing. Everyone thinks they need to be on top of it, but no one is completely sure now to use it. Even fewer people have an idea of how to measure whether or not they’re using it effectively. Most of the time brands think about Twitter like this: Create an account, start tweeting, and then measure success by looking at how many followers we have. But that doesn’t tell you the whole story. In fact, that tells you almost nothing.

Here's a little something I wrote up about how to use the Twitter API and Google Fusion Tables to draw insights about those who follow you (and others) on Twitter. It's amazing how much data is publicly available, and the kind of analysis you can do with a few lines of code. If you ever wanted to know how to map 12,000 points on Google Maps, this is your chance to learn how.

Gelocation information provided by modern mobile devices puts analytics data into an entirely new context. Not only do you know what someone did and when, but now you know where. I'm particularly intrigued to see how these kinds of APIs develop in the future, and at what point brands start using public API data to aggressively target their competitors consumers in a very hostile manner. We aren't far away from the breaking point where you can challenge massive incumbent brands by targeting their most vocal consumers right outside of their house.

Developers looking to prove a point about the information people are sharing on social networking sites have unveiled a new tool called Please Rob Me. It hunts out tweets from people who are also using location-based services telling the world that they're out of town, and then directs the world to go rob their house. The creators of the site said: 'Don't get us wrong, we love the whole location-aware thing. The information is very interesting and can be used to create some pretty awesome applications. However, the way in which people are stimulated to participate in sharing this information is less awesome.' How long until the first actual robbery takes place?

I love this concept. Let me say that again: I LOVE this concept. Props to Barry Borsboom for going out there creating it.

I love geolocation, but the idea behind Foursquare is a bit, well... dumb. Broadcasting where you are to everyone? Why? Why would you do that? It seems like one of those things that people did just because they could, never stopping to think about whether or not they should. Foursquare would operate just fine if it was mostly anonymous, or if only your friends new where you were.

Just look at Google Latitude. Google Latitude shows your location without even having to check in. On BlackBerry and Android based devices it can operate in the background, constantly updating your location in real time. I've been using it since I switched to a BlackBerry and I think it's incredible. You can literally watch people as they roam around the city. But the difference is that it doesn't broadcast it out to everyone, only the people you choose. There isn't even a public setting, because (I suspect) Google realized that would be a pretty dumb feature.

I have a feeling that most people don't care. They just want to broadcast everything, all the time. If you put QR codes in bathroom stalls that did nothing but tweet that you were taking a dump, I venture that most people (who knew what they were) would use them. Hey, that gives me an idea for a toilet paper company...

Currently wiping my ass with with Charmin Ultra Soft at Kaffe 1668 - Tribeca (275 Greenwich St, New York) w/3 others!

Brilliant, Aaron. Brilliant.

I was talking to some of the Big Spaceship crew the other day about the idea of location based ad server. It was sort of a, "Why doesn't this exist? We should build it."-kind of conversation. I figured that Google probably had a few teams dedicated to this sort of thing. I started looking into it and it turns out they do.

When users pull up your business listing on their mobile phone, they'll see a section that lists the available coupons. They can then click to find a specially-formated page which shows all the coupon details they need for redeeming it. Now even when customers are on the go, they can see all the great values and offers available from your business.

Google's been doing paid listing and advertisements in Google Maps for a while now, but I didn't know they had a coupon system like this. There's a lot of room to explore with location based ads, and it's something I've been thinking about for a while now too. I think one of the problems with Google's implementation thus far is that it's so hidden. I'm not sure if there is an API for this, but an application which consists of location-based coupons could be quite compelling, especially if the offers being made were time sensitive (i.e. Come over to Starbucks in the next 20-minutes and get a tall coffee for 99¢."