Geo-blogger Glenn at the GIS user blog shares his new passion for the Google Phone and the Twitter apps for Android. Personally, I haven’t found an app on the market that provides a positive twittering experience, but I have a little tweak to share that combines two Android apps in a geolicious way!

First, install MyTracks, the GPS track recorder from the Google team. If you jog for example, use this app to record your track every time, and compare your performance through the Google Spreadsheets the app generates for you. Your phone just turned into a physical performance booster there

Once you got MyTracks up-and-running, install Twidroid, the twitter app for Android. If you are like me and you do not like the noise of Twitter apps, go in the settings and turn off the notifications from your friends.

Now that you have those two apps running on your phone, next time you do your jogging around the park, here is what you will do:
Record your track - Hit ’share maps with friends’ in MyTracks - Select Twidroid.

Once Google generated a map for your track, Twidroid sends it right away to your Twitter stream, notifying your followers of your performance of the day. You could be more precise in your tweet, by adding “san francisco, dolores park, jogging’ in your tweet for example, so that other tweeps jogging in the same area can find you.

I find this app combo to be super easy to use, and also a real life-changer if you have been looking to hook up with other people on Twitter around outdoors activities.

To push this combo a bit further, let’s say that you want to share this map with a friend that has a Facebook profile, but no Twitter account. No biggie. Just install the Selective Twitter Status app on Facebook. Next time you recorded a track you want to show to your Facebook friend, just send him a shout out the way I described above, and add #fb at the end of your tweet.

I have tested it and it works wonderfully well.

About two weeks ago, Google launched the MyTracks application, which purpose is to track your whereabouts through your smartphone, and share this itinerary through a Google Maps or a KML file.

In a more recent discussion, Corvida from Shegeeks writes about the importance of location-awareness services. She states:

“With money becoming tight around households it’s no surprise that people may be spending less time traveling from city to city and more time exploring the options available in their own city thanks to the “recession”. [...] With people venturing out more in their own city, they’re more likely to use location-awareness services to find new events and venues to explore.”

In other words, when short on cash, we tend to look for the closest and most affordable solutions for our daily consuming needs. A geolocation search is the appropriate tool for this type of demand, and today’s well-geolocated businesses are grabbing an increasing number of market shares. If you are a professional and seek to grow your geolocated presence, consider these powerful tools to successfully reach your objective. They will help you build a strong presence on Google Maps.

Another one of Corvida’s bullet point about the importance of location-aware services is the resulting social networking potential. I am not entirely convinced by the ‘meet-new-people-in-your-area’ potential of location-awareness services, unless it is in a given context like a conference or a concert. However, I believe that mapping your whereabouts - with MyTracks for example - is a way to bring people closer in a more meaningful way.

Here is an example: My wife lives on the other side of the globe, and we also have an 18-month-young son. For practical reasons, my son is now staying with me in San Francisco where he was born. There is no need to say how tormenting it is for the mom to have her little boy live 5576.4 miles away from her. Thanks to new Web technologies, it is becoming easier to be constantly connected to one another, share our daily activities, and therefore feel closer to one another.

The location-awareness tool MyTracks dramatically helps us enhance this long-distance connection. Tonight, I took my boy on a walk around my neighborhood. I turned on the MyTracks app on my phone, and slowly headed to the Safeway to purchase diapers. When I got home, I stopped MyTracks and sent the itinerary to my wife by email, with a little message attached saying: ‘hey Mommy, I went for a walk with Daddy, here are all the places I saw today!’ With the Streetview feature, my wife can literally replicate our walk around the neighborhood. Now isn’t that the most value you can get out of location-awareness services?

Here is the itinerary:

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