How about a service that gets you the directions and list of places in an SMS? Does that interest you? Then LatLong would be the ideal choice.

LatLong is a Indian-based startup that basically offers you routes and directions on the map of the city. So how is it different from the other big alternatives such as Google Maps or Yahoo! Maps? LatLong is not just a map service, it can list out restaurants, petrol bunks, and shops (amongst many others) in any particular area (that’s right, not ‘city’, they’re narrowing it down to the area). You can then choose to lookup the route to these places, or send them an SMS asking them to send the list of places and the directions to them.

As an example, I asked LatLong to find me a petrol bunk in the area that I live. As you can see from the screenshot below, it correctly displayed all of the petrol bunks available in my area.

LatLong also works as a stand-alone SMS based service. Users can send an SMS “help” to 9008890088 to start using the service. The best part is, unlike most of the SMS services that require you to send SMS to a 5-digit premium number, LatLong’s number is local. So those of us with free SMS plans can conveniently message them and get back answers, FREE. You can try out a demo here.

Unfortunately, since the startup is still small, LatLong is currently operating only in Bangalore and Chennai, with plans to include Mumbai by next month. Another drawback is that their website is quite slow in responding to queries, and the SMS service takes at least an hour or more to send out replies. We love the service, and we’re sure that it will be a hit in the upcoming weeks.

Check out LatLong on the web or send “help” to 9008890088 to get started.

Twitter2GTalk is a great way of showing your latest tweet as your GTalk status. The service takes your last tweet and shows it up as your GTalk status, albeit a few minutes later.

All you need to do is to login to their site with your GTalk login and enter your Twitter username in the settings page. It doesn’t even ask for your password. So feel free to spread the word about @hgeek =P

P.S. – see the email address in the image? Feel free to add me on GTalk anytime if you want to. =)

Wanted to check if a particular Twitter user was following you or any other user? Here’s how. My friend Lakshman Prasad, also known as @scorpion032, has written a small application that checks whether a given user is following another specified user.

The application, hosted over at Appspot, allows you to specify a Twitter username and check if that user is following another user that you specify. Check the following screenshot to understand better.

Twitter-Follow @Appspot.

Tired of Twittering? Or too lazy to write a 140-character tweet? Hey, don’t worry, you’re not alone. There’s now a dedicated website setup to generate random status messages that you can use as not only tweets, but as Instant Messenger status messages as well.

Social Status Generator is a website which generates messages based on tags that you choose from their cloud. For example, check out the following status message generated for the tag “food”.

(Yes, I find it quite amusing that my display picture was incidentally of Stewie Griffin’s. The status message is quite like what he would say. Family Guy FTW!)

Why wait? Go generate some wacky status messages over at Social Status Generator.

With the elections approaching fast, and the need for a neutral news reporting service, Yahoo! India has launched a new website (elections.yahoo.in) filled with all the latest news, trivia, and schedules.

the BJP

The site includes the election schedule, along with comments and quotes from all the politicos.

You have a picture. It’s not that interesting. Of course, a picture is a lot better than a thousand words of text. But still, the picture isn’t up to the mark. You want to spice up the picture. Add a funny speech baloon or two. That’s fine, but then, it’s rather painful to keep adding a speech baloon every now and then, isn’t it?

Meet SayTweet. SayTweet makes the best use of your photo and your latest tweet.

SayTweet lets you upload a picture (or link to one available online), tag the people with the their twitter user ids, and creates a canvas – your original picture plus the latest twitter update in a speech bubble. Now the awesome part is that this picture is dynamic, and the speech bubble is updated to your latest update from twitter!

So what’re you waiting for? Headover to SayTweet, upload/choose a picture and create a canvas of your own!

Have Fun!

See what we at Harmless Geek have cooked up!

Presenting StatusHQ.com – a new web startup that makes it easy for you to keep up with your own groups. It could be basically said as Twitter+BrightKite for firms/professional groups/closed user groups. It has got 4 plans to choose from : 3 paid plans ($40-$10) and a FREE plan. You can have a maximum of 5 members in the group for the FREE plan, and you can have more than one group.

Status is part of a new trend of LIGHTER communication tools. When you need to get up to date with your group, a single screen shows what everyone is doing and where they are. This means you can stay in touch on your own terms, without using heavy attention-stealing tools like email.

Updating/checking in could be done in 5 ways:

• Web UI
• SMS
• EMail
• MAC DashBoard Widget
• iPhone app

I tested it with creating a group for the lovable geeks here at HarmLessGeek and here are some screenshots that’ll give you the feel.

StatusHQ  is suitable for web startups, organized freelancers Music Bands and the like. If you ever need a solution to keep up with your group, look to nothing other than StatusHQ.

Cli.gs is a new URL shortening site that not only shortens your URL, but also provides detailed analytics about your “clig”.

Once you create an account, any future cligs you make will show up in your ‘My Cligs’ page where you can then see detailed stats of the clig like the referring sites. It will even show you references of your clig on social media sites like Twitter.

You have total control over your clig. You can give it a custom name, create a duplicate, or even delete it.

We need to share paragraphs or little pieces of text every now and then. Sometimes we Twitter, and sometimes 140 characters are just not enough. This is where a text sharing site comes into play.

We have made a small list of what we believe are the best text sharing sites today. From German to Indian, we have three sites that we think you might love. Take a look.

Text Save.de

Text Save is a German site that kind of looks Web2.0-ish, but really isn’t. It does what it is supposed to do pretty well, but does not present a hyperlink that can be easily copied. Instead, you have to manually select the text (URL) and copy it.

TinyPaste

One of the first text sharing sites that we came across. We Harmless Geek authors used it quite a lot, especially since we were new to Twitter and kept breaking the 140 char barrier. TinyPaste was popular among us, it provides a Firefox plugin and all, but that was before we came across its probable killer, and our primary text sharing site, Txtb.in.

TxtB.in

Txtb.in is my personal favourite site, not because it’s Indian, not because a cool friend made it, but because it’s really simple to use and the finished URLs are clean and small. We absolutely LOVE it.

Yesterday we wrote about Copy Paste Character.com, a site that lets you copy special characters to your clipboard with ease.

Today, I came across TwitterKeys, which basically does the same function as Copy Paste Character.com, but provides a lot more special characters. Again, this can be pretty useful on a site such as Twitter. =D

You need to double click the character, and then press Control + C. You can then paste the character on Twitter or any other site that supports UTF8.

Here’s the link.