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. 
This is eerily similar to the webcam equipped jackets the aliens gave to human volunteers in the TV show “V,” in order to spy on the resistance.

Are we saying that the administrators from Harriton High in Lower Merion County are aliens?

At this point, we have no comment.

When we read stuff like this, it gets a bit tougher to give Foursquare a hard time for allowing you to knowingly, with your explicit consent, publicly share your location.

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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?

Probably not, but it is forcing very young services to handle sensitive PR issues early in their development.

Anybody who uses social media a lot knows that there are plenty of ways you can get yourself in trouble by oversharing.  Tweeting about those difficult term sheet negotiations.  Posting pictures of yourself in drag while at a Tea Party rally.  Threatening people.

But the stakes are a little higher with location because there is such a direct real world tie in.  Making an effort to minimize those risks without scaring away new users or throttling growth will be a difficult, sensitive challenge for these tiny start-ups.

Of course the risks exposed by PleaseRobMe are probably a bit overstated.  Access to perfect information isn’t the only factor that prevents people from becoming robbers.  There’s stuff like the law, ethics, competence, laziness, etc.

Plus, about 90% of the population leaves their home on a regular, predictable basis to go to work, which isn’t generally considered a security risk.  And many people who are checking in have roommates.  And pity the poor robber who tries to rob Krazy Dad because of an inside tip he was at the North Pole.  Etc.

Security and privacy issues have been raised before in regards to social check-ins.  On this blog, Chad has talked about the “creepy line” when you combine friending and location, and there was also the location based service suicide chatter.

But the questions raised by PleaseRobMe are good ones and represent the most aggressive, direct communications challenge for the social check-in space yet.  Clearly these questions were going to have to be answered eventually if social check-ins had any chance of going mainstream.

Here’s to hoping that Foursquare and Gowalla do a good job of handling this little media firestorm.

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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.

In Person over Remote

Secondly, while it will be possible to sit at a laptop to view locations anywhere (indoors and outdoors) with augmented layers, this medium really comes into its own when it enhances the user’s interactions within their immediate vicinity. So while playing with augmented layers over Street View in Beijing from a coffee shop in Berlin will be fun, walking around Beijing with a augmented reality capable phone will be more beneficial, immediate and most importantly social for the user. Walking in to the Forbidden City with your phone, checking in, and then searching the palace for Foursquare badges (or maybe even seeing other users “wearing” their badges), is going to be much more fun than sitting thousands or even a couple of miles away and trying to do something similar from a laptop. Other kinds of augmented reality could also be activated when a user is physically present – wouldn’t you like to shake the hand of the emperor?

Fun over Utility

Which leads us into another reason augmented reality and location services are a perfect fit. Many of the currently popular social location apps are popular because they are fun – utility is at best right now a side effect. And while there will be many utilitarian uses of augmented reality, first and foremost people will want to have fun with it, therefore gravitating to those apps that offer gaming elements over more serious uses. As we mentioned above, a clear example would be Easter egg hunting for badges and other virtual goods (which is basically what Gowalla is in an un-augmented app world). Gaming and virtual goods have proven to be tremendous business models and it will come as no surprise to us if the first wave of augmented apps are mainly games. Of course, in this case, Foursquare and Gowalla may have to compete with Zynga and Tencent and others, but even though those giants have the edge in online gaming and virtual goods, location-savvy startups should be able to level the playing field with better location-aware apps.

Check-in activated advertising

On the topic of revenue (such a pesky topic, isn’t it?), the inevitable revival of display advertising in augmented reality another major source of income for location apps. Step into a baseball park, check-in, and watch signs pop up to give you discounts on hot dogs, beer and peanuts. It won’t really matter if those signs are already there in real life – the augmented ones will have high conversion rates so they will be there (possibly even overlaying the actual physical sign). Virtual signage that only appears when a user checks in will continue to drive the desire to check-in (whether manually or through auto verification), although we fully expect that there will be plenty of augmented signage just hanging in the air whether users check-in or not. That said, current location apps that continue to build relationships with venues should have a step up over newer entrants on securing augmented advertising deals.

Are they ready?

Finally, we wonder whether or not current location apps are ready or willing to tackle augmented reality functionality. Of course, augmented reality will need an ecosystem to truly thrive, but some of the examples we gave above, such as hunting for prizes or viewing other users’ badges can be completely within the control of the apps themselves. Perhaps this functionality will not come from the startups themselves, but through developers using APIs. Regardless of where it comes from, however, apps that combine what’s great about location apps with the seemingly unlimited potential of augmented reality, should do very well indeed.

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:

If you are working on something in the geolocation / social check-in space, you may find it helpful to think about where you fit into this stack, and what you need to do to stake and defend your claim in what is rapidly becoming a very competitive area.

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.

Current media darling Foursquare is built around an action that is even simpler than commenting or tagging – Checking in.  On an iPhone, a Checkin is just a single tap of the phone.  If other patterns of UGC participation are any guide, a community built around a single tap has a better chance of going mainstream than a community built around a more in depth behavior like writing an article.

But is there any value in the content created by a single tap of the phone?  On Foursquare, yes.  My Checkin tells my friends where I am.  It tells the business that I am a customer.  That Checkin gives the (awesome) future me a historical list of the places I’ve been.  And on the aggregate, those Checkins tell Foursquare what places are hot at
any given time.

One little tap can carry a lot of data.

By now, if you’re like me, you are probably thinking about how you canlet folks check in to your web service.  And taking a quick look around the social media landscape, there are plenty of Checkins to be found.

You can Checkin to a place: companies like Foursquare, Gowalla, and the mysterious DoubleDutch (my current project) are all over this.

You can Checkin to a piece of content on Facebook: try “liking” something in your newsfeed.

You can Checkin to a product: try clicking “I want this” on GDGT.

You can Checkin to a link: just click it.

And on and on.

Checkins are easy, fast, lightweight, and most importantly, are a data point tied to a larger intention.  For Foursquare, a Checkin represents a person’s connection with a local business, their location, and probably an indication of a dollar spent.  For Facebook, a Checkin is a signal of the content preferences of the “liker,” a newsfeed story in its own right, and a gentle, hugely important tap of encouragement for the content creator.  For Google, a
Checkin is revenue, a signal of content quality, and on the aggregate, a view of how the world surfs the web.

The dirty little secret of User Generated Content has always been that a tiny percentage of the population contributes most of the content.

Perhaps the proliferation of Checkin-like actions can begin to change this.

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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.

First of all, Plancast right now is only a browser-based web app – they have not launched any mobile apps to our knowledge. While not crippling, this is certainly something that needs to be rectified if Plancast is to grow into what we think they will be. What Plancast does right now is to allow users to make and broadcast events any time in the future, allowing people to join and post comments regarding the event. Add ticketing and more robust event pages (adding photos and video seems pretty logical in addition to text comments) and then Plancast becomes a full-fledged event site. But it can go further. The part that is missing is what happens when the event comes to pass? Right now, there is no way on Plancast to know if someone is actually attending the event, i.e. have they checked in yet?

Plancast could certainly try to build this half of the service from scratch, but we suspect that more likely, their plan (sorry, couldn’t resist) is to integrate one or multiple location app APIs instead. While Foursquare may be the sexier choice of the moment, we wonder if Brightkite might not make more sense for Plancast. Brightkite and Plancast are closer in design, use and simplicity – neither has a gaming element, and both are pretty open in allowing their users to do basically whatever they want. Also, Brightkite has really strived to build their own half of a social network (and actually merged with one a while back) and we wonder if perhaps they aren’t the better fit for the other side of the equation. We’ll just have to wait and see.

(Fun fact: In a role reversal, I am now blogging, and Plancast’s CEO Mark Hendrickson is now the entrepreneur – he was the first blogger (while at TechCrunch) to cover the launch of a website – ZoomProspector – that I helped launch at my last job.)

Six clicks, plus typing content into your phone.

That’s what it takes to share your location with Google Buzz.  Here is the break down:

1 Tap on your Google Buzz bookmark
2 Tap on “Nearby”
3 Tap on the list of Nearby places
4 Select a location
5 Tap on “share what you’re thinking”
6 Enter content (required)
7 Click post

Compare this to Foursquare:

1 Open Foursquare
2 Click Check-In
3 Click Venue
4 Click “Check-in” here

If the world of UGC has taught us anything, it’s that the easier a publishing activity is, the more people will do it.

Checking in with Foursquare and Gowalla is far easier than with Google Buzz.  And the delta is not trivial.  When you consider the hassle of typing content into your phone, I would say that it’s probably more than twice as hard to share your location with your friends with Google Buzz, than it is with Foursquare.

Google Buzz may be Google’s best social media product yet, and it may take a dent out of Twitter and Facebook.

And as my colleague Chad says, it very well may signal the end for Latitude.

But this is no Foursquare killer.

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The announcement yesterday of Google Buzz all but guarantees that Google has given up on its poorly thought out location experiment, Google Latitude. We’ve held off dropping Latitude into the deadpool in the hopes that Google would innovate around it and make it much more appealing. Turns outs, they decided to go down another path – instead of innovating around Latitude, they decided to trash it and go with something else. Whether it was Buzz, some other homegrown app, or an acquisition (if only they had bought Dodgeball back in the day…wait a minute…), Google obviously realized that they needed a better way to compete in the location space than Latitude. So what was so wrong with Latitude? Well, to state it as frankly as possible, Latitude crossed the creepy line. It was basically pitched as a way for Google to track all of a user’s movements, running all the time in the background (on phones that don’t start with the letter “i”) and then broadcast out that info to your GMail contacts. I.e. it was pitched as a creepy app (of course users have privacy controls, but people hear “always on” and they get creeped out).

On top of a bad product launch roll out, Latitude had (yes, we know it is still technically available, but we’re going to use the past tense nonetheless) major flaws as a social location app. First of all, using Latitude didn’t really add much of anything for the user. Why would a user use an app that just tracked them, where’s the value? Secondly, the app didn’t offer any benefit to anybody watching/following/tracking their contacts (we won’t go as far as “friends”), so why would anyone want to watch/follow/track? The answer is they didn’t – we’re pretty plugged-in guys here at LocationMeme and we can’t think of anybody that ever invited us, asked us or even talked about Latitude – it was a complete flop and Google needed to make a move, especially as other location apps are starting to gain strong traction.

So the logical question now is can Google Buzz establish itself as Google’s location service, and more to the point, can it compete with much smaller players such as Foursquare, Gowalla and Brightkite? And if it can’t beat these small players, how can Buzz hope to compete with Facebook (whenever they launch their location component), Twitter and Yelp? We’ll keep an eye on Buzz over the next few days and will get back to you with our thoughts on Buzz.

We want to throw one last thought out regarding Google and location. The one thing that Latitude did highlight is that Google’s greatest location asset is Google Maps/Earth. Google Maps continues to get better (free navigation in Android 2.1 for instance) and Google continues to build an enormous location database of businesses, restaurants, bars, schools – you name it. Integration with Google Maps was the correct strategy, and we hope that Google will make a way to integrate Buzz with Google Maps, preferably right in GMail. Maybe they could call it Longitude.

Another week, another major business development win for Foursquare.  According to the New York Times, Foursquare has signed a joint distribution deal with restaurant guide Zagat, not unlike the Bravo deal they closed last week.

Specifically, this deal entails custom Zagat badges for Foursquare users checking in at Zagat-rated restaurants, and Zagat recommendations included in the “tips” section on the Foursquare service:

In addition to offering a special badge for Foursquare users, Zagat will begin piping tips and recommendations into the Foursquare system, which already doubles as a user-generated city guide. Foursquare users can submit their own suggestions for activities and dishes to order at a particular restaurant, which will pop up when their friends “check in” on Foursquare from that venue.

On the distribution side for Foursquare, Foursquare mayors of Zagat-rated restaurants will be interviewed on the Zagat website, presumably helping Foursquare acquire new users.

So Foursquare gets help in two areas where they need it: they get more content to drop into its venue pages (a clear need in the face of competition from content rich Yelp), and they get distribution from a high traffic brand.

Business Development is a discipline that has taken more than a little heat during the Web 2.0 era.  In social media utopia, web services don’t need Business Development – they just expose an API and big distribution partners happily line up to build on top of the service.

Foursquare is taking a markedly less passive approach.  With a tiny team, they are signing up partner after partner: Bravo, Harvard, BART, Zagat, Metro News, etc.  They seem to be effectively cashing in their media buzz for cold, hard distribution.

BizDev isn’t easy, as it’s tough to get big companies to get even the simplest things done.

Foursquare’s apparent focus and expertise in Business Development is a surprising development.

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As millions of iPhone/iPod Touch and soon to be iPad users know, Apple’s SDK’s biggest drawback is single-tasking (i.e. no background processes). As the dominant mobile platform (we don’t want to debate “best” or “most used” – Apple’s SDK is the first mobile platform almost all developers develop their apps for first, so it is dominant), many social location services have built their apps to work in a single-tasking environment, first and foremost. To take this a step further, an argument could be made that the whole check-in craze is the bastard child of the limitations of Apple’s SDK. Would this space have evolved if Apple’s SDK supported multi-tasking? Well, we certainly have made the case for checking in as a concept that stands on its own merits, and Foursquare and Gowalla and others have made great progress in utilizing the focus of single-tasking to make relatively straightforward apps, but still, we would argue that the intrinsic value of check-ins aside, these apps are not all that they could be.

Back in September of last year, Loopt announced that they had hacked together a way to go around the background process limitation. Loopt made a complex agreement with “many partners” (including presumedly AT&T) to use cell tower triangulation to approximate a user’s location to update that user’s Loopt location (for a monthly fee). Here’s what I wrote at the time in the comment section of MG Siegler’s TechCrunch article covering this:

“Here’s my take. As far as a good way to create a revenue stream for themselves and AT&T, this is a smart move. However, as many commenters have already pointed out, cell tower triangulation really doesn’t make this all that special. Best case scenario is that I have some idea where my friends are in a city/area but I will have not have any idea what they are up to unless they check in somewhere (this is somewhat true even for GPS as street address doesn’t necessarily tell me what my friends are up to, but obviously it’s much more precise). When an app/phone can push and allow me to verify (or best case, do the verifying itself) where I am and what I’m up to, then we’ll see a breakthrough in this space.”

As I said then, I don’t think that this is very big news – cell tower triangulation has been around for awhile, and who wants to pay a monthly fee when their phone already has GPS and they’re paying a lot of money for 3G connectivity? Right, a very limited number of people. As I said in the comment, even if Apple allowed background processes that connected to the iPhone’s / iPad’s GPS (we still want GPS for the iPod Touch allow with that pesky camera), that still wouldn’t confirm to my friends what I’m up to – they could probably take a pretty good guess, but verification would still be needed in order to be sure – whether I, the user, do it myself or some other part of the app does it for me. This last part is what we see as the killer approach, and here is why…

Social location applications will truly come into their own when the apps themselves interact with the environment around the user’s physical location. What do we mean by this? Here’s an example – a user walks into a shopping mall and the app running in the background (again, running in a multi-tasking environment, i.e. not on Apple’s SDK right now, but Android, WebOS, whatever) and utilizing GPS pushes out a map of the mall with all of the user’s friends that are currently in the mall and shows them moving around the floorplan, and perhaps highlights what shops are having sales, and could even verify your correct location by cross-referencing it with other friends that have already checked into a location - all without the user having do initiate anything. Understand, this is separate from checking in – this is having the app push helpful info to the user without having them reveal their location to their friends or the world – the check-in would work as an endorsement (as we’ve mentioned before in this blog) but it wouldn’t be necessary to get something out of the app (i.e. you don’t get to be the mayor of anywhere on Foursquare unless you check-in). We could offer dozens of other examples, but we’ll let your imagination run wild instead.

So back to Apple. As the dominant mobile platform, Apple’s current SDK is severely stunting the growth of social location apps, both for developers and in how fast the average user adopts these kinds of apps (i.e. the average user needs to see more value come out of location apps). If the push for better and more useful location apps continues, developers will be faced with a very hard decision – to stay with Apple in the hope that they can gain more users and switch them over to better features if/when Apple finally decides to allow background processes, or opt to stay on the bleeding edge and build innovative features/apps on other platforms such as Android.