Often hailed as the next big thing in Social Networking, location based applications are increasing in popularity as smartphones become more mainstream. Facebook and Twitter have proven that people love to share their thoughts with anyone that will listen, so sharing your location is an obvious next step. The giants in this relatively new market are Foursquare and Gowalla, both use the GPS which is now commonplace in phones to allow users to create and check-in at a variety of locations such as shops, pubs, parks and museums. Achievements (e.g. Gowalla’s ‘Cup o’ Joe’ for visiting 10 different coffee shops) encourage users to explore
I’ve been using Gowalla for around a year now (over 320 check-ins), but after a couple of friends started using Foursquare I thought I’d give it a try too. Initially there doesn’t seem to be much difference between the two apps, they share a lot of common functionality such as posting your check-ins to Facebook and Twitter, but its where they differ that is interesting.
Gowalla allows users to upload photos at their check-ins and to add comments which only their Gowalla using friends can see. The application makes use of attractive graphics and a traveller metaphor – users have a passport, collect stamps and pins and add items to their backpack. Occasionally when checking-in to a location, you will find an item thats been left by another user and when creating a new location you can drop an item to become a founder. As well as adding locations, users can string together a collection of locations to create a trip, such as sight seeing or a pub crawl.
Foursquare is a little more popular and as such has more locations, most of the high street near my work is covered by Foursquare, with only a handful of check-ins available in Gowalla. One of the differences between Gowalla and Foursquare is that user comments are public, users can leave tips such as ‘try the steak!’ which you can mark as done or add to a to-do list. Check-ins in Foursquare are awarded points, although I don’t yet understand the criteria used or what the idea of the points is, also in Foursquare you can become a mayor of a location from repeated check-ins.
Personally, I prefer Gowalla – mainly because its more fun its in appearance and ‘gameplay’, I do like the tips idea from Foursquare and a number of retailers have started recognising the power of this new phenomenon by offering specials e.g. Domino’s will give the mayor of each branch a free pizza every Wednesday.
Social media, urgh.. its become one of my most hated of buzzwords, but this week I was impressed with effectiviness of the RATM for Christmas No 1 Facebook Group. It was announced yesterday that Killing in the Name was the UK’s Christmas Number 1 with over half a million sales, beating the latest X Factor winner Joe McElderry.
With just single single page on a website, the RATM for Christmas Number 1 campaign had such a viral effect that it eventually generated more sales than a campaign based on one of the UK’s most popular TV shows, radio play etc. The fact that a single person could have an idea and reach so many people in a short period of time with easy to use tools is as inspiring as it is powerful.
The facts are these
The campaign made Sony even more money
Simon Cowel is still uber rich and doesn’t give a crap
over £60k was raised for the homeless charity Shelter through Facebook, plus RATM are donating the proceeds of sales
Killing in the Name is first song to reach number one in the UK charts through downloads alone
The Facebook group has almost 1 million members
RATM should release a new album already
Don’t feel bad for this X Factor guy, he sold exactly the number of singles he was going to anyway, its just more people thought it would be funny to make a mockery of the system. I’m sure he still has a few months of excitement in the music industry before going back to restocking shelves at Tesco and opening community centres or whatever happens to these people once the new series of X Factor/ Pop Idol/ Britains got Talent starts and people forget about them.
I’m off to start a Facebook group to bring Mountain Dew back to the UK.
Microformats are additional markup that add semantics to content in web pages; their aim is so to improve the way information can be searched, extracted, indexed, cross-referenced or combined by software by describing content.
A good example of this is hCard, heres some basic contact information in plain HTML :
With the hCard markup this information has become more useful, the content has context making it easier to be automatically processed or extracted for use in applications like Outlook or Address Book (hCard is the web based equivalent of the vCard format). Other Microformats include hReview, hCalendar, hResume and hRecipe, take a look at http://microformats.org/ for more information.
One of the principles of Microformats is that they should ‘be presentable and parsable, visible data is much better for humans than invisible metadata’; this definitely seems to be the direction the web is going in as Google recently announced they ignore keywords in meta tags and Apple, Microsoft, Google and Yahoo have incorporated support for microformats some of their webapps; as have popular social networking sites such as digg, facebook, last.fm, linkedin, twitter.
Another interesting use of Microformats is the XFN (XHMTL friend network), this was the first microformat and is used to describe the relationship between individual’s and their various online presences. Its really simple and consists of two attributes.
rel=”me” – this is used to show that the link is related to yourself (eg the links from this blog to my twitter profile page)
rel=”friend” – this can be used to describe relationships between people when linking (eg the links from this blog to my friend’s blogs), this tag can also be stuffed with context such as ‘co-worker, met, acquaintance, colleague, child’.
I managed to snag an invite from a friend who was lucky enough to be invited to a Google Developers event.
Just in case you don’t know Google Wave is the new web app from Google which they believe will replace traditional email and more. The project’s strapline is ‘what if email was invented now?’ and aims to solve some of the problems with they way we communicate online. Wave has the potential to merge and replace IM, Social Networking, Wikis, Email, will be open sourced and has an API allowing developers to write extensions or incorporate Wave in external sites.
Here are a couple of videos that explain Wave in more detail
Google Wave in 2 minutes
Google Wave revealed at Google I/O 2009
So far, my impressions are it’s fairly quick and clean… but until more people I know are using it, its only really useable as a kind of twitter/ forum hybrid by browsing the with:public waves. As far as I can tell, theres no way of knowing if a person is currently online, which seems odd to me and every now and again you are reminded that this is a product still in development as it hangs and gives you a quote from Firefly (incidentally, Wave gets its name from the show too).
I’m looking forward to Wave being released publicly and using it at work, as I think it will be an excellent project management tool. We have two offices, in different timezones and communication can be difficult. We currently use an inconsistent combination of Basecamp, Google Docs, Skype, phone calls, email and, within the main Edinburgh office, face to face conversations to communicate; I see Google Wave replacing and centralising a great deal of our communication in a clean, searchable organised tool.
If you got here via a Google search for free invites, sorry I don’t have invites to give yet!
