Ever wondered where are the bars, restaurants, hotels in the area of your residence? This Google Maps mashup called MashSpots will show you exactly where they are and even location address are provided when you click at a specific spot.

MashSpots is a newly launched Google Maps mashup that helps you to make the local search much more easier. You can post a query on the site and it will returns you with search results, and through a sidebar provided, there are up to eight (8) spots in a listing for you to choose from. Sounds useful, but the default search results might not the exact location you’re in now. However, you can always drag your avatar, i.e. Drag Me! to the position where you are in now, so the results are more relevant to your area.

Meanwhile, MashSpots has an iPhone Web application. In other words, the same search functionality would also be extended to your own iPhone.

GoodvBad is a newly launched site that used a little crawler called Andromeda to search for your query on the Web and then come out with a simple answer for your query whether it is good or bad. In a practically manner, it is a site that you would like to use it, in the event of gauging for public opinion, and the polls you’ve created did not attract enough number of opinions.

To gauge public opinion, the normal practice is that you need to create a poll. However, sometimes you want to know the answer as quick as possible, but not the hassle of creating and designing the poll, GoodvBad is the answer for you. However, I did not encourage users to use the outcome generate by this GoodvBad system as a reliable fact, since a simple “good/bad” is an abstract and there are many ways for us to conduct an even more reliable market research survey.

For the outcome of your query, any “good/bad” pie chart can be shared across the Web as an addthis widget, allowing you direct posting options to a number of sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc. The only limitation now is that you cannot use the chart and embed it on your existing sites since the embed code is not provided by GoodvBad at this moment.

The other day I stumbled onto this new Twitter third-party application, ChirpCity. Just as the site name implies, ChirpCity is a search engine that search the tweets posted by all the Tweeters and classified the search results according to the cities, as a way to keep track of the interesting stories happened in every city being sent via Twitter.

For users who search via ChirpCity, the popular city-specific navigation links can be found on the front page. You can search the tweets from one city and jump to another city. You also will read the latest Twitter-ing updates in a particular city even you have not been there before. With ChirpCity, you’ll be given easy access to the latest tweets from a city, or whom have tweeted about and the top Tweeters in that particular city. Furthermore, ChirpCity has a browser plugin, which is a IE7 and Firefox compatible that allows you to receive the latest tweets from the cities of your choice.

Though I like this kind of tweet search according to cities, I tend to believe that the quality of ChirpCity’s searches was vulnerable, because given the Twitter’s growing influence, some companies located in a particular city will tried to use Twitter to talk to their customers in order to build a brand, you’ll only find all the tweets from these companies instead of what you want to read in the first place due to the frequently tweet updates from these companies.

There are many people used Twitter right now, more than what I guess the guys behind Twitter envisioned when they first started it. On a personal level, I like Twitter very much, it’s hard to tell that I login several times a day just to know the interesting conversations that the Tweeters I followed and to keep track the useful URL links especially related to the topics that I have vastly interested with.

On rare occasions, when I read a tweet from a friend that I followed and she pointed out a good article, I thought that it would be nice if there is a feature such as ratings so I could rate it as a very useful tweet to a platform so that other Tweeters that they might not know me could read the tweet as well. This kind of concept of rate a good tweet – essentially the idea of rating a tweet as useful has already arrived. Tweeterate, which is a third-party Twitter application that built by a team of Web developers from Germany has built exactly what I have mentioned in the above.

What Tweeterate offers, after you logging in with your Twitter username and password, allows you to rate the tweets of your friends as useful, funny, and lousy. On Tweeterate, you also have the options to hide your friends’ tweets from the timeline, or even unfollow them, a bit harsh to say this. Other than this, Tweeterate also provides a chart where you can check your overall tweets as useful or funny in a useful/funny chart, finding this to be the most effective way of measuring your skill in writing your tweets overall. Meanwhile, to check out for the most useful Tweeters and most funny Tweeters, you can check it out at this top 50 list.

Embedr is a newly launched service that allows users to create a custom video embed code. A nice thing to try Embedr is that even you did not register an account with them, you still can test its embed features. In other words, if you are a user who simply want to embed your very own one video and really not bother to register another Web account, you’ll likely to appreciate this convenience.

There are two (2) types of video playlist embeds. You can either use the standard playlist or smart playlist. The standard playlist allows you to embed a unique video playlist with a grouping of 100 videos maximum, whereas the smart playlist is for the ease to embed YouTube videos via the generic keyword or your own YouTube account. If you want to embed YouTube video by using the generic keyword, you’ll find that Embedr will group a series of video clips that contain this keyword in your playlist. This prove quite useful in a scenario that the related video clips to the one you want to embed are showing in front as one of the video slideshow. After you embedding the video, the URL of the video playlist and the embed code is much shorter than the usual YouTube embed code.

Well, the embed feature of Embedr isn’t a revolutionary development on the whole. However, it represent a good video embedding service alternative to some video sharing sites.

The impact of current economic meltdown has cost million of workers lost their jobs. Many have still questioning that the worst of this financial crisis is yet to come. For the job seekers, though they still can find a wealth of job postings on the Web, but at this time, any job sites that listed numerous job listings should be paid close attention by them, as a reality check, any neglect this imperative will have to pay the price.

For the job postings that are centered to the technical side, there is a site called CoNotes that focusing heavily on matching job seekers and cool startups. I came across this job site via an email from this company itself in last year. It is a job site which is well connects startups with talented and passionate people. On the site, you can browse the jobs, and companies by location or by industry. Most of the job listings are US-based, makes me think that in such a financial crisis, many American companies are still suffering a shortage of engineering talent. Maybe this is cyclical, but the job listings posted on CoNotes mean that if you are really good, then you are worth to be fighting for in the job market.

For the company you would like to apply for a job, you can add it as favorite, or write a question as well as comment on it. Each company with a profile on CoNotes will have its own job vacancy section, contact information, and flexibility can be found as to users can add a description tag to the profile of the company. In addition to looking for jobs from the companies, you can run a simple search via keyword, type of job or occupation for the jobs you want to apply. Perhaps you found a job that you’re interested with, you also can connect to the people that working at that particular company by using the integrated feature rendered by LinkedIn. With LinkedIn, you can access to these people, asking questions about the company, culture or the job vacancy even before you submit your resume to them. On the other end, there is a News column, which is listed all the current news feed that are related to the companies listed on the site.

A great feature I like about CoNotes is that it has a job recommendation engine that works on every user’s profile. This engine is aims to be simplified the process of job finding on the site by providing three (3) suggested companies based upon your own personal profile. Initially, after you signing for CoNotes, it will instantly suggest you three (3) companies, probably based upon your years of working experience and your current work position so that you can focus on these three and looking for the positions they have opened. The longer you’re on the site, and based on your recently viewed jobs, the engine will know you better and will thus pull another three (3) different companies that are more suitably for your skill sets.

Meanwhile, CoNotes has started to provides internship listings for students as a completely free of charge to the potential employers in last month. Overall, I believe that CoNotes is a great platform for job seekers and potential employers (cool startups) to set up a profile there so that they can find a perfect match each other.

Update: This site is now powered by Simply Hired.