I used to do a lot of development, data warehouse and business intelligence work for a pharmaceuticals giant. During this time I learned a great deal about clinical trials, supply chain, HIPA, good development process, business intelligence and most importantly – the value of a day.

A Pharmaceuticals Analogy

For those of you who have never given big pharma much thought, consider that each time a company discovers a compound that they think will be useful to treat something, the clock starts ticking. In a nutshell, they need to patent the compound before anyone else does, run clinical trials to ensure that the compound will not kill anyone, document the effectiveness and the side effects, run results and literally truckloads of paperwork through the FDA, get the paperwork reviewed and approved and then they can market the drug. [Pharmaceuticals pros know that it is far more complicated than my summary!]

The problem is that patents on the compounds are not infinite and the company needs to get their meds into play for as long as possible before their exclusivity runs out and the generics come in with cheaper versions of the same thing. Insurance companies like to pay the cut rates for the generics. Therefore, a single day can cost a pharma company millions of dollars. This is why the industry is so cutthroat, fast paced and on edge.

I am looking at location based similarly from a “cost of a day” perspective. Foursquare and Gowalla and to a lesser exent Whrrl have enormous potential and also a set of hard problems. Dennis Crowley is on the cover of every magazine and out speaking everywhere to promote the product and that is working. I am not criticizing this nor do I want to spoil his amazing ride,* I just want to remind him and his counterparts of an ever looming threat.

The Giant is Going to Awaken

Facebook has been talking about getting into the location game soon. I thought it would happen at SXSW and I was wrong. It probably would have happened at D8 except that Mark Zuckerberg and company are a tad distracted right now by issues of privacy. I think that Crowley and fellow location based rock star, Josh Williams need to look at this as a stay of execution.

• Facebook has somewhere between 400 and 500 million active users.
• All other LBS combined have around 1/100th of Facebook’s user base
• Facebook has penetrated the main stream who largely still is either scared of or has no idea what a Gosquare is
• We do not have a clear picture of all of the services available on Foursquare, Gowalla, Whrrl, Brightkite, etc.
• Automation of services / self serve models do not yet exist or are as slow as molasses
• Business development teams are spread quite thin
• Case studies with ROI are few and far between

What’s going to happen

Here’s what I see happening. Facebook is going to get through this privacy thing. National Quit Facebook Day was a bust because people have no place else like Facebook to go. They have already made privacy easier to manage and now people seem to get that their data is not their own. Blogs like this one have documented what people are asking for in a Facebook alternative and identified the fact that they are going to have to pay for the bandwidth. Rumblings of Facebook entering the location game have been going on for months. Their developers are working on it as we speak and I would bet it is ready to roll out within hours of Zuckerberg saying “Go!” (pending Apple allowing an application update).

I am sure that Facebook will have all of the features that we like about LBS. They will probably have check ins and specials that are activated by check ins or by loyalty. They will probably have something like a scavenger hunt that unlocks a prize. They will have an element of randomness with their PCP (post checkin page) where you can unlock achievements (badges / pins) or win prizes. (I am supposing all the aforementioned. Do not treat as fact.)

The Top Priority

The thing that the big 3 need to solve before Facebook gets into the game is ease of activation. They need to clearly state how to validate that a location belongs to the business owner and make this a speedy process. They need to tell marketers and brands exactly how to activate. We need to know what are the exact services they provide, what is the lead time and how much they cost. And they need to do this soon because there is really only two good, clean business case on LBS right now, by AJ Vaynerchuk and company at Vaynermedia and another by the Fleishman Hilliard team for Cheverolet.

Facebook will treat this like a revenue stream. Their LBS version 1 will go online with a method of business activation, tiered levels of service and a pricing model. They have the benefit of seeing where Gowalla and Foursquare are succeeding and where they are failing, plus they have the mainstream users on their site who do not need to be convinced to use a new app and build up a new social graph, rather they can just use the one they already have.

There goes the neighborhood

With Facebook on the scene, the openness of data is compromised. The current tools are reasonably open via the API or at least via data providers like SimpleGeo. Facebook’s data is harder to aggregate and will be less accessible. Facebook will be the ones enjoying an increased ability to target their user base and marketers will benefit because they will be able to take advantage of this new data stream as long as they want to use Facebook to do so.

So move quick Big 3! Fix your funnel. Make it clear how to activate. The value of a day for you, like big pharma, is extraordinary.

*I like Crowley. He’s dynamic, smart, confident, funny and a good sport. He has never given me shit for coining the #failsquare hashtag and he is fantastic at answering the hard questions in a public forum.

We already know that people love to share information with family, friends and stalkers, the biggest proof point is Facebook with more users than there are Americans.

Evolution from Information to Intelligence

The tools, which initially were just focused on spreading pictures, messages and videos are evolving into data streams that can be useful for businesses and not just for advertising. User experience designers live at the intersection of data and creativity. Their designs are increasingly exposing more hierarchical, semantic data. In other words, they are becoming more readable by programs and algorithms and that makes them more useful overall. The challenge of data architects and a user experience designers is to strike a balance between flexibility and overall usefulness.

Business Intelligence tools have many important distinctions. Two of these are that they allow business users to answer questions that are relevant to their goals and they allow them to explore the data to answer the questions  by answering the initial questions. We used to use terms like cubes, hierarchies and slicing and dicing, but it’s better to just do these things without making users need to think about the functionality.

Foodspotting as a Unique Social Network

In FoodSpotting I can follow people, dishes and places because of a well managed taxonomy. That’s right. You can follow content just like people! This allows me to:

• keep track of foods my friends like
• make new friends and learn about new places via dishes that I like
• learn about dishes that inspire people in places that I like or want to try

Foodspotting as a Business Intelligence Tool

Questions can be answered like:

• Who likes my restaurant?
• What do they like about my restauraunt?
• What are the most popular dishes at my restaurant?
• Where else do the people who like my restaurant like to go?
• What dishes do they like at the other places?
• Who likes my competitor?
• What dishes do they like at my competitor?
• Do they like my restaurant too?
• How is my dish different from other versions on the dish?

Furthermore, most users are freely sharing their twitter accounts via Foodspotting. So now you can engage them and find out what it is that struck them about your dish and maybe even offer them an entree, side or (frosty, malt) beverage for their trouble. There’s your collision of business intelligence and social media. Now, about that beer…

What else can I do with Foodspotting?

I am using Foodspotting and I am loving it. I have been food spotting forever and did not know I was actually Foodspotting. More on Foodspotting later, I have a bigger post planned, but I came across an interesting use case to pour out to Alexa and her team.

So I mentioned that I have been food spotting for some time. This means I have a back log of pictures that I want to post and tag in the tool. Some of these are not close to my “current location”. Foodspotting’s iPhone app asks to know where I am and assumes that any food that I am tagging is food that I have just encountered. Well, the food that I want to spot is from Kirkland, WA. So I go to the map.

The blue dot indicates that I am in Boston, so I drag the map over to Seattle.

I then make sure my filters are set to spot foods in the area

then I scan the area for foods to let it know where I am?

AWESOME! I found the absolute best coffee shop on the planet, Zoka Coffee. So now I want to spot something. I want to add a fruit salad to the Trellis Restaurant in Kirkland. I setup my shot. (Isn’t it beautiful? That fruit salad was amazing)

And now to tag it with a location.

Oops. The blue dot is in Watertown, MA so I must be there too. Is there a way to do what I want to do which is to add stuff to the database that is not near me? I get why you are doing it the way you are, so that people don’t add a dead woodpecker to some restaurant in Omaha when they are in Boston.

obviously that’s photoshop

I caught this article on Mark Zuckerberg’s privacy settings via Julia Roy. And while Zuckerberg may be both cavalier and pompous, so is the community. Look at their sense of entitlement. Please let this serve as a friendly reminder: Facebook is free.

Facebook is Free

The community is complaining about free software, free software that is doing what it says it is going to do. Facebook tells you that they can use your persona to target you and that developers can use it to build applications to serve you. That’s the point. That is how they make money. And let me remind you again, you have not paid a dime for Facebook. The terms of use clearly outline the default privacy. Yes, they change them a lot without asking -WHICH IS TOTALLY SLIMY- but they are pretty good about telling you they changed them. It really is your responsibility to read what you’ve accepted and you do not until someone who has posts something on your wall telling you what they have read. And If you think what they are doing is sleazy, then leave, but first you may want to consider what you would be leaving for.

Do People Want a Facebook Alternative?

Maybe. People say they want more control of their data, but I am not convinced that even Diaspora, the open source, privacy aware, alleged Facebook killer is what people are asking for. This is just based on their video, but it sounds like it is just another version of Facebook, except more righteous and secure.

Ilya from Diaspora says: “No longer will you be at the whims of these large corporate networks who want to tell you that sharing and privacy are mutually exclusive because it will be your node.” Someone has to pay for that. What’s the catch? There’s only $175,121 in kickstarter donations to date thus far. When it collapses under the weight of a lack of revenue model, people will be running back to their free Facebook accounts.

Here is what I think the screaming community means to ask for:

A write once, use anywhere (portable) “digital locker” that carries standard profile information, your content, your locations, your connections and your fully customizable security policy.

There are a host of problems that need to be solved. First major problem is that a W3C-like standard needs to be implemented for the digital locker class and the associated API. Developers need to have something to develop against and a standard convention will make it easy for new developers to understand the possibilities while existing applications bring themselves up to speed.

Money and attention seem to have opened the eyes of Diaspora even wider because they have, according to their blog, decided to implement some new standards like OStatus. But it’s probably just scratching the surface of what they really need to do.

The biggest problem here is that the complainers will need to manage their own security models. There will be default models that can be chosen to pass to any application that you sign up for, but I would bet most people won’t take the time to create and manage security on an application by application basis. It’s not easy.

Also, somebody has to pay for the space you are using. Will it be you?

• Are you willing to leave Facebook for a pay option?
• What has Facebook done to violate the Terms of Use?
• Are you willing to spend the time managing security policies between apps and other people’s digital lockers in your own digital locker?

Loren Feldman of 1938media and I were chatting about Facebook’s arrogance and the irresponsible way that they handle your privacy. Facebook clearly has their own agenda and wants to advance their cause at the expense of their user community. Every time they release something new it is greeted with shock, surprise and a lot of bitching from their base.

AOL does not have the aforementioned annoyances, but they aren’t perfect either. They have a whole host of other [very fixable] problems.

Feldman is spot on about using their ICQ dollars to do campaigns that showcase their thoughts on privacy and frankly what they have to offer. Check out his video on what AOL needs to do to kick Facebook’s ass. Yes, the solutions to their problems come mostly through marketing and redesign. The infrastructure is there, but so is the ick.

 
 

 
 

AOL has The Ick

What ick? The portal ick. AOL is not known as a social networking space. It is a portal and it has the ick of a portal in its design. AOL is PACKED full of awesome stuff, but it’s as hard to find stuff there as it is to find soccer on ESPN.com. The best social media sites make their functionality easy enough for a drunk monkey to find.

AOL gets the aforementioned first point for sure. They know that in order to beat Facebook or at least steal market share that they need to have the same functionality without the privacy problems and flat-out lack of attention to the voice of the customer. AOL developers are smart and their systems are sound, but the second point, the point about the drunk monkey, this is where they struggle.

Privacy

They also get something that Facebook clearly does not get. Users want to be protected. They want to feel safe and secure when they go online. Most AOL help includes both help with problems and quickly addresses privacy issues. It’s transparent. It’s up front because it’s not an issue. For example from the AOL lifestream beta help, the 5th question starts a whole section on privacy:

• Who can see my AOL Lifestream?
• How do I manage my privacy settings?
• Who can comment or like my posts?
• How do I keep my updates from showing up in search results?
• etc

What they Need to Gain Share

AOL needs to fork their experience into 2 different, separate entry points. Keep the portal experience for people who like portals. Portals are just content aggregators. They try to be everything on one page and they are really confusing, but at least you can customize them. Let the user choose the default experience, but give them a social network type experience as well. The components are all there. There are status updates, games, AOL is the king of chat, buddies, there is content and now they have an activity stream called lifestream.aol.com. Lifestream is a really good start, but they need to find a way to elegantly incorporate the other stuff into it to win. The portal has ways to use Twitter, Facebook, AIM and some other stuff without leaving. That needs to be a part of the lifestream. Content Strategists and UX people can solve this stuff easily. I know just the people.

 
 

 
 

This should be a separate post, but the lifestream has a bunch of things that Buzz is lacking, most notably the ability to filter content based on channel and type. How novel!

So here’s what they need: 1) Design changes that incorporate stuff they already have into the lifestream platforms. 2) A kick ass marketing program – that educates people on what AOL has- because a lot of people only remember “You’ve Got Mail” and those shlocky CDs in the mail. Focusing on privacy and the fact that leaving Facebook doesn’t lose you anything are AOLs keys to (re)gaining significant share. The game companies follow suit and the next thing you know we are complaining about Farmville on AOL – or are we? It is already pretty easy to filter the stuff we don’t want out of the lifestream.

What else am I missing?

The Gowalla iPad app is beautiful. The experience on the iPad is fluid and gorgeous and is a cool showcase for the devices capabilities. The biggest difference is the appearance of the icons on the map. It shows you the Gowalla identified locations in the area. You can click on the icons and get information on activity and see photos. It’s beautiful.

Next Release

Of course I cannot help but make suggestions. I am sure this stuff is on the road map, but here goes:
I want search. I just got it in the iPhone app and I cannot live without it any longer. That said, I do not want to use it to simply find a nearby point of interest. I want Gowalla to allow me to set a location as my location regardless of whether I am there or not. This way I can explore places with Gowalla prior to going to the location. It would also be very cool if I could toggle some indicators on the icons such as number of unique visitors, checkins and photos. This takes Gowalla from checkin tool to a business intelligence tool which could then evolve. I can imagine being able to overlay check ins by segment like application use and check in type (for example: people who check in to restaurants).

What would you like to see in the Gowalla iPad application?

When we tell people about Movember, the men’s cancer research charity founded by Adam Garone and a bunch of friends who, over beers, decided to both give back and revive the moustache, we usually hear a couple of standard things:

• I can’t grow a moustache
• My wife won’t let me grow a moustache

Movember is not really not about growing a moustache. The good ones are cherished and so are the bad ones. Movember is about giving and it is about bonding. Movember is a community of people who are passionate about the destruction of cancer. That’s right. Movember is a global community of men and women in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, South Africa, Europe and the United States. Movember is about stories of friends and loved ones who have been affected by this terrible disease, raising awareness, making research possible and celebrating the efforts of those who are involved. But it is not all warm and fuzzy, Movember is also a little competitive.

Graham Nelson told me about Movember. I remember the day he told me informed me that I would have to shave my beard in order to grow a moustache to raise money for cancer research and treatment. It took some convincing. I like my beard. Graham talked about challenging our friends in Austin to raise more money than us and that we could use any means necessary to spread the word. The Movember Digital Challenge was born. Last year Team Boston devastated Team Austin by raising near $25,000 dollars to Austin’s 20,000+. The components of the challenge were events, videos, photos and good old fashioned smack talk!

As a participant last year, I felt the need to step up my own involvement in the organization. I recently appointed myself Digital Challenge “Chief of Global Team Expansion”, a promotion from my last week’s title, VP Director of Expansion. The beauty of Movember is that people feel passionate about the cause. It’s easy to do. It’s rewarding. It’s impactful and yes, it’s fun. You can pretty much decide to just do stuff and it happens.

I am happy to announce the 2010 Movember Digital Challenge to kick off on October 31, 2010 with the annual “shaving of the facial hair”. Is it a #MoUp? Nope. Its a #MoDown [I want to remind all participants that a beard is not a moustache. Shave down to nothing and no "connecting" for the month of November.]

Teams from across the globe will be competing for the title of Grand Champion. The idea is to use any legal, means necessary to raise money for the cause. This means holding events, creating content via twitter, youtube, facebook… hell even dribbble – whatever it takes. This year’s Movember site will have a Digital Challenge leaderboard which will show team progress as well as individual leaders.

Teams captains are being named now and can be found on the official Digital Challenge Movember Team Captains list.

Last year teams made videos, created flickr albums, got corporate sponsors, had events and even made calendars. There was trashed talking alsoside camaraderie. There was showmanship, particularly when David Armano and Team Austin leapfrogged Team Boston with a generous donation from The Art of Shaving. This year people have been promising to go bigger. Last year we started planning in late September. This year? Well as of today, it’s still April.

Here is the official list of team captains as of now. Talk to them about joining their team. The official team site is not open yet, so we are suggestion that team captains keep a list (perhaps an email newsletter, twitter list or a Facebook group) of people who are interested in joining. More details about the challenge will be released as they arise.

The Original 2
Team Austin : #TeamAUS : Aaron Strout
Team Boston : #TeamBOS : Graham Nelson

Expansion Teams
Team Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill : #TeamRDU : Gregory Ng
Team Toronto: #TeamTOR : Sean Moffitt
Team New York City : #TeamNYC : Lisa Kolodny
Team Charleston : #TeamCHS : Chad Norman*
Team Salt Lake City : #TeamSLC : DJ Waldow
Team Seattle : #TeamSEA: Damon Cortesi*

* = mostly committed

TBD:
United States
Team San Francisco : #TeamSFO
Team Denver: #TeamDEN
Team Chicago: #TeamORD
Your City

Global
Team Melbourne: #TeamMEL
Team Sydney : #TeamSYD
Team Dublin : #TeamDUB
Team London : #TeamLHR
Team Aukland : #TeamAKL
Your City

TeamBOS News

#TeamBOS (This year we are shortening and standardizing the hashtags) has already had several major developments: Jim Storer has named himself Director of Recruiting. Derek Peplau on the very same day told Jim that he would be sharing the job! Karen “Pumpkin Spice” Costa aka. VanillaBean45 appointed herself Director of Corporate Relationships.

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.