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.

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.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Google Just Declared War On Social Startups – Who Is Going Down? (thenextweb.com)
• What Google Buzz Means for Mobile (mashable.com)
• Google takes another stab at location-based services with Buzz (mobile.venturebeat.com)
• The Location Implications of Google Buzz (mashable.com)
• Google Buzz Challenges Facebook, Twitter In Social Evolution (singularityhub.com)

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.

The last 24 hours has greatly solidified a movement and community that has been gaining steam for the last year or so – crisis mapping. Crisis or disaster mapping is a range of services/applications that are designed to help gather and spread information for and between first responders, NGOs, domestic and international governments and relief organizations- as well as most importantly the people affected by a crisis. Over the last year, a few startups and non-profits have sprung up around this concept (I’m also developing technology around this), although the majority of “crisis mappers” work for large companies such as Google, Yahoo and ESRI as well as national and multinational organizations such as FEMA, NASA, the UN and the World Bank. There have been a few conferences put together by members of the fledgling community, including Crisis Camp, Random Hacks of Kindness, and the ICCM conference. There has been interest from government and NGOs in how to tap into this community. But while there has been a general agreement that this community was all sailing on the same ocean, ships have been taking their own courses to the destination. That is, until a 7.0 earthquake hit the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince a little over 24 hours ago. Since then crisis mapping has started to put itself onto one current, and what is happening is nothing less than the real birth of a community for good.

Since the quake struck, crisis mappers have been working around the clock to help to provide incident report sites and sites that help people find missing family members. Today alone I spend four hours on conference calls and a few hours with a dozen or so other crisis mappers on EtherPad (which, if Google Wave can truly integrate would be amazing) discussing how we as crisis mappers can be most effective over the next few days and weeks. We decided that the best way to harness the groundswell of support for helping Haiti is to run a number of emergency Crisis Camp hackathons this Saturday around the country in order to:

1. Build a new base layer map of Port-au-Prince and surrounding areas as existing maps are simply no longer applicable
2. Build a directory of technologists and their specialties that NGOs and government officials can use to find people to meet their technology needs
3. Work on a single depository of missing person information and a way to access that info for any developer that needs it

So why is this probably the tipping point for the crisis mapping community? There are many reasons. First of all, the world needs this, plain and simple. Secondly, the technologies are in line. Third, governments and NGOs are starting to realize that they need this (again, just starting). Fourth, there is enough participation of startup-minded folks that are really innovating in this space. Finally, the crisis in Haiti has affected us all, and – as we were with the Asian tsunami, Katrina and other recent disasters – we are truly humbled and simply want to use the force of our collected knowledge to lend a hand to those in need. Beyond the next few weeks where we will focus on Haiti, I can see that this community now has the resolve and momentum to carry on in a more cohesive direction and purpose, and hopefully at some point – and this is my sincere hope – we will be able to offer and implement solutions before disasters happen that will lessen the loss of life and property, instead of simply responding. While this isn’t the usual topic of our blog, we think that it’s an important part of the location sphere, and one that will increasingly be integrated into various existing social location services.

This just in from the Google Mobile Blog – they have turned on a “Near Me Now” link if you visit google.com with your Android or iPhone browser.  Clicking the “Near Me Now” link displays a menu of business types: Restaurants, Coffee Shops, Bars, ATMs, etc.  Clicking on one of the categories then shows you a list of of businesses close to you.

Here are some screenshots from my iPhone:

A couple of things stand out to me here:

• The business filters are nicely done.  There’s an iPhone app called AroundMe that does a nice job with these sorts of venue filters, but they are the only location service that I can think of using this approach.  Until now.  If you’ve ever tried to use Foursquare in Manhattan, you will realize why filters can be helpful.
• Google’s local business data is very, very good, and very accurate.  Their review content, though not up to Yelp standards, is growing slowly and steadily.

Any time that Big G decides to add another link to Google.com, it’s worth stopping and taking notice.  With Yelp acquisition rumors, and those big giant plastic pins, and their favorite places barcode decals, and local business days in major cities, and now a new link on Google.com – it’s clear that Google sees local as a major battleground.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Google’s Near Me Now is Live & Good Enough to Replace Yelp (readwriteweb.com)
• Google Search launches “search near me now” on Android/Mobile (thenextweb.com)

Believe it or not, not everyone checks in with their mobile phones. Some of us actually use a new fangled device called a laptop, or an even newer fangled device called a netbook. With laptop/netbook weights increasingly (decreasingly?) becoming so light that you can carry them around all day without even knowing you have them, coupled with batteries with charges that can stretch for up to 9 hours, checking into a location based service while on the move with a laptop is increasingly realistic. Along with this hardware evolution, this year also brought us location-aware browsers and HTML5, which among many other improvements, includes a geolocation API.

All of this means that many of the main location services right now offer a web-based version of their service, to varying degrees of functionality. Below is our review of what each of the major services offer from a laptop/netbook (you could of course use your desktop as well, but then you would always be checking in from home or the office). For the sake of simplicity, we’ll use “laptop” to reference all non-phone devices in the rest of the article. Also, to make this list, a service must have a web interface that users can log into, and must allow users to sign up online with just an email or through another services credentials (i.e. Facebook Connect). If a service requires a phone number to sign-up/login we are not including them in this review, as this doesn’t really lend itself to getting users to sign up or use a service on their laptop.

Google Latitude

Although we suspect very few people are using this, it is possible to use Google Latitude from a laptop by installing an iGoogle gadget to your iGoogle start page.

The gadget can then detect your location through self-checkin or WiFi hotspot detection (with Google Gears installed, although we imagine that as Google has already announced they’re switching to HTML5, this will end soon). While this is better than nothing, if Google wants to put Latitude where people will actually see/use it, they need to integrate the service directly into Google Maps (for users that are logged into Google), or better yet, directly into Gmail.

Brightkite

Brightkite is rather unique in the location space – they actually started out with a web-based service and then moved to mobile – as such, it should come as no surprise that their website is one of the most fully featured, including the only service that lets you checkin directly on their main website. Like Latitude, Brightkite doesn’t involve any gaming elements – you share your location, notes, or geotagged photos and that’s it (of course you can comment on other people’s status updates, but that’s not a game).

To checkin on brightkite.com, users must type in their location and then choose from a list – there is presently no auto-detection of location using either Google Gears or HTML5. Brightkite has a very easy to use web-interface, although as long time users, we kind of preferred the old interface which was more map-based – now it is kind of hard to even find a map on the interface (you need to click on someone’s location to see a small map, and then if you want to browse that map, Brightkite sends you off to Google Maps, which is kind of disorienting). Other things that are nice about Brightkite’s web interface is it has Facebook Connect integration for logging in and finding friends, as well as very detailed and easy to use account settings.

Foursquare

Since its launch, Foursquare has notoriously been at the bottom of the pile when it comes to its web interface, especially when to compared to its great iPhone app, which nearly everyone has loved from the start. When it launched, Foursquare – as Loopt still does – required you to provide a phone number to sign up, but they have since removed this annoying requirement to use the service – you can now sign up with an email or through Facebook Connect. The website has improved in other ways as well, with a better homepage, less bugs and a cool “stats” page. That said, Foursquare’s web interface still has one major flaw – you cannot checkin using foursquare.com.

If, however, you are a die hard laptop checkin-er, we have a solution that was pointed out to us by our friend Scott Rafer – you can go to foursquare.com/mobile and checkin using the ubiquitous interface that Foursquare provides for mobile users that don’t have smartphones. Like Brightkite, this option doesn’t have any auto-detection geolocation features.

Gowalla

Gowalla’s website has a nice design, works well, let’s you sign up with an email, has Twitter and Facebook integration and adequate map integration and email notification settings. However, like its main competitor, Foursquare, if you want checkin to Gowalla with your laptop, you need to go to its mobile site m.gowalla.com.

Unlike Foursquare (or Brightkite for that matter), however, Gowalla beats both with auto-detection of location that works quite well. Right now, this is a huge advantage – especially if Gowalla could integrate this interface right into Gowalla.com instead of hiding it at m.gowalla.com (Foursquare of course should do the same, but Gowalla would still win at the moment with auto-detection). Also, m.gowalla.com has a more fleshed out design closer to gowalla.com than the bare bones foursquare.com/mobile is to foursquare.com.

Whrrl

Checking in on Whrrl is similar to Foursquare – you need to go to the m.whrrl.com site, and there is currently no auto-detect feature, i.e. also inferior to Gowalla.

However, Whrrl does something very smart that none of the other services does: when you login to whrrl.com, there is a very clear message that tells you to checkin using the iPhone app or go to their mobile site. Although we still think it is better to integrate the checkin functionality into the main site, at least they have figured out that users with laptops might not know where to go to checkin, and have clearly shown the way.

Conclusions

The main conclusion is this – none of these services does it quite right yet, although Gowalla is the closest. While we understand that everything takes development time, we recommend that all of these and other services we haven’t covered here, do the following:

1. Do not require users to provide a phone number to sign up.
2. Integrate Twitter and Facebook Connect for signing up, signing in, and checkin notifications.
3. Integrate checkin functionality directly into your main website (or at the very least make it very clear to laptop users on where they need to go to checkin, and optimize your mobile site to recognize non-mobile browsers to offer a better looking experience).
4. Enable auto-detection of location from the browser.
5. Embrace the added functionality and screen space that a website experience can offer to add more features for users.

As part of Location Meme’s coverage, we will keep track of location services’ websites and report any improvements or new services that are available to laptop users.

So Twitter has just bought Mixer Labs, the creators of GeoAPI, a location infrastructure service that provides tools and data to people building location related applications; stuff like reverse geocoding (translates lat / long to city name), neighborhood / city lookup, structured data about 16M POIs and local businesses, and more.

I see a couple of different, and non-mutually exclusive ways that Twitter could go with this:

They can beef up their paid API services

This is a no brainer.  Twitter is already charging for some aspects of its API.  GeoAPI has a working revenue model.  With GeoAPI in its stable, Twitter has more stuff they can charge for, right off the shelf.

They can beef up their free API services, expanding their footprint

Google has infiltrated much of the web via AdSense, Maps, Analytics, Friend Connect and all of its other distributed tools. Facebook is propagating like crazy via Facebook Connect.  Twitter has had a lot of success getting companies to build on its API, and can surely reach a broader universe of sites with the additional tools provided by GeoAPI.  More people building on Twitter’s API gives them access to more engineering, product, and marketing resources focused on getting more data into Twitter.

They can improve Twitter.com with more local oriented features

Location filters / nearby tweets, location based trending topics, local search – there are all sorts of ways location could be integrated into Twitter.com.

They can build another app

Wait, hear me out.  The Twitter management are product guys.  They’ve shown lots of restraint in keeping Twitter simple, and not bolting on superfluous features.  But don’t you think they have other app ideas floating around over there?  Didn’t Twitter itself start as a side project?

Twitter is now sitting on 16M local business and POI listings, not to mention a massive firehose of geo tagged tweets.  It’s not hard for me to imagine a local business page with a river of geotagged tweets rolling by, structured data like hours and payment info, neighborhood info, “who’s been here” panels with smiling Twitter avatars… come on, it has to have crossed their minds.  Maybe it looks something like TownMe.

No doubt there are other implications of Twitter snapping up GeoAPI, but I’ll cut it off there.

Today’s TechMeme headlines seem to be all about smartphones and location services.  While TechMeme doesn’t show causality, the smartphone / location services trajectory feels a lot like what we saw with broadband / web services.

Read more:

O’Reilly, TechCrunch, Twitter