Feb10
by Lawrence Coburn
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:
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Feb10
by Chad Catacchio
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. Read the rest of this entry »
Feb09
by Lawrence Coburn
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.
Feb08
by Chad Catacchio
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. Read the rest of this entry »
Feb05
by Lawrence Coburn
Who owns the address and phone number data associated with a local business? On one level, the information is in the public domain. I can walk into any merchant in the world, ask for their address and phone number, and likely get a response. The closest thing to the owner of this information, the local merchant itself, almost certainly would prefer that its accurate and up to date address and phone number be disseminated freely.
But the question of address and contact information ownership gets a little bit trickier when you start talking about curated databases of millions of local businesses. This data tends to go “stale” quickly – businesses close, move, change names, and open every day. I’ve heard estimates that up to 40% of all listings go stale each quarter.
Historically, it’s been a costly operation to keep this data up to date. The top tier providers, companies like InfoUSA and Acxiom, employ huge call centers that are focused on verifying local business information. These companies charge top dollar for access to this curated information.
Read the rest of this entry »
Feb04
by Lawrence Coburn
* Quick update: Marshall has written a nice post on this same topic over on RWW.*
The backlash against social check-in services like Foursquare, Gowalla, BrightKite, Rummble, Yelp, PlacePop, etc. is beginning.
A few days ago, BusinessWeek proclaimed that check-in type services have “limited appeal.” Last week, Andrew Hyde of TechStars committed Location Based Service Suicide. And here on LocationMeme, my colleague Chad wrote a compelling piece on the “creepy line” that comes when you combine the web’s broad definition of friending with location.
So why on earth would anybody want to share their location?
Let me take a shot.
Just like the clothes you wear and the music you listen to, the restaurants, coffee shops, and bars that you frequent are reflections of your personality. I remember way back in the Dodgeball days, I hacked together a little widget using the RSS feed of my Dodgeball checkins and put it on my various blogs. This widget wasn’t particularly useful, but in some way, it expressed an aspect of my personality, a little slice of how I wanted the world to view me.
This concept of self expression as a motivation to publish is something that we’ve seen over and over again. Widgets, Facebook Quizzes, Compatibility Tests – many of the most popular social applications hinge on allowing users to express themselves to their friends and the world at large. Checking in is no different. Read the rest of this entry »
Feb03
by Chad Catacchio
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.
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… Read the rest of this entry »
Feb01
by Lawrence Coburn
A new social check-in app called PlacePop quietly joined the social checkin space over the weekend.This is what they have to offer so far:
PlacePop doesn’t seem to bring anything new to the table, but the features that are there are nicely designed. The aggregation is especially well done (another social checkin company that is doing heavy aggregation is Buzzd). To the untrained eye, this will look like an app with a lot of users.
Somehow, friending beyond one by one invites didn’t make it into the release version of the app. I’m sure there was a heated internal discussion about that – while it’s great to get something out the door, not having Facebook and Twitter integrated friending for launch in a social app is an unusual move.
Via their URL structure, it looks like there are about 1585 different profiles set up for PlacePop so far.
Jan31
by Lawrence Coburn
The New York Times is reporting that Foursquare and Bravo will announce a distribution deal tomorrow in which more than 500 locations, restaurants, and venues with associations with Bravo TV shows will carry their own custom Bravo badges within the Foursquare experience. Additionally, Bravo television personalities have added “tips” for a number of Bravo locations.
Bravo’s Foursquare integration will be advertised on Bravo TV, apparently giving Foursquare TV coverage and promotion:
“We really want to tap into the power of Foursquare by engaging their audiences and bringing our Bravo viewers these unique experiences on a national level,” said Ellen Stone, Bravo’s senior vice president of marketing. Mrs. Stone said Bravo will start creating on-air TV promotions telling viewers how to play the Bravo-enhanced features of Foursquare.
Jan29
by Lawrence Coburn
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.
