Why do people check in? Who cares about FourSquare? What is this “checkin” sh%#? Can I have a bite of your burrito? I hear these kinds of questions all the time so I thought I would write yet another location based services blog post to answer. With regard to my burrito, the answer is “no”. I’ve also included a #wouldbeawesome tag in a couple of the sections to make suggestions for additional functionality.

Checking in. It’s nothing more than a tweet with latitude and longitude and an attempt at standardization. Twitter used to be fairly inane before people started to figure out that they had a lot to say in 140 character. Forrester started classifying everyone in Groundswell segments and people got into a whole tweeting-should-be-intellectual thing, but the truth is that we still want to know where people are, what they’re having for lunch and who they are with. Tools like Foursquare, Gowalla, Brightkite and Whrrl do that, but they also have more to offer. In other words, there is more to this stuff than just checking in. Are you using “the more”? Let’s start by finding out why we use this stuff and then we’ll see:

Find Our Friends

The is the most obvious reason and all of the apps do this pretty well. One of the apps has a particular advantage in actually providing you with the friends that are closest. FourSquare organizes your friends first by the city you are currently in so that you can perhaps find people you would like to spend some time with. According to Dennis Crowley, one of Dodgeball’s* primary reasons for being was so that he and his friends could find out at what bars they were watching the (choke) Yankee games. When I was in Seattle, I found this particularly useful because it helped me discover restaurants and bars that my friends like and gave me a glimpse into what their daily lives are like.

#wouldbeawesome
A range of ways to organize by proximity. Let us pick which city we want to watch and the activity in our stream that corresponds. Sorting by time is key and we get that by default, but what about sorting by the people who are closest to wherever we are? If the person is a person I trust or want to get to know I can meet them if they are still there or I can check out a place where they have checked in.

Organizing by lists of friends we want to stalk would also be cool.

See What Happens Next

We want to see if we’ll get rewarded. Badges, items, tips and offers are the reason we focus on a particular app. The gaming aspect of FourSquare seems to have made it the LBS of choice, approaching near 1 million active users. Foursquare has offers for mayors and they have recently released the idea of “specials”. Specials are loyalty plays that allow something to happen at a location based on a check in there, but are not necessarily just for the mayor.

I love that with Gowalla, the potential is there to find items of value randomly. That said, it’s usually not very random. I have only found them at a major event, SXSW. The approach of anyone being able to win is cool.

#wouldbeawesome
Gowalla item adoption. We need some case studies. Heresay [blogging, not journalism] in Austin: One Taco in Austin said they saw a 10 to 1 return in terms of buzz. They said that ten people were coming to One Taco and mentioning that a friend got a free taco from Gowalla for every person that actually redeemed.

I am currently trying to make this happen with a client. Stay tuned.

Make Stuff Happen

Gowalla has the clear edge here. It seems to be based on a the premise of Geocaching which is following a series of clues leading to latitude and longitude locations where you find treasure boxes. The boxes contain a log book and a cool item. You take a picture of yourself with the item and post it to a site to let people know you’ve found it and you sign the log book. Sound familiar? Gowalla has trips. The items are pins and the logbook is a checkin at the site and of course you can take pictures.

FourSquare has 2 different philosophies. Their badge philosophy is a lot more random in the way that it can be achieved. Gowalla’s pins come from hitting specific locations, while most of FourSquare’s are based on hitting multiple locations with a similar theme. They are now combatting this with “specials”.

Marketers need to use the trip functionality. Having a scavenger hunt or quest end up at your restaurant or shop, particularly if there are cool things to do along the way will generate serious word of mouth buzz, particularly with twitter and Facebook integration.

#wouldbeawesome
I would love it if Gowalla plugged into Google Maps or Mapquest and gave me the optimal path to complete a trip. My family and I wandered around Harvard Square this weekend trying to find the 11 landmarks and I was able to find most of them, but I had to look at pictures and look around a lot.

Road rallies. Instead of giving away the location, give a set of clues. People who complete the quest get a pin or a prize. Company sponsored quests would be fun, particularly if they ended with you winning something of value from the company. If the injected randomness along the way like things that let teams skip steps or special prizes, the buzz would be enormous. Trips with grand prizes that have already been given could be marked as such so that people can still play the game, but their expectations could be managed. Road rallies are fun, but tough for people to plan. The beauty of them is that they’re a group activity. The driver can drive while the team figures out the clues. Everyone can check in when they get to the destination. Randomness and fun ensue.

Contextual recommendations. I think most people would like to be given interesting offers based on what they do, but this needs to be done in a fashion that keeps things fun versus getting really noisy. One way would be to add a tab that makes it a choice. This way you can look at offers in the area only when you choose to do so, unless of course you want your phone buzzing every time you check in to let you know there’s an offer nearby. Passive contextual recommendations are tricky because you have to allow the phone to ping the LBS to tell it where you are when you may not want to do so. Dennis Crowley himself said that “passive check in is yucky” but then proceeded to tell us about contextual recommendations, so it will be interesting to see how they do it. Whrrl already has a bit of context letting me know that people who go to my current location often go to some other one afterward.

See What is Happening

This is the stuff I think many people are missing. There’s a lot more than a checkin and a tweet to be had from LBS. The services all provide some level of context in the form of text, tips and pictures. [We are told video is on the drawing board, but scaling concerns worry the founders.]

Once again I missed SXSW music. Aside from WOXY dying, that was basically the year’s biggest crime against indie rock. I was, however, able to get some idea of what was happening by checking the SXSW calendar, listening to live broadcasts on NPR, following good folks like Brad Mays and Mike Leis on Twitter. By using Gowalla, I could see some cool things that were happening at the events as they were happening via pictures:

Broken Bells

Muse at Stubbs

These are a few of my zillions of thoughts on this matter. Your turn. Why else do we use this stuff?

Once again the good folks of Brightkite have missed the boat with their latest effort: Check.in.

The mobile site (not an app) gives a user the ability to simultaneously check in to up to three services: Brightkite, Foursquare and Gowalla.

It’s not all bad, they did bring a much needed search function to Gowalla, but the flow is a tad labored. It feels like there is an extra step.

It might not be fair to judge yet because it’s just a beta, but I couldn’t give a mayorship at Chuck E. Cheese. This is what I do.The fun of checking in is the PCP. That’s the post checkin page, not a hallucinogen. The PCP gives you tips, tells you if you’ve found an item, scored points, joined a society or become the mayor of a location. Brightkite has always been a slot machine without a jackpot.

The following URLs Weren’t Available?

• Friendster2.com
• No.fun
• Despera.te

The Point of Checkins

Brightkite. Listen. You don’t get it. We checkin not only to tell our friends where we are, but to see what is happening at places and to see what happens next. You do a great job of showing people what is happening with your pictures feature, but you do not give people incentives, particularly with this app. No mayor? No items? That’s just plain lame and even if you intend to add the PCP later, you have done yourselves a disservice but releasing this beta without them. I’m calling callcheck.in http://dont.get.it.

In summary in an effort to save people time, Brightkite is actually creating a fun vaccuum. I would not waste your time with Check.in.

What do you think?

SXSW confirmed what everyone knew. In the game of location based social networking, there are two giants: Gowalla and Foursquare. Each of them has ridiculously smart, dynamic, mop-haired founders: Josh Williams and Dennis Crowley respectively. Brightkite, the network that allows users to share photos by location, was barely talked about at SXSW unless it was preceded by “What the heck happened to…” Whrrl wasn’t mentioned much either, but it has some very interesting features including a touch of context.

Similar Problems Managing the Funnel

Josh Williams told me that Gowalla is not focused on monetization yet. They have so many ideas for what they want to do with the product that they are focusing all of their resources on building something that is feature rich and usable. Talk to anyone and they will tell you that Gowalla’s user interface is beautiful and elegant. But the next sentence usually is “it really needs search.” Gowalla wanted to try to stay pure and leave it up to the GPS to find every location. Unfortunately, to no fault of Gowalla’s, the GPS on iPhone and Android are not quite there yet. I tweeted a question about the addition of search and the Gowalla team responded by telling me that it will most likely be in version 2.1.

Crowley’s NYU thesis was on Location Based Social Networking. Dodgeball, his first iteration of FourSquare that he eventually sold to Google, was only “10 of 100 pages.” When Google shut down Dodgeball, they decided that the other 90 pages were worth investing time in. The big downfall of Dodgeball was that it did not have the benefit of services like twitter and Facebook. It was all SMS based. Also, there was no real reason to keep checking in. The post checkin experience did not exist in Dodgeball. As Crowley says, seeing what happens after checkin is the “one armed bandit”. It is what keeps people coming back.

Dennis Crowley told an audience at the Pepsi Podcast Playground that Foursquare has no business development people and that everything they have done to date is opportunistic. He later told the Ad Club of Boston that their funnel is essentially overflowing and that they have more incoming emails than they can keep track of. This is the opposite problem of most businesses, but a big problem nonetheless. No organization wants a reputation for being hard to work with.

The app has evolved and the experience at SXSW was based on rewarding people with SXSW specific badges based on going to combinations of places. For instance I got a Piggy (actual name) for hitting up a bunch of awesome BBQ joints. This may be because Foursquare was forthcoming with their roadmap saying that they are actively working on context based pushes, no small undertaking. What is that? Let’s say they know you like BBQ and that you go every Tuesday. If you happen to be in the area of the Salt Lick, Stubbs or Ironworks at that time FourSquare will ping you and let you know that you’re in the vicinity of a place you might like. As Crowley says “Foursquare will let you know it’s time for fun.” They are also working on experiences that benefit loyalists who are not necessarily the mayor.

Flash back to SXSW

When I talked to Williams, I jabbed him by saying that SXSW was the ultimate battleground for Location Based Social Networking. He joked with me (a little) and said “Oh. You’re here to perpetuate that?” There was a soft confidence in his voice and a smile as I explained to him that I was just really curious to see how it all plays out. Williams knew that he had big plans. Gowalla had many giveaways and special items that you could find randomly by checking in. They gave away VIP badges via the app. They gave everyone a virtual Livestrong bracelet [which I forgot to drop at Lance Armstrong's bike shop when I was in his conference room. Damn!]. There were also random items that could be redeemed at local businesses, like a free taco and One Taco. I was given one by a kind soul that I later dropped at Guero’s just for the irony. But that’s the beauty of items in Gowalla. Unlike FourSquare, you can leave items for friends or you can arrange to meet at a spot so you can give them an item.

Checkins Not Guns

Crowley told the Ad Club that there is no Location Based Networking war. “We aren’t looking to squash anyone. We’re all looking for our place in this eco-system. It’s not a winner-take-all.” He told me that FourSquare is focused only on their upcoming scaling challenges. They are very close to (and maybe surpassed by the time you are reading this) 1 million users and they got there faster than both Facebook and Twitter. Crowley says that photos are on the table, but that being bulletproof and scaling is their top priority. “We’re going to hit 1 Million users I said ‘That’s great!’” said Crowley “My engineers said ‘That’s terrible!’”. Having the fastest application that works is more important to Crowley than elegant front ends and additional features right now. “Gowalla and Whrrl has pictures, but they also do not have near the user base that we do.” he said. Basically they have the luxury of being able to scale while watching the other products to see what is working before they implement.

The two CEOs are drastically different. If you liken them to SXSW bands, Josh Williams is more Broken Bells and Crowley? How about Japandroids. They do both say that they aren’t worried about the other one, that they have their own agendas and that there isn’t really a battle for LBS supremacy. I hope that does not give someone else with killer instinct the opportunity to come in and squash them both.

Photos by the Ad Club.

I have heard people from the SXSW newbies to the social media elite talking about the content at SXSW not being up to their standards. It makes me wonder if we were at the same conference. Sure, some of the sessions I went to were duds, but I found presentation gold on more than one occasion. I think it’s because I “created” and always follow the Cardinal Rule of SXSW.

The Cardinal Rule of SXSW

“If something sucks, go someplace else.”

SXSWi is an exercise where you try to drink as much as you can from a fire hose. It’s impossible to consume all of the content and I found conflict in every time slot. I went to SXSW to learn and also happen to have diverse interests so it was really hard for me to decide where I should go. I selected between 2 and 5 sessions in each time slot and made my choice based on how important the content was to what I want to accomplish with my career, personal interests and what people I trust think of the speakers.

On Saturday I went to a 9:30am presentation that was not what I thought it would be. I started checking twitter and found trusted friend, Kipp Bodnar of Hubspot tweeting the applesauce out of Chris Messina’s presentation on activity streams. I hightailed it to the Hyatt at top speed and sat on the right side of the wall and got a very meaningful 30 minutes from Chris. 4/5 stars

Don’t Sweat All of the Details

We are not doing much with Drupal for any of our clients right now, but I have a pretty good command of the platform and found out that expert, Josh Konig was speaking on using Drupal in the cloud. He had a modest sized crowd and gave a presentation that everyone who needed to know something about the cloud could have used. Sure, there were some Drupal specific examples, but it was full of estimation, case study and useful takeaways. Had I gotten hung up on the Drupal piece, I might not have gone to the presentation and it was 4/5 stars.

Be Two Places at Once

Sure Gary Vaynerchuk asked me to come to his session, but it was up against (my brother) Gregory Ng’s session on Attacting Sponsors with a Super Niche Webshow. Gary started at 12:30, Greg was 12:50. So I went to both. Hell, Greg went to both! Greg gave 15 of the most impactful minutes at SXSW. Just ask Justine. She was there.

Don’t Get Stupid Drunk and Miss the 9:30 Session

I said I was going to the conference to learn and learn I did. I was at 9:30 sessions every morning (even the day after drinking enough Dogfish Head, 512 Brewing and Live Oak Brewing to kill a small horse). The 9:30 folks are maybe willing to work a little harder. They know they don’t have the prime slot or the big audience (because most of you could not get out of bed due to still being drunk on Tequila) so they bring the heat to turn up the volume. THE best session I saw was one that I attended simply because I am a music geek. 14,000 songs in 28 days had 100 to 400 level content and it was at 9:30AM. The presenter, Burr Settles, is an (accidental) authority on community creation and management [he's actually a machine learning and data mining wizard], but not a marketer so he ended up with about 40 people. He should have keynoted. Everyone could have benefited from his 4 principles of community and analytics rich case studies.

Leave the Convention Center

The Blippy presentation on publishing credit card data was also great, but it was over at the Radisson so few people made the trek. The point is that SXSW isn’t easy. You do have to work for it. Maybe the people who are complaining aren’t able to work the way I can, I don’t have 100s of people coming up to me so I can move around with relative ease, but I would suggest that if you are not looking for content, do not complain that you cannot find it. It is there.

Oh. Margot Bloomstein killed it with Content Strategy and Baked Goods on day one, but you probably were there because at least 500 people showed up.

Ashvin Kumar, CEO of Blippy says that he created Blippy because people love to share. Kumar says that he would share more often but he admitted he is flat-out lazy and that active sharing does not suit his personality.

Active vs. Passive Sharing

Active sharing requires the user to make a decision to share. They must physically open an application and check in to a location, set a status, upload a picture etc. This leaves holes in the overall experience, but also allows people to protect moments that they do not want to share like the trip Forbidden Fruit or visiting grandma’s house. Active sharing takes time and effort and, some might say “thankfully”, leaves holes in the story.Passive sharing happens on an event. In the example of Blippy, whenever you make a purchase on iTunes, eBay or even with your credit card, the purchase is shared. Graham Nelson revealed today that he bought the BMW of strollers for @twinliving via Blippy.

Graham won an auction and Blippy let us all know. He did not have to go to twitter, login and type HEEEY!!! LOOK WHAT I WON! Blippy took care of everything. It is fun to see what people are spending and it would be cool if this sort of technology could be integrated into sales automation tools, marketing automation tools and expense forms. Blippy-type technology could also be extended to things like medical records, web activity, blog activity, library checkouts and checkins and even your email. It could also be hooked up to devices that people use.

For instance an exercise bike could share the number of miles a person rides, time spent on the machine, calories burned or changes in their heart rate. A person’s vehicle could share speeds, fluid levels, oil change reminders etc. What about security cameras or web cams?There are all sorts of cool ways to mash this data up, but I think that’s a separate post. What about looking at macro level passive streams?

Michelle Feldman shares information on a recent run

Micro vs. Macro

Micro or personal streams are really interesting, but what about looking at activity streams from a public or macro perspective? That is when things start to really get interesting. What if public transportation activity streams were freely available? In Boston, they are. The MBTA decided to make bus, subway and commuter rail whereabouts data public when they became mired in trying to figure out how to economically produce installations, phone numbers or applications.

The result is a series of applications that make it possible for people to track problems with public transportation. So one forward thinking (or desperate) government organization is leading the way for passive sharing of macro level activity. And in reality this is late. Public transportation in the US is largely government owned and supported by tax dollars so it makes sense to have the data readily available, right?

Given that, how about public office spending as a stream? I would follow everyone from selectmen to senators to get an understanding for how they are spending our tax dollars. Political campaign spending would be fascinating. I could see it either becoming more discretionary or even more lavish as candidates would be exposing their moves to the public [including paying teams to analyze the others' data.]

How about payroll? Public payroll for teachers, public officials, police, firefighters and the like would be another interesting stream that would let us know if public people are being properly compensated and if they are getting raises.

What are some useful passive streams that you would like to see?
energy consumption? Maybe taxi and airplane whereabouts? Let’s get a discussion going.

I head up a group at allen & gerritsen called the Digital Incubator. It is an emerging technology and emerging media strategy and lab environment, so naturally I am at SXSW to test out all of the hot technologies. In a discussion of goals for SXSW with Graham Nelson, I told him that I wanted to meet the Gowalla team, particularly CEO Josh Williams.

Within 8 minutes, I had accomplished this goal. When I checked into the Austin Bergstrom Airport, I got an offer! I was delighted. I was not sure how many other people had received the offer and knowing that I was on a plane full of social media nerds, I looked around the plane. I did not see anyone jumping and hitting their heads on the cabin ceiling, so I smiled and accepted.

I checked the email and made my way to baggage claim and standing there, holding a sign with MIKE is Josh Williams. He hands me a t-shirt and I try to fight the urge to launch into a zillion questions about the application, their revenue model and surprises for SXSW.

Brad Mays form Chevrolet and jumped into a brand new Tahoe and headed to our hotel. On the way, he told us about Chevy’s plans for SXSW.

This is a great story about a brand thinking about online and offline experience and the payoff of location based social networking promises to go beyond checking in. While this probably will not do much more than create buzz for Chevy and perhaps change a few minds about the ability of American big auto to think creatively, it is a definite step in the right direction.

Chevy has a bunch of interesting activities with Gowalla and QR codes in action at SXSW. If you find a Chevy pin when you check in, you can get some limited edition Hot Wheels at the Chevy Volt recharge station. They staged a big road trip for several content creating teams heading to SXSW, there are Chevy test drives and I am told there are other surprises planned. Now if only they drove people to a community where they could capture and nurture the relationships they are building.

Google Buzz has the potential to be THE ultimate social media dialogue and content aggregation machine. Here are three short-term ideas that will make it infinitely more usable and convert the skeptics.

Compact the Content

Problem: Showing the buzz and all the comments (even just 10 – and how are they decided?) is really noisy. Particularly when you follow people who get serious engagement like Jason Calacanis, Pete Cashmore and “Mr. Noisy” Robert Scoble. Users will decide when they want to read the comments. Result: more content is read. I do not see a decrease in engagement. The people who don’t like to read comments were not going to read them anyway.

Filter Out Channels

Problem: Some people are still using multiple social media tools. They want to continue to use them for what they like to use them for and they are not coming to Buzz to have that content duplicated. OK. Let them remove the content they do not want to see. Caveat: They can’t remove Buzz original content.

Here’s a quick and easy way to remove the content you do not care about.

Clicking “Filter Channels Options” takes your to this screen that allows you to set options globally and also to change your mind if you decide you want the content back. (Yeah, I grabbed the channels from FriendFeed).

Make Buzz Post to Twitter

That’s game over.

Google’s social network killer is upon us and it is called Buzz. It is the tool that has Facebook screaming in agony, twitter paralyzed with terror and tumblr, posterous, gowalla, and foursquare raising a collective eyebrow.

The first iteration of Buzz is nothing more than a light version of my personal favorite social network, (queue angelic music) FriendFeed. It allows you to aggregate content from other social networks, including twitter, and also create your own content via a picture, link or text driven buzz. From the content it is possible to create threaded conversations, an area where Twitter is sorely lacking [Hashtags are horrible. You drop and disrespect them all of the time. Admit it.] and that Facebook and Friendfeed both have very firm handles on.

What’s the Point?

With any new take on an existing platform you have to ask yourself what the point is. This point is to steal market share [of course.] Buzz basically validates that Google thinks that FriendFeed was the correct approach. So what does it have that FriendFeed lacks? Nothing, right?

Wrong.

The answer is prominence¹.

FriendFeed is out of sight out of mind, but there are over 146 million users of gmail² and they were all greeted with a splash screen that told them about Buzz. So while Google may have plans to differentiate themselves from FriendFeed, Facebook and Twitter in the future, right now the fact is that they have exposed themselves to an audience that is larger than the size of Russia. If Buzz begats buzz, look for Google to make a larger investment and a more feature-rich platform. Analytics anyone?

¹Yes, the mobile app has some cool location based features too.
²Arrington, Michael (2009-07-09). “Bing Comes to Hotmail”. Techcrunch. http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/09/bing-comes-to-hotmail/. Retrieved 2009-07-11. “Hotmail is still by far the largest web mail provider on the Internet, with 343 million monthly users according to Comscore. Second and third are Yahoo (285 million) and Gmail (146 million).”

Caveat: This is fun and non-scientific and directional. It took me about 15 minutes. I created three groups of posts:

• all posts about Scott Brown
• all about Martha Coakley
• all posts about Scott Brown and Martha Coakley

And through the magic of Social Media Monitoring (thanks @Radian6)…

Both Candidates are Campaigning Hard

Looks Like Brown Has a Slight Edge in Voting

query: voted for Brown (and not Coakley) vs. voted for Coakley (and not Brown)

Brown’s Supporters Are More Passionate

query: Love / Like / Hate / Dislike Brown (and not Coakley) vs. Love / Like / Hate / Dislike Coakley (and not Brown)

It’s going to be interesting to see how this one shakes out. I am voting later today.

I was very excited to hear about the ustream.tv iPhone app. I love the site and use it as my go-to application for live streaming. Yesterday, I downloaded their iPhone application.

I was wicked excited as it gave me a couple of things that I have been wanting: The ability to stream live and to do video without jail-breaking my phone. I downloaded it, logged in as BelchingMonkey and began to stream. I clicked on go live, I got one viewer and when I was finished, I selected the option to not save the video.

Luckily, I talked to Gregory Ng yesterday. I told him I downloaded the application and he said “Yeah, I saw your videos. You have 4 on the site”.

Three were videos that I did told the application not to save. The fourth was a video that I took last night, but did not even mean to take. I clicked on the app and it started recording on its own. It also HORRIFIED me when I saw this at the end of the video:

So the moral of the story here is that you can use the ustream.tv iPhone app, but be prepared for it to potentially stream your activity after you shut down the application. You could end up giving away your email addresses unwittingly or worse, allowing people a window into your personal or business email accounts.

I hope we hear a response from ustream.tv soon and plan to be very vocal about this until we hear from them. I happen to think their technology is amazing, but that they have been irresponsible in putting extremely buggy software into play. I am all for constant-beta, but these seem like problems that should be sorted out in alpha code.