Location, Location, Location

Hinweis der Redaktion

2. Over the past 8 months I have been researching conversational and social media, amongst other things. What became increasingly apparent over this time was the relevance location was having on the media landscape. Today I’d like to give a brief overview as to how we’ve arrived at the point we’re at, talk about some of social media networks, how they are making the move towards integrating location-based features, and discuss some of the main location aware services that are currently available. (If you haven’t already, remember to check-in.)
3. To understand the significance between services such as Twitter and location - the Iranian election last year serves as a good example. The Iranian civilians used social networks to communicate with each other, self-organise and voice their messages to the rest of the World at a time when journalists couldn’t get access to the country to report what was happening. This was been coined as the Twitter Revolution. What’s interesting here is how the ability to communicate with geographically specific messages actually led to direct action.
4. If we remember, the traditional media landscape and technologies, such as the printing press, telephone and email have all made location less relevant, but location actually gives context. And what context does is it creates...
6. Twitter and location have been linked before 2009. There’s a much cited story about the South by Southwest festival in 2007 at which Scott Beale, the founder of LaughingSquid.com, was queuing to get into Google’s party. Tired of waiting to get in he walked down the street, found a deserted bar, grabbed some tables, and turned his mobile phone on.
7. Using Twitter, he announced a meet-up at the bar he was in, the Gingerman. Within an hour over fifty people joined Scott, until eventually there was a line right out the door. Again, location gives context. Since November of last year we have been able to geotag tweets, and since January of this year we’ve been able to tap into what’s trending locally. Building on this Twitter have just announced a new feature they’ll be rolling out called Points of Interest.
8. Starting soon, users will be able to click on a place name or a location tag in a tweet and see that place on a map. Next to the map, they’ll also be able to see what people are saying about that place in a search results view. This will provide a convenient entry point into the current Twitter conversations about a certain place or city. There will be an API for developers so this feature can be built into client apps, so it will be accessible from more places than just the Twitter website soon.
9. Facebook has recently confirmed their location-based feature, which is apparently due to launch soon. What’s interesting about Facebook is that it has over 400 million users, with 100 million of them using mobile devices. This would mean that they could potentially become the largest player in the location based service market, which would ultimately spell bad news for services like Gowalla and Foursquare. Gowalla and Foursquare are two specific location based services with elements of game play integrated. I’m sure a lot of you would have checked in upon arriving here today but for those of you who haven’t I’ll go on to explain what they are and how they work.
10. Gowalla is a primarily a mobile web application that allows users to check-in to locations that they visit using their mobile device. It first launched in 2009 at SXSW and 2010’s festival seen the launch of Gowalla 2.0.
11. Users can collect badges for checking-in to places, which are these little icons. Some businesses are already using this application with some of them playing with the idea of virtual goods actually translating into real world rewards. For instance if you find a coffee icon in Starbucks, then you could redeem a free coffee for picking the badge up.
12. Gowalla was born out of a desire to inspire people to discover and share the world around them... Essentially what the Gowalla team are aiming to do is to encourage people to visit places that they wouldn’t usually go to through the power of game mechanics.
13. Another application that uses this idea of gameplay to encourage altered human behaviour is Foursquare. There has been a lot of talk about Foursquare over the past 2 months, and it was recently reported that they have over 1 millions users and just over 40 million check-ins. Dennis Crowley recently went into more depth about the company at Where 2.0.
14. He talked about Nicholas Felton, a graphic designer living in NYC. He painstakingly produces these Annual reports with 20-odd pages of statistics about his everyday life. How many hours he played GTA, how far he’s walked, or how many movies he’s seen. This gives a host of personal metrics... and as a result you can begin adding score to everything. If we have this data we can begin analysing whether we’ve read more or less books this year, and take action depending on how you interpret those results.
15. Crowley has said that his aim was to create a service that would turn normal every day life into a game. He discussed how he was inspired by the Nike Plus model.
16. So with Nike Plus you get this little white device that you stick into your iPod and the red device you stick into your shoe.
17. As you run it measures you and gets these metrics based on the things that you are doing, how far you run, how fast, the amount of calories you’ve burnt...
18. You can use it to set up challenges and compete with your friends. This is the kind of thing that would encourage you to get out of bed on a rainy morning because if you don’t then your friends might and they’ll get points for it and you won’t.
19. They cleverly use game mechanics to manipulate the behaviour which takes place in the real world. Users get virtual badges, trophies and points for accomplishing races against their friends.
20. He began to think about routes which he ran and how geotagging and game mechanics would make it more fun. So if you take the route and
21. sprinkle power-ups throughout you would essentially be competing with the other people to get the power-ups and pick them up. It just makes those mundane tasks more fun. This model was then applied to everyday cultural things, like going out at night or going for coffee. How could you use software to encourage people to see more movies — ultimately to change behaviour.
22. Using Foursquare, you can check-in to a place, be it a restaurant, your friend's house or a shop, in any city across the world. Foursquare uses the phone location to do a local search and present you with the most likely options. If the place isn't there, you can add it on the fly from your phone; if it is there, with one more click, your location is registered. Once checked-in, your friends are alerted that you're at a specific location.
23. You also get points for checking-in, and in certain situations, you can get virtual badges. The person who has the most recent check-ins at a place is crowned its mayor. These virtual badges, points and titles are the key to Foursquare's success - they make checking in fun instead of tedious - and more than 2 million of them have been given out. By adding game mechanics to its app, Foursquare has tapped into everyone's competitive spirit. Friends battle for mayorship of their favourite bars and restaurants. People can check who has the most points on the city-wide leaderboard.
24. Foursquare turns you into this guy.
25. This essentially gives you google analytics for real world places. Obviously there is a huge added benefit to businesses if they were to get in board, and we are already witnessing a move into this location based social sphere. Businesses are highlighting who is the mayor and who is the deputy mayor egging people on to try and steal this mayorship away, therefore by going to their business more.
26. Other social savvy businesses are offering free products and services for foursquare check-ins. We are still in the early stages and it will be interesting to see how different businesses enter these new grounds.
27. One business owner capitalised on using the Swarm badge. A badge that can only be collected if more than 50 foursquare users check in to the same place and the same time. The restaurant owner attracted 161 FourSquare users a the same time to his burger place in Milwaukee, bearing in mind there are only approx. 300-400 foursquare users in the area. Even more impressive is the fact that the restaurant more than doubled its typical sunday sales, with an increase of 110% that day.
28. So there are plenty of plus sides to location based services and applications but a very serious concern for those who broadcast where they are every second of every day surely must think about privacy.
29. We’ve already seen how this data could be exploited. A web page was in the news last month for highlighting twitter, gowalla and foursqaure users who had broadcast messages that they were somewhere other than their home. In essence this information could be used by unsavoury people to rob their premises.
30. Another real concern is the lifespan of these location start-ups. If a large company, such as Google, was to acquire Twitter and Foursqaure for instance then Google would be in possession of huge amount of information about us.
31. Google’s corporate motto is ‘Don’t be evil’ but we’ve seen in the past how companies have run into problems and sold data for marketing purposes.
32. http://www.google.com/dashboard/ Emails, website analytics, buzz conversations (if anyone actually uses it), calendar dates, credit card details, contacts, documents, the things you read, an archive of your search terms, your favourite videos and the list goes on. Google would know a wealth of information about you... where you are, where you go frequently, who you go out with. Google would know you better than you know yourself. Of course this is just worst case scenario situations but it is something that is worth bearing in mind.
33. So why are location services important and why will they become more prevalent over the next few years? The time is now for the use of real-time, hyper-localised use of social media as a business tool. These new tools should allow for people to explore the world around them in unique and interactive ways.