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. Read the rest of this entry »

I spent some time this weekend playing with MyTown – an iPhone app with a location component that is claiming more than 500K users.  You may know them from blog titles such as “Foursquare Who? Gowalla What?” that reference MyTown’s reported 500K users and 31M check-ins.

So what’s the deal?  Is MyTown really kicking the collective asses of Foursquare and Gowalla?

My humble opinion is this:

Not really.

MyTown is a monopoly style game in which the properties are businesses in your neighborhood.  Checking in at businesses in your neighborhood earns you coins, which can then be used to “buy” those locations, giving you the opportunity to collect rent when other people check in to those places.

Unlike the other social check-in apps, MyTown encourages you to check in to places without actually going to them.  The emphasis is on the gameplay, not the utility, or your precise location.  The UI is very nice, and the app makes all sorts of pleasing jingling and whistling noises as you tap and accumulate coins.  It’s easy to kill time playing MyTown. But comparing MyTown with apps like Gowalla and Foursquare that are actually about getting off your couch and venturing out into the real world is a bit silly. MyTown could very well turn out to be a big hit with lots of players and a profitable virtual goods business. But the location component of MyTown is more a simple way to customize the gameplay for each player, than it is a hook into the real world. While Foursquare and Gowalla are location based apps with some gameplay, MyTown is gameplay with a dash of location. Their check-in and user data should be judged accordingly. Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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. Read the rest of this entry »

The social location landscape changed dramatically this weekend.

Yelp, the 800 pound gorilla of local social media, revamped its popular iPhone app in order to let users check in to locations.

So how will this affect social location services like Foursquare and Gowalla?

I think it’s a devastating development for them, a brutal punch in the gut.  It’s not a surprise that Yelp should choose to implement check-ins – indeed, check-ins are a perfect extension of local business reviews.  In some ways a check-in IS a review – an implicit endorsement of a local business, in the same way that sales data is a vote of confidence for a product (see Blippy).  And it’s much easier to check-in to a venue from a mobile phone than it is to write a review of that venue.

But what is a surprise is how fast Yelp moved.  To roll out as polished a product as their most recent iPhone release, they had to have begun development months ago.  And the fact that they chose to risk totally revamping a highly successful and popular iPhone app, as opposed to building a separate app, shows just how big Yelp is betting on check-ins.

In the TechCrunch article covering this news, MG Siegler suggests that this development doesn’t necessarily mean lights out for Gowalla and Foursquare:

“No one is quite sure how well the concept of check-ing-in will work when tacked on to an existing social network.”

This is a reasonable point.  Yelp’s social graph doesn’t reflect real life as accurately as say Facebook’s.  And will people share their location with people who are not their friends in real life? Read the rest of this entry »

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. Read the rest of this entry »

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? Read the rest of this entry »

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. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m involved as a mentor with a brand new San Francisco based incubator called i/o ventures.  It’s an all-star team, and the partners recently purchased a 7,000 square foot space (complete with cafe) in San Francisco’s funky Mission District.  Here’s the TechCrunch write up.

If you are working on a location oriented project and are looking for seed funding, a vibrant work environment, and access to a bunch of top entrepreneurs, you should apply now.

Note: i/o will look at all opportunities, but its sweet spot is web services, client software, digital media, and gaming.