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 [...]

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 [...]

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 bookmark2 Tap on “Nearby”3 Tap on the list of Nearby places4 Select a location5 Tap on “share what you’re thinking”6 Enter content (required)7 Click post [...]

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 [...]

Well, that was fast. Just as features like user profiles, status updates, and friend graphs have become standard fare on social media sites, it appears that the social check-in will soon follow. With the entrance of big fish like Yelp into the social check-in space, and the rumored entrance of even bigger fish like Facebook [...]

Twitter’s new Local Trends function on Twitter.com is basically meaningless. It’s full of spam (just as the global Trending Topics is) and really isn’t all that interesting because: 1. lots of the same trends go across the limited number of places Twitter is offering right now; and 2. there is no context for the user [...]

Here are a few posts that caught my eye today: Andrew Hyde commits social location suicide after getting stalked. Foursquare rolls out a Blackberry App Only 0.23% of tweets geotagged Bing maps rolls out some new stuff like local events Nokia offering free navigation services with Nokia phones

Companies like Foursquare and Gowalla are trying to build businesses – and venture businesses no less – based on helping people share their real world locations. Local business review juggernaut Yelp recently bolted on social location check-ins to their iPhone app.  Twitter and Facebook are almost certain to turn on some sort of location based [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]