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.

It’s just built that way

Twitter was founded on the concept of short status updates and has evolved as a tremendous way to share links and communicate. This is exactly how we predict that the location space will evolve – status updates (checkins) to link sharing (deeper detail on location-based info) and location enhanced communication. Since this structure is already in Twitter’s DNA, it will be easy for the service to scale and build out location features, as well as being a natural fit for users already familiar with Twitter’s genes.

Twitter isn’t cluttered

What is more simple than saying “I am here”? It is short and precise, two things that are also in Twitter’s DNA. Yes, you can add a Twitpic or stream on Qik or share any number of other things through Twitter, but all of that boils down to a link (and a short one at that). This lack of clutter is probably why – contrary to seemingly common sense – Twitter, and not Google Maps, will end up being the platform for the social location graph.

Tweets are Meta

Way before the geo-API, TwitterVision showed everyone how immensely interesting it was to see people from around the world tweet. The tweet itself is data and can be mapped, regardless of what the tweet is about. Of course, however, location is about hyper-local, so geotagged tweets open up an entire new realm of applications that are more than fun to look at, but are actually useful. We suspect that the most successful applications will work to enhance the streams of users with location in as unobtrusive a way as possible – i.e. they will make tweets better.

So don’t worry that less than 1% of tweets are presently geo-tagged. Once developers (or maybe even Twitter itself) start using location to make tweets better, that 1% (or 500,000 tweets per day right now) will quickly rise as users start to see tangible benefits.

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.

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• The Location Implications of Google Buzz (mashable.com)
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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.

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 and Twitter, the social check-in seems to be progressing from differentiator to commodity.

Says Om Malik in the comments section of his interview with Josh Williams from Gowalla:

“I am still waiting for services like FSQ and GOW to come up with a value proposition that goes beyond checking in — which I believe is nothing more than a cool functionality for starters.”

And Marshall Kirkpatrick has this to say in ReadWriteWeb’s “The Era of Location as a Platform” post:

The mobile location “check-in” is fast becoming the hot new status message type online. It was only a matter of time until “where you are” became a platform to build added value on top of just like “who you know” has on social networking sites like Facebook.

And here is, uh, me from my “Is Social Location a Feature or a Business?” post:

I’m personally of the opinion that social location will, and should be, a feature on many existing sites.  Location adds context to many different web verticals – reviews, search, blog posts, photos, videos, etc.

And most credibly, here’s a snippet from a Business Insider article today:

For his part, Foursquare cofounder Dennis Crowley told us he fully expects Facebook and others to launch “check-in” functionality, making it “commodity by the end of the year.”  Dennis says Foursquare’s survival depends on providing “the most incentive for a user to check-in.”

Facebook can probably get away with offering a stripped down social check-in as part of its service, and Twitter will likely do so as well, relying on 3rd party developers to do the creative stuff.

But I expect to see lots of innovation from everyone else in the coming months in order to avoid being commoditized.  Already, it would appear that Gowalla might be moving towards the travel vertical with the introduction of  Trips – user generated bundles of various checkins by theme (bar crawl, museum tour, art gallery walk, etc.).

Foursquare was the early innovator in the social check-in + game dynamics, and I expect to see them continue to go down this road.

Yelp is clearly trying to use check-ins as a validator for its core review business – a review + check-in carries more weight than a standalone review.

What other social check-in mash-ups and angles will we see over the coming months?  Check-ins + news?  Check-ins + deals?  Check-ins + photos?  Check-ins for the enterprise?

There is growing evidence that there may be widespread consumer interest / comfort with sharing their location.

With that hurdle mostly crossed (thanks in large part to Foursquare), we should now be entering a fun stage of experimentation and innovation.

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• Foursquare Rewards Social Networkers for Location Info (time.com)
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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 other than millions of other people in their city or country tweeting. We held off on writing about Local Trends until today because until Tuesday only about 1% of Twitter users had Local Trends enabled (not sure if it is 100% now, but lots of people now have it enabled) and second, the API function related to Local Trends wasn’t turned on either until the last 24 hours or so. As with most things in the Twitterverse, the API is where it’s at, and now Local Trends can really get interesting.

Twitter’s API team turned on two calls – Local Trends/available and Local Trends/location. While Twitter is still apparently building out the places that they can offer trends around, this API call will allow developers to go beyond geotagging of tweets (which will discuss below) and map out trends and search parameters inside of their applications. One interesting line in the API documentation says that Local Trends are “an array of “locations” that encode the location’s WOEID and some other human-readable information such as a canonical name and country the location belongs in.” We read that as saying that Twitter is using a mix of ways to determine a user and a tweet’s location, and not just relying on lat/long. Obviously, there could be many uses for this.

One use that comes to mind is a “breaking news” application that could push out notifications to users when a local topic starts to trend. Another could be a map-base app that shows heatmaps of trends, for instance, which trends are hot or not in different areas of a state. Check-in apps (i.e. Foursquare, Gowalla, Yelp) could also use this data to compare check-ins across a trend – so for instance, on New Year’s Eve, users could drill down on the “Happy New Year!” trending topic to see where people mentioning that trend in their city are checking in, which could be a good indicator of where the best party spots are. The possibilities are not limitless, but there are a lot of ways this data can be used.

That said, there are three major drawbacks to what is in place right now. First of all, spam is a huge issue that right now often accounts for 50% or more of trending topics on Twitter, and we’ve noticed the same thing happening with Local Trends. Twitter needs to figure this out, and needs to figure it out fast, or the entire concept of trends is going to be worthless. Secondly, Twitter’s attempt to get users to geotag their tweets has been to all reports nearly worthless – almost no one is turning this option on, so the accuracy of Local Trends has to be called into question we think. Finally, while Local Trends (if accurate) is interesting in a discovery kind of way, it really isn’t all that relavant to the user because right now there are no filters in place to see what’s trending locally among your local followers or people you follow. Foursquare quickly figured this out when they added friend leaderboards in addition to city mayorships soon after they launched last year, and major apps that figure out this kind of filtering will have a hand up on their competitors. We will be closely monitoring which apps integrate Local Trends, and more importantly, what they do with this new feature.

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 functionality soon.

So what will be the winning approach?  Will social location be won by a point solution that does one thing and one thing well, or it will be won by a company providing a more full featured suite of social features?

There’s a fascinating discussion going on about this very topic on Jon Steinberg’s blog.

Jon’s position, and that of most of the (perhaps NY / Foursquare biased) commenters, is that he expects Yelp to struggle.  Doing some back of the envelope math, he calculates Yelp will need about 10% of their iPhone users to start using the functionality just to catch Foursquare’s usage – something he sees as a daunting task.

Foursquare investor Fred Wilson, admittedly biased, has this to say:

“we’ve also noticed that point solutions often beat more full featured ones. not sure whether that will be the case here, but dennis and the team are focused 100% on this stuff. the big companies, and yelp is just one of them that are coming into this space, aren’t and won’t be.”

A look around the social media landscape certainly does show some examples of point solutions beating full featured ones:

Point solution YouTube whupped Google Video in video sharing.

Point solution Craigslist whupped everybody else in classifieds.

But there are also instances of the full featured sites carrying the day:

Facebook seems to have won photos, events, and could be on their way to winning status updates.

I’m personally of the opinion that social location will, and should be, a feature on many existing sites.  Location adds context to many different web verticals – reviews, search, blog posts, photos, videos, etc.  Furthermore, I think the Yelp implementation is pretty damn good, and I think it’s a logical extension of their existing business.

That being said, the question of “where” strikes me as big enough to support a couple of standalone business.

Take, for example, the question of “where are all my friends right now?”  Sure, people could find and share location using Twitter, but the experience would be cluttered by all the other, non location oriented tweets.  For me, the question of “where” is important enough to maintain a membership on several different location point solutions (and to write a blog about them).

So there you have it.  The answer to “Is Social Location a Feature or a Business?” is a resounding yes.  Social location will make the experience on many social media services richer and better.  But I believe the problem that social location is addressing is important and universal enough to support a number of standalone businesses.

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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.

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