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.

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.

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.

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.

Unless you’ve been on Neptune the last few weeks (you’ll need to show us your check-ins to prove it), you’re almost assuredly aware of the iPad, Apple’s supersized iPod Touch. Assuming that Apple will sell millions of these things (regardless of whether people need them or not), and other companies also release portable, multi-touch tablets throughout the course of the year (Lenovo for one has our mouths watering with their U1 Hybrid, and the Google Chrome OS tablet rumors are starting to heat up), tablet computing will be disruptive to a number of online verticals, including we believe, the location space. Here are a few reasons why.

More mobility

If tablets can offer a fair amount of computing power (we’re not sure this is the case with the iPad) they are likely to replace laptops/netbooks when people are away from home/office. Why? Frankly, because they are cooler and lighter. We (Location Meme) accept it as human that people are vain. People are going to want to be seen with their tablet, which means that they will bring it with them when the go out (esp during the day – we doubt many people will be bringing their tablets to nightclubs). Further assuming that given the choice between interacting with the much large screened tablet over their cellphones, people will use their tablets to check-in at a location, which alone will change the location space. But more to the point, when they do check-in, tablets will offer…

Better Interaction With a Location

Let’s assume for one minute that Apple comes to its senses and adds a camera to the iPad (and Steve Jobs willing the iPod Touch). We all know that augmented reality (AR) apps are just getting going, and it is a no-brainer to conceive that tablets are the true future of AR. Crowd a lot of augmented info onto a 3.5″ screen and things get cluttered fast – change that form factor to a 10″ screen and things get a lot clearer and easier to use (not to say that good AR apps can’t exist on smartphones too). There are too many application ideas to list here, but imagine stepping into an IKEA with your tablet, checking in, then then using the tablet to do anything from get directions around the store, to pointing your camera at a couch you like and overlaying different fabric colors onto it, to – yes, the holy grail – purchasing and checking out right on your tablet.

While the above reasons are important, the most important reason that tablets are going to change the location space for companies such as Foursquare, Gowalla, Google and Loopt is…

Tablets will make us more social on the go

Please understand, we are not trying to hype tablets in this post. We see the tablet space as an evolution not a revolution (the iPhone was a revolution) – in fact, as many pundits have noted, tablets have been around for awhile already. But the 2010 tablets (the Twenty Ten Tablets? TTT?) seem to us to be an evolutionary step in computing, especially mobile computing, and every such step in this direction has made us more social on the go. Tablets will allow users to see great looking maps of where their friends and interesting places are, as well as deeply interact with location apps. AR will explode on tablets (once those pesky cameras are installed), and AR is all about location. Finally, and most importantly, tablets will allow us to bring more of the web with us on the go. Apps are great, the more easy and usable access we have to the web as a whole, the more we can truly interact with the millions of websites that don’t have apps, and this above all else, is where tablets are going to change the location space.

Collective buying is not really a new idea.  At its simplest level, collective buying entails individual consumers banding together in order to get bulk or group discounts.  If you buy 1 taco, it’s $3.50, but if you buy 100 tacos, it’s $175.

Tragically, not many individuals can commit to buying 100 tacos at the same time, so they end up paying the $3.50 rate, as opposed to the $1.75.

But that’s where the Internet comes in.

Companies like Groupon (Chicago), TownHog (San Francisco), and Living Social (Washington, DC), are attempting to leverage the unprecedented speed, ease, and low cost with which news of a deal can circulate among friends via social media services like Facebook and Twitter, to bring collective buying mainstream.

If you’re a merchant, there’s a lot to love about collective buying.  In exchange for offering some minimum number of consumers a steep discount, merchants get new customers, people buzzing, twittering, and facebooking about their store, and cash collected.  As an added bonus, just like in the mail in rebate model, some percentage of those people buying the deals will never show up.  It’s like advertising, marketing, and promotion all packaged into one, only instead of you having to dish out cash, you receive cash up front.

And the model isn’t too shabby from a start-up’s perspective either.  Collective buying has a built-in business model.  The startup takes a cut of the cash collected when the consumers buy the deal.  And from an operations perspective, all you really need to do is 1) sign up deals; and 2) build an email list to blast out said deals.  This is a sales and marketing play posing as a technology startup.

But because of the killer business model and glorious clarity of the value provided to all sides of the transaction, collective buying is a mad arms race right now.  Groupon, the space’s largest player, has already raised $30M on an alleged pre money valuation of $250M.  Living Social has raised a total of $10M, with $5M coming just this month.  TownHog is backed by some of Silicon Valley’s highest profile angels.

So where does location come in?  This is where I think things start getting really interesting.

Because these deals are occurring at brick and mortar merchants, with real lat long and addresses associated with them, it’s only a matter of time before location becomes a differentiator.  As a consumer, I am clearly more interested in the deals near me, than I am in ones on the other side of the city.

I can think of a number of ways how location could be woven into the offerings of these startups.  My guess is that we will soon start seeing some experimentation in this area.

Collective buying is one of the really compelling stories happening in startup land right now – indeed, if Groupon were based in Silicon Valley or New York, they’d probably be getting as much buzz as Foursquare.  It’s rare that a model emerges with with such a clear value proposition for both businesses and consumers, and a gorgeous revenue model to boot.

I will be following this space with interest, and not only because of the disclosure below.

Disclosure: I am married to a co-founder of TownHog.

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• Groupon Lets You Get Great Deals and Discounts in US (gajeebo.com)
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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.

Friending and friend discovery are core concepts (maybe the core concepts) of social media. There are really three main friending choices for social media sites: follow only (i.e. RSS); friend request approval (i.e. Facebook); or anyone can follow anyone, no reciprocal follow required (Twitter model). As social location services evolve, how friending takes place (and is handled by app providers) is going to greatly determine the popularity of location services in our opinion.

The why is quite simple – people generally only want to share their location with people they trust. Scratch that – with people they really trust. Not everyone is that way for sure (and we believe that more people will open up to the idea as time goes on), but right now, the general populace (read: your mom) doesn’t like the idea of sharing location with strangers (or even casual acquaintances) one bit. You could probably convince your mom that its ok to share your location with your BFFs, but beyond that, it’s rough going. Of course, adults don’t have to ask their mom to do anything (or shouldn’t have to), but adults get creeped out like moms do (and some adults are of course moms). That said, if you just become friends on location based services with the people you really trust, chances are your friend list won’t be too long (unless you’re a really really trusting person, in which case this post might not be for you). Let’s say for argument sake that you have 50 friends/relatives that you really trust. Will you only share your location with those 50 friends? How about the other 200 people you’re friends with on Facebook? Or the few hundred people that follow you on Twitter? Do you trust people you’ve probably never even heard of (which makes up the vast majority of most people’s Twitter followers) with your exact present location as well as your check-ins over time?

This is of course one of the main problems/concerns over social location sharing. Privacy has many levels – for instance, you may trust someone explicitly but not want to share your every movement with them – so we could go very deep into many aspects of privacy in this post, but we won’t (we’ll break it up for later posts). What we want to focus on here is how social location sharing services may deal with friending and at what point does it become spam and/or threatening?

We will say this right off the bat – privacy and friending procedures should be at the very top of the priority list for social location providers. Numero uno without a doubt. If you are running one of these services, figure this out, work with your users and innovate and you will do well. Don’t, and you’ll be left behind, as tepid users go somewhere just as fun, but safer.

So let’s break this down into four “friend” categories that we see: real friends; established contacts on other social media services (which can include your real friends); strangers; and brands/businesses.

Real friends

The main issue here is not whether or not to share your location with your real friends – which we will assume that users will do for the most part – but what privacy settings are available as filters. As we mentioned above, this is a whole post in itself, so we’ll reserve this discussion for a later post.

Established social media contacts

Many social media services – including location sharing ones – rely on data portability technologies (Facebook Connect, OpenID, OpenAuth, etc.) and email contact lists to import and invite ready-made contacts into their service. Users can choose which (if any) of their social contacts to import and invite, and a fair number of new users take advantage of this. This is standard and accepted fare in social media. However, when inviting someone to a location sharing service, this may not be so cut and dry, as users will probably have to think hard about whether sharing their location with these persons is what they want to do (especially when the only sharing option is “share” – i.e. precise privacy options are not in place). There is also the other side of the coin here, and that is the invited user accepting the invitation to share his or her location. Does the service require that sharing be mutual or can it be one-way (i.e. following like Twitter)? Regardless, location services will continue prompt users to mass invite their contacts, which will often include their real friends. While some users will receive requests from people they don’t recognize, there is at least some kind of previous connection between the two users, unlike the next two kinds of “friending”…

Strangers

Location sharing services and strangers – try freaking out your mom more. If you join a location sharing service, however, eventually strangers are going to request to become friends with you. Social media isn’t just about communicating with those you know but also discovering new people, i.e. strangers. With location based services this goes a step further, because unlike other social media, location is based in the real world, so often discovery is centered around location, which means that a stranger could be requesting you as a friend while standing right next to you. Or from somewhere on the same block. Or the same city. We’re not trying to creep anyone out – this is just the reality of location sharing services. This is amplified by the fact that a number of providers are adding social features that are focused around a specific location. This means, for example, that everyone that checks into a bar will be able to know who else has checked into the same bar with them – whether they’ve friended them previously or not. It also may mean that if you are in the same bar, people may be able to message you without being your friend. So how do providers avoid any of this becoming too creepy (if not worse)? We would suggest that social location sharing services need to make more of an effort to include a buffer in this process, perhaps a “Kevin Bacon” type of referral system that tells a user “this person is friends of Bob W. who is friends with Jim K.” etc (which is in a way how LinkedIn works, although LinkedIn’s model is way to cumbersome for fast-moving location services). Whether providers adopt this approach or other strategies, they need to create some kind of a creepiness buffer or they may possibly face a strong backlash from their users and potential users.

Brands/Businesses

The final group of “friends” are entities that are trying to sell you something, whether a Fortune 500 brand, a local convenience store or anything in between. Getting this right will be both very tricky and very important to any location service’s business model. It will be very tricky because unlike other social media sites that can just push these kinds of friending and messages aside (read: spam or ads pushed to the side of the website), with location enabled apps these “friend” requests can be triggered by where the users themselves go. For example, if a user visits a car dealership and shares that location, doesn’t that give the car dealership ownership and the car manufacturer an opening to invite you to be their “friend”? Certainly from the dealer’s and the manufacturer’s point of view. From a business model perspective, the location service provider in this case could charge both the dealer and the manufacturer a fee to have access to the user’s location. But what about the user? Just because they visited the dealership, does that mean they want to be “friends” with the dealer and/or the manufacturer? Some kind of coupon or advertisement may be acceptable to the user, but as a growing number of marketers know, the real benefits of social media result not from one off offers, but from long-lasting friend/fan/follower relationships with consumers. This has worked well with Facebook and Twitter – but in neither case is the user giving implicit permission to the brand/business to access their physical movements (Twitter now has optional geo-tagging of tweets, but we haven’t heard of any brand really using this to enhance the relationship with certain followers). But in a location sharing service, users sharing locations with brands would be implied after friending. This is not to say that there may not be some benefits to users that establish a “friend” relationship with brands, especially ones that have multiple physical locations (i.e. if a user is a friend with H&M, every time that user is with a certain distance of an H&M store, H&M could then send them offers). However, will this outweigh the uneasiness that users will feel with sharing their location data with not just one individual, but with an entire organization (i.e if a user shares their location with IBM, how many of IBM’s 400,000 employees now have access to that user’s location data?). Again, it will be a very tricky (yet business critical) issue for providers, and it will be interesting to see what users are willing to not only accept, but will also demand back from brands for sharing their location. As with other concerns we’ve pointed out here, we predict that solutions will need to revolve around privacy and promotional rules in conjunction with nuanced user settings.

Conclusion

Friending within social location sharing services will probably not follow the same patterns as we have seen in other social media services, because of the inherent physicality of this new type of social media. Social location sharing services will need to pay close attention to user feedback and adjust and innovate with the understanding that they are breaking new ground in how friending occurs.

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.

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Don’t let the flood of press about Gowalla and Foursquare fool you – it’s still very early days when it comes to location based check-in applications.

Here are a couple of data points:

- The current world record for check-ins at a single venue is 242 – a Boxee meetup in Foursquare’s home town, New York City.  This was the dream Foursquare checkin scenario – Boxee is a darling of early adopters, and shares   investors with Foursquare.

- My San Francisco based startup recently interviewed ten intern candidates, all iPhone owners.  All between 21-25.  All ten had Shazam on their phones.  None of them had heard of Foursquare or Gowalla.

- At the Treasure Island Music Festival in San Francisco two months ago, there were 33 Foursquare checkins.  This out of about 4000 attendees from San Francisco / Silicon Valley between the ages 18-40.  And if checking in hasn’t busted out of the early adopter crowd in San Francisco, it certainly hasn’t in Philadelphia.  Or Sao Paulo.

Foursquare is reporting about 160K users, and Gowalla about 55K users.  A recent GigaOm article puts MyTown at 250K users, though it’s unclear if those folks are really checking in, or if they are just playing the game.

Product innovation is still in its very early stages, and we haven’t seen anything innovative on the marketing side yet.
It’s early days folks.  It’s anybody’s ball game.  So crank out those wireframes, spec out those game mechanics, build those apps, and throw your hats into the ring.

Location is a big, rising tide, and there are going to be a lot of winners.

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