Posts tagged as "facebook"

Check In, Get Acquired, Check Out. Farewell Gowalla

With the benefit of hindsight, it was probably inevitable but 5 years after the location based, check in social network we know as Gowalla launched and 3 months after they were acquired by Facebook, Gowalla is no more.

Despite launching in 2007, 2 years prior to Foursquare, Gowalla never seemed to be able to capture attention from either users or from the media in quite the same way as Foursquare. The similarities were many; both social networks used location as a key facet, allowed users to check in to locations they were at or near and to share those locations with other users and other social networks. But while Foursquare's game mechanics of badges and Mayors seemed to hit the right note with users, Gowalla's ill explained and ever morphing system of virtual items, spots and trips never seemed to make sense. No-one I've ever spoken to could explain exactly what the point of Gowalla was, whilst Foursquare's mechanics were simplistic and easy to grasp.

After loosing ground to Foursquare, Gowalla tried to act less as a sole source of checkins and more as a central aggregator of the disparate checkins from itself, Foursquare, Facebook and Twitter, amongst others, but this move did little to slow Foursquare's ascendancy.

Another Category Of Place You Really Don't Want To Check In To

There are some places you really don't want to check into using one of the many location based social networks. There's a variety of suggestions of this nature on the web including funeral homes, an ex-partner's house, jail or the same bar (every night). It now seems you can add military bases (when you're in a war zone) to the list.

Camp Phoenix

A recent report highlighted concerns that the US Air Force has over troops using location based apps, with the Air Force posting a warning on an internal web site on the matter.

"All Airmen must understand the implications of using location-based services," said a message on the internal Air Force network. The features, such as Facebook's 'Check-in,' Foursquare, Gowalla, and Loopt "allow individuals with a smartphone to easily tell their friends their location," it said. "Careless use of these services by Airmen can have devastating operations security and privacy implications," said the message, which was posted on November 5, according to spokesman Major Chad Steffey.

The age old adage about Military Intelligence being an oxymoron springs to mind.

Facebook Places; Haven't We Been Here Before?

A week and a half ago Facebook finally launched their Places feature to a predictable media furore over location privacy, regardless of whether it's justified or not and, to location industry watchers at least, a strong sense of deja vu. Haven't we been here before?

Let's look at the key issues that seem to be getting people hot, bothered and generally up in arms.

Facebook's (Creepy) Bid For Your Homepage

Most browsers have a variation on the theme of a home page, which automagically loads your favourite web page when you start the browser or open a new browser window or tab.

A lot of web sites try to capitalise on this, offering earnest entreaties to "make me your home page" ... "no make me your home page" ... "no, choose me for your home page, I have so much personalised content".

They're needy and somewhat neurotic entities these web sites, it's not like I can have all of them as my home page.

Most of them personalise their content for you, based on a registration setting or some other insight, to give you what they think is the information your looking for.

This is not creepy.

Placebook ... Facebook "Places" In The Wild

After much teasing and tantalising, one of the long rumoured Facebook location features is out in the wild in the form of place community pages. They vary in scale from a hamlet in Spain ...

... through to New York City.

It's clever though not particularly sophisticated at this stage; a simple exposure of Wikia's underlying geo metadata and it probably took very little effort to implement. Facebook appear to treat places as people, hence the exhortation to connect with the place.

Genius or Desperation?

I'm sorry Facebook but your ad targeting systems are wildly inaccurate and reduce that valuable screen estate to the right hand side of my browser window to irrelevant line noise. Google's and Yahoo's ad targeting is pretty darn good but looking at Facebook right now offers me:

  • Omniture Research; which Obama used, apparently.
  • Free laptop from Vodafone Business; I'm not self employed so a business tariff is a non starter.
  • Everyone plays Mafia Wars; except me and most of my friends.

Deliciousness: hairy landings, Twitter (mis)identity, escaped cat, the United States of Facebook and mapme.at

The latest batch of social bookmarks from my Delicious stream:

You Don't Always Get What You Pay For, But Sometimes You Get It For Free

Here in the UK we're used to bad or non-existent customer service, so much so that it's virtually ingrained into our genes. We're well aware of the oft used expression that you get what you pay for except that you actually don't; you continue to pay and act pleasantly surprised when you actually get what you've paid for, murmuring "well that's a turn up for the books". We look longingly across the Atlantic to the US and talk admiringly of the "American service culture" whilst conveniently overlooking the fact that our US counterparts get paid rock bottom wages and have to work damn hard to garner enough tips to make a living.

In the Spirit of Experimentation

Posterous is a service that just begs for experimentation; not only because it's a beautifully simplistic yet rich service but also because the Help and FAQ pages can be a little bit light on detail for some of the less obvious questions; probably to avoid scaring those of a less-power-user-frame-of-mind away.

So the Posterous FAQ at https://posterous.com/faq says this "We'll do smarter things for photos, MP3's, documents and video (both links AND files)".

Link eh? In the spirit of experimentation let's try this, firstly from the easy and obvious one ... twitpic.com

... and rival yfrog.com ...

... and from my Flickr photostream ...

... and finally a more challenging one, from my Facebook photo album ...

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=3454882&id=757562989

... there's only one way to find out, so let's send this to Posterous right now and see what happens; all in the spirit of experimentation naturally.

Posted via email from Gary's Posterous