So we’re working on redesigning a few things to focus more on the ‘meme’ part of Location Meme. The site is going to be a bit quiet until then, but hopefully we’ll be able to share the changes with you soon! We really appreciate all of the great feedback, comments and tweets that you all have left us over the past three months, and we look forward to bringing you a great meme about location. Like our prose? Never fear, we’re continuing to actively blog about the social location graph with our friends over at The Next Web.

Yesterday Twitter released some usage statistics, saying that users produce 50 million tweets per day, or about 600 per second. That’s up from 2.5 million tweets a day at the beginning of 2009 (and 5,000 a day in 2007). So even though Facebook has many more active users, Twitter is producing quite a lot of content – and if you look through the eyes of location, they are currently blowing Facebook out of the water in geo-content. While geolocation enthusiasts have at the same time lamented the sorry state of geo-tagged tweets while remaining hopeful, we still see Twitter as the most logical platform for social location sharing to thrive. Read the rest of this entry »

You Think Foursquare is a privacy risk?  Try going to Harriton High School.

With the interwebs buzzing about privacy and location, we couldn’t resist pointing out one suburban Philly high school’s hamfisted and Big Brotherish attempt to spy on its students.

Here is what we know so far.

Harriton High gives out laptops to its students.

These laptops are equipped with remotely controllable webcams, allegedly for anti-theft purposes.

A student with one of said laptops got in trouble for “improper behavior” at home.  The evidence?  A photo snapped by his laptop.

The parents of said students have sued the school.

The FBI is now investigating.

Know what this sounds like to me?

Exactly. 
Read the rest of this entry »

We’re doing some research on SMS and location and wanted to ask you, our loyal readers (yes, we do have a few) if you use SMS to check-in and how frequently you use it. We’ll follow up soon with a post once our research is complete.

 Loading ...

Well we were going to have to talk about this at some point.

If you check in somewhere, you are presumably not home.

And if you are not home and that information is publicly available, someone with bad intentions could try and rob your home.

Oh.  My.  God.

To highlight this opportunity / risk, there is a brand new service called PleaseRobMe that aggregates public check-in data from the Foursquare API via a robber friendly UI complete with location and user name filters.

Does this signal the end of social check-ins?  Will Foursquare and Gowalla have to shift to the MyTown “check-in from the comfort of your own couch” model?

Read the rest of this entry »

As it does almost every year, TED has gotten people excited about the next big thing – and this year that next big thing is augmented reality. Well, actually it’s more likely to be the big thing in 2011 or maybe even 2012 (we would humbly suggest that check-ins are the big thing now). Nevertheless, when augmented reality finally comes to fruition in scale, more than any kind of apps, social location services will be propelled to new heights.

There are many reasons why this will be the case. First of all, as we have mentioned before, checking in will be a much more compelling experience once those check-ins are verified (and there will be less cheating going on for sure), preferably by interacting with the surrounding environment. Although this can be accomplished through other ways than high bandwidth augmented reality, other means will be much less compelling than this new medium, which means they won’t win out over augmented reality. Read the rest of this entry »

Foursquare Spamming (a desire to be mayor of the North Pole spins out of control)

Gowalla party at SXSW (check out the neat way you get VIP tickets – Chad and I will be there)

Tips for Small Business to Leverage Check-In Craze

Google Buzz has Pissed Off Canada (gulp)

Gowalla Global Leaderboard (couple of faces on both lists)

Foursquare Global Leaderboard

In one of our favorite Valentine’s Day posts of all time, Chris Dixon posted about the “geo stack” – a model for how to think about the various layers of the geolocation ecosystem.  According to Chris, the stack looks something like this: lat long detection > lat long translation (into venues, addresses, etc.) > user relationship (how to get consumers to share location) > recommendations (tips, reviews, etc.) > social graphs > monetization.  If you haven’t already, please click through and read the whole post – the comments are worth reading as well.

We’ve taken the liberty of trying to visualize this stack with a few tweaks and notes – for instance, we’ve included social graph in the “User Relationship” layer, and example companies who we see as competing at the various layers:

Read the rest of this entry »

This post was originally published on November 30, 2009 on Sexy Widget.

In light of our recent claim that Google Buzz is unlikely to kill Foursquare due to the check-in process being significantly more complicated, we thought the discussion around ease vs. proliferation was worth another look.

Conventional wisdom tells us that the easier an action is, the more people will do it.  It’s easier to write a blog than to publish a book, so there are more bloggers than published authors.  It’s easier to tweet than to write a blog post, so there are now more tweets than blog posts per day.  And of course, it’s way easier to read than write, so there are far more lurkers than participants.

This helpful pyramid from Clara Shih also reflects this behavior.  In the typical online community, there are more taggers / voters than commenters, and more commenters than content producers.  It’s hard work to write a blog post or a review, slightly less hard to comment on said post, and really not a big deal to vote / like / or tag that review.

Read the rest of this entry »

No, Plancast has not hired Owen Van Natta as its VP of Business Development (although there is a plan for his welcoming party). Nevertheless, Plancast is a hot startup – as well it should be, because essentially the idea is what we consider to be half of a location-centric social network.

If you are not familiar with Plancast, it’s really a simple idea that is executed extremely well. A user creates a “plan” which is just “what, when and where” and then anyone (assuming it’s a public plan, which almost all are) can just click a “count me in” button and then join that event. The best part about Plancast is its seamless integration with Facebook and Twitter, not only that it allows you to sign-in/sign-up with these services, but that it broadcasts (hence the ‘cast’ in the name) your plan out with a #plan hastag and a link to the plan. Lots of people have been comparing it to event services such as EventBrite or Twtvite (the later of which is another dead simple but extremely well done app), but we see it differently – we see Plancast as a location app, one that, if combined with a check-in type service such as Brightkite, could form the first true location-based social network. Here’s how. Read the rest of this entry »