Posts about social • Gary Gale

Just Because You Can Put Things On A Map Doesn't Always Mean You Should Allow Anyone To Put Things On A Map

2013-07-11 12:20

Benadryl, the hay fever medication, has sadly learned the hard way. At first sight it seems innocuous enough; a hay fever relief brand teams up with the UK's Met Office to crowd source areas where there's a high pollen count.

Crowd sourcing data is a laudable approach. Crowd sourcing data and putting it one a map seems like a good idea. Crowd sourcing data and putting it on a map without any verification or checks? You might not end up with what you originally intended.

This is a lesson that Benadryl, the hay fever medication, has sadly learned the hard way. At first sight it seems innocuous enough; a hay fever relief brand teams up with the UK's Met Office to crowd source areas where there's a high pollen count.

You take that crowd sourced information and put it on a map so fellow hay fever sufferers know what to expect in their neighbourhood and with the presumed side effect that if you are a hay fever sufferer then maybe you might want to pop out and buy some Benadryl to help cope with the symptoms.

But people are ... creative and whilst you might get an accurate map of high pollen count areas you might also find that people want to be ... well let's just call it artistic.

First of all a series of map markers across Westminster, on the bank of London's River Thames seemed to spell out a word that rhymes with duck. Note that for those of you with a sensitive disposition or who are reading this at work, the screen shots below have been pixellated out for your comfort and convenience; you can click through for the NSFW versions if you so choose.

This was followed in quick succession by another word, this time rhyming with bit, appearing across London's Docklands area.

Who knows how far the creative hay fever sufferers of the United Kingdom would have taken this but it wasn't to last. Benadryl noticed this new form of map art and quickly took the social pollen count site down and it has since reappeared, though this time there seems to be some checks in place so that users can report high pollen count areas and only high pollen count areas. But whilst their developers were frantically trying to put some safeguards in place, it has to be said that Benadryl put up a temporary replacement that shows a certain sense of style and a whole lot of class.

Screen shot credits: Us vs. Them.

Revisiting SoLoMo in Istanbul

2012-11-13 13:52

last time I spoke about whether do embrace SoLoMo or just embrace social, local and mobile I cautioned against the tick in the box approach and against adopting new technologies just because you're exhorted to.

But at first glance, a business running classified listings does seem to put all the right ticks in all the right boxes.

Firstly local. Classifieds are inherently local, offering a way for local businesses and individuals to offer ... stuff ... to other local people. Implementing a local strategy needs your mainstay offering to have a strong geolocation quotient and what could be more local or more geolocation than addresses and postal codes?

Then there's mobile. Most classifieds businesses have either fully or partially transitioned from print to online and if you already have an online presence, you're more than half way to having a mobile online presence.

Finally there's social. Again, there's a strong affinity with classifieds. Nothing spreads faster than word of mouth reputation and harnessing the power of social media to allow people to say "hey, I just found this really cool stuff" is a compelling case for social.

So when the International Classified Media Association, the ICMA, asked me to talk about SoLoMo at their Social, Local, Mobile: Classified Media Strategies conference in Instanbul last week it was an ideal opportunity to see whether my preconceptions to be skeptical about SoLoMo were borne out in practise or whether I'd just overdone the cynicism a bit too much.

If any industry sector is uniquely poised to benefit from the triumvirate of social, local and mobile, it's the classified listings industry. The last time I spoke about whether do embrace SoLoMo or just embrace social, local and mobile I cautioned against the tick in the box approach and against adopting new technologies just because you're exhorted to.

But at first glance, a business running classified listings does seem to put all the right ticks in all the right boxes.

As it turns out, I think it was round about a 50/50 ratio. Most of the classifieds people in Instanbul fundamentally got the basic precepts around each of SoLoMo's constituent elements.

But there were two major flies in their respective ointments.

Firstly, as with most industry sectors, the classifieds businesses are experts in ... classified. They're not experts in social, local or mobile. They're far too busy running their business to become experts in anything other than their business. Which means metaphorical toes are dipped in equally metaphorical waters without maybe understanding or appreciating what is meant to be achieved.

Secondly and closely linked with my first point, even if a social, local, mobile or SoLoMo strategy is put in place, it's still not clear what's going to be achieved or how to measure success or failure. Many of the classifieds players I spoke to openly acknowledged that whilst they have social media dashboard and metrics in place, it's a major challenge to interpret a sea of figures and work out what this means in the context of their business area.

I'm still strongly of the belief that if applied sanely and in a way that makes sense for a business, there's a lot to be gained from social, from mobile and from local.

I'm still equally strongly of the belief that SoLoMo, even if it does have a manifesto, is too vague and wooly to be understood by people trying hard to make their business succeed and needs the basic tenets broken out and explained in language the people SoLoMo is trying to help can understand.

As usual, the slides from my talk, which will be just a tad familiar to anyone who read my last SoLoMo post, are below and my deck notes follow after the break.

[scribd id=113080713 key=key-1tr8s6lysr71tcss8g53 mode=scroll]

Slide 2 So, hello, I’m Gary and I’m from the Internet. I’m a self-confessed map addict, a geo-technologist and a geographer. I’m Director of Web & Community for Nokia’s Location and Commerce group. Prior to Nokia I led Yahoo’s Geotechnologies group in the United Kingdom. I’m a founder of the Location Forum, a co-founder of WhereCamp EU, I sit on the Council for the AGI, the UK’s Association for Geographic Information, I’m the chair of the W3G conference and I’m also a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.

Slide 3 There are URLs in this talk but this is the only URL in the entirety of this talk you might want to take a note of. Although if you go there right now, it'll 404 on you, later today or tomorrow, this is where this slide deck, my notes and all the links you'll be seeing will appear on my blog. That’s an upper case “I” and a number “9” at the end of the URL by the way ...

Slide 4 As you might be able to tell from the title of this talk, I like social and social media ...

Slide 5 Based on social networking theory from the 1980's, social networks and social media are one of today's dominant forces for communication on the internet and the web.

Slide 6 And even though a lot of the social networks that originally launched are no longer with us, we're a social species and social networks are here to stay in some form or other for the foreseeable future of the web Slide 7

Whether it's a social network for your professional profile Slide 8

... for your friends and family to share stuff Slide 9

... for your more technically literate friends and colleagues to share stuff

Slide 10

... or for expressing yourself in 140 characters or less, probably everyone in this room knows and uses social networks to a greater or lesser degree

Slide 11

I also like local ...

Slide 12 I travel a lot, both for work and for when I'm not working. Online local sources of information, both those which are place related and via social media, are to me utterly invaluable.

Slide 13 Local is both a global and a intensely personal thing. My idea of what's relevant and local will differ entirely from yours most of the time. Local maps and local place information allow me to find the things that are important to me, like where to find a good cup of coffee in a new city, where the hotel I’m staying at in a new city is located and other more detailed information about that place.

Slide 14 Local is both a global and a intensely personal thing. My idea of what's relevant and local will differ entirely from yours most of the time. Local maps and local place information allow me to find the things that are important to me, like where to find a good cup of coffee in a new city, where the hotel I’m staying at in a new city is located and other more detailed information about that place.

Slide 15 Local is both a global and a intensely personal thing. My idea of what's relevant and local will differ entirely from yours most of the time. Local maps and local place information allow me to find the things that are important to me, like where to find a good cup of coffee in a new city, where the hotel I’m staying at in a new city is located and other more detailed information about that place.

Slide 16 I also like mobile ...

Slide 17 I like the fact that the social and local services I've come to rely on are not tied to the internet connection at home or at work and that I don't have to have access to a desktop computer or a laptop to use them. My mobile is more than a phone, it's a computer with an internet connection in my back pocket. I use my mobile all the time and I'm not alone; a recent ComScore report shows that in the US more people now spend time on Facebook and Twitter on mobile than they do on those company's respective web sites.

Slide 18 But do I like SoLoMo ... ?

Slide 19 SoLoMo is one of those fantastic acronyms that the tech industry creates on a regular basis, the aggregation and the convergence of the three things I've just talked about ... social, local and mobile.

Slide 20 It even has a manifesto for "everything marketeers need to know about the convergence of social, local and mobile". Given what I've been showing you on the last 16 or so slides, I should love the concept of SoLoMo .... shouldn't I?

Slide 21 But SoLoMo has an odd sense of deja vu for me. I freely admit this is in part down to my healthy sense of cynicism and skepticism where marketing and advertising is concerned but I'm sure we've been here before, where a buzzword or an acronym has been heralded to be the next “big thing” only for the harsh light of day and the passage of time to show otherwise.

Slide 22 Remember the "year of the map" ... ?

Slide 23 The explosion of maps APIs, first from Yahoo!, then from Nokia, Google, Bing, OpenStreetMap and many others have revolutionised maps with only a few lines of JavaScript code. Suddenly maps were everywhere, whether they actually needed to be or not.

Slide 24 Now it's true, that some amazing work has come out of the mapping API, such as Stamen's Pretty Maps that mashes up Flickr’s Alpha shapes, urban areas from Natural Earth and OpenStreetMap road, highway and path data; and which showed that you could produce maps, such as where I live on the outskirts of London and here in Istanbul, that weren't only like no map you'd seen before but were almost works of art in their own right.

Slide 25 Now it's true, that some amazing work has come out of the mapping API, such as Stamen's Pretty Maps that mashes up Flickr’s Alpha shapes, urban areas from Natural Earth and OpenStreetMap road, highway and path data; and which showed that you could produce maps, such as where I live on the outskirts of London and here in Istanbul, that weren't only like no map you'd seen before but were almost works of art in their own right.

Slide 26 It also meant that people even went so far as to link the Twitter API and Modest Maps and make maps for individuals, such as this map that Aaron Cope, ex of Flickr, made for me.

Slide 27 But in becoming widespread, digital maps started to become a commodity and for every good use of a map, the number of maps that are just plain wrong started to increase, such as this, digitally produced, totally wrong map of a local bus route in London, which has been helpfully corrected by a local resident ...

Slide 28 Or a combination of online digital maps, from Google and incorrect spatial data from the US State Department being used as a justification for a border dispute between Nicaragua and Costa Rica in 2010.

Slide 29 Then there was the "check-in economy" which was going to revolutionise advertising and local commerce through checking into a place on your location enabled smartphone. Companies such as Brightkite, Gowalla, Facebook's Places and Foursquare were hailed by the media as the standard bearers for this. Time has not been kind here.

Slide 30 Who here remembers Brightkite? One of the earlier LBS apps to take advantage of the check-in phenomenon. Wikipedia's entry on Brightkite says it all ... "Brightkite was a location based social network" ...

Slide 31 So farewell Brightkite, there's always Gowalla, Facebook Places and Foursquare.

Slide 32 Ah. "Gowalla was a location based social network". I'm having a bit of deja vu here again.

Slide 33 So, no more Brightkite or Gowalla. There's still Facebook Places and Foursquare. And after Facebook's recent IPO, surely Facebook can't get it wrong can it?

Slide 34 Actually Facebook Places lasted just over a year and for a lot of that time, it was only available in the US and automagically turned itself on when I was in Silicon Valley and turned itself off again once I got home to London.

Slide 35 So of the 4 poster children of the check-in economy only Foursquare is left and, apparently, still going strong. Maybe the "check-in economy" didn't really exist.

Slide 36 Fast forward to today and in addition to SoLoMo, there's The Cloud

Slide 37

Now the notion of storage and services hosted remotely and accessed via the internet is nothing new. You can argue that the IMAP server which holds my email and my web host provider are as much cloud services as Amazon's EC2 and S3 and DropBox are

Slide 38

But unlike the digital map and the check-in which are fairly clear and unambiguous, no-one really seems to know precisely what the cloud is; take an unscientific straw poll of 5 people and you'll probably get 5 different answers.

Slide 39 So the "year of the map”, "the check-in economy" and other buzzwords, such as hyperlocal, never really materialised and either were over-used or failed to live up to their much hyped potential.

Slide 40 So back to SoLoMo and back to the convergence of social, local and mobile.

Slide 41 It has to be said that I’m very wary of SoLoMo as a concept, though not of the converging technologies that make up SoLoMo and I encourage you all to be equally wary, as I hope you'll see.

Slide 42 Firstly the concept of social. SoLoMo encourages your business to be social. But almost everything on the internet now is already social, either as an established social network or as a component to existing ventures.

Slide 43 Although Twitter launched in 2006, it's over the last 4 or 5 years that it's become an established part of the internet. Sharing people’s thoughts and trivial day-to-day activities, through to breaking news, from celebrity news, through political events to natural disasters.

Slide 44 Ditto for YouTube, started in 2005 and acquired by Google a year later.

Slide 45 There's also Tumblr, founded in 2007.

Slide 46 And of course, Facebook, launched in 2004.

Slide 47 All of these services and plenty more besides have permanently changed people's expectations and habits of how they use the internet and how they share content with their social community. Even before Facebook's recent IPO, this one site has become a magnet for how brands reach and interact with their customers.

If you're looking to bring a social aspect to your business, how do you compete with the existing platforms and how can you compete with the massive attention that your brand rivals already have on social media platforms? Unless you're bringing something radically new to the table you'll have a hard time competing for your audience's attention. You can take the common route of literally buying attention with deals, coupons and special offers, but that's not a sustainable method of engagement in anything but the short term.

The often overlooked solution to vying for social attention is to make social a key aspect to all of your business and all of the departments that make up your business. "Doing social" can have a benefit but only if it's a core part of the way in which you interact with your customers, past, present and future. Simply having a Twitter account or a Facebook page does not a social strategy make.

Slide 48 Another truism is that there's much much more to mobile and to mobility than just Apple's smartphone offering.

Slide 49 There are a lot of smartphones about and that number continues to grow. In the last 2 years in the United States alone, smartphone growth has risen from under 30% to 50%, whilst there’s been a corresponding fall in feature phone growth, from just over 70% to meet smartphones at 50% in March of this year.

Slide 50 It's true that most companies these days go down the mobile app route and that often means that the starting point is to focus on a single platform. Yet despite what you read in the media, often the social media, there are other platforms out there besides iOS.

Slide 51 There's Windows Phone, and despite me working for Nokia and having a potential bias here, I have to say that this platform is growing fast and offers a differentiating factor to a startup or company expanding into mobile that iOS, with it's massive array of apps, can't now offer.

Slide 52 And then of course, there's Google's Android OS as well. By all means develop, launch and keep updated a mobile app. But don't get complacent and think that your mobile strategy will be successful just because you have a mobile presence on a single mobile platform. Even if you're aggressive and target all of the mobile platforms, there's still the cost and effort involved in maintaining a mobile presence across disparate environments.

Slide 53 Although relatively recent and still somewhat fragmented from a standards point of view, HTML5 is looking to be a viable alternative option for a mobile presence and indeed, some companies, including the Financial Times, are focusing entirely on HTML5 to cut development costs and to work around the restrictions and limitations that each platform's app store or app marketplace has, particularly around revenue generation.

Slide 54 But there's more to mobile than just smartphones, there's also the growing number of tablets

Slide 55

From Apple's iconic iPad

Slide 56

Through Amazon's newcomer, the Kindle Fire plus many other table variants running Android.

Slide 57 And beyond the smartphone and the tablet, there's the connected TV, which is becoming more and more one of the every growing number of screens that vies for our attention on a daily basis.

Slide 58 Finally, in addition to social and to mobile, there's local. But local is more than just localised and relevant information, deals and coupons.

Slide 59 In just the same way in which the "check-in economy" never really materialised, the "deals economy" is not having an easy time. Groupon, once the poster child of local commerce, has had a rough ride, with vendors finding out the hard way that good deals for their customers doesn't necessarily equate to good business for a business. Indeed, the rumours of Groupon's near bankruptcy have forced the company to postpone their promised IPO. And as with social and mobile, the local marketplace is already filled to near overflowing point with competitors and it can be hard for a newcomer to vie for customer's attention against the competition.

To do local successfully, it's not just about choosing to partner with the right tool, say Foursquare vs. Gowalla or Groupon vs. Living Social and hoping that you've chosen a partner with longevity. As with social, it's not just about engaging with your audience. As with mobile, it's not just about putting the tick next to the box that say "have mobile app". It's about looking long and hard at your business and its offering and rewiring it from a local perspective in a way that makes sense for your offering and your audience. It's about convincing your staff and your investors that doing this makes sense for you and for your business. Putting a tick next to the box that says "do SoLoMo" simply isn't enough.

Slide 60 So if SoLoMo is more than just adding social, local and mobile together to be buzzword compliant, what is the success factor in all of this? The answer is content. The internet remains one of the best ways we have today to reach an audience, both as an individual and as a business and that audience is hungry for content ...

Slide 61 ... specifically for digital content. More specifically, an audience that is hungry for quality, current and relevant content. Content that can tell a great story which can boost your brand, content that explains your products and services clearly and unambiguously, content that creates loyalty, that makes your social, mobile and local presence compelling and sticky, content that builds a community around it, via comments, Facebook Likes, Tweets and so on. The harsh fact is that in the fields of social, local and mobile there's a simple equation ... no content or irrelevant content equals no business. You may have an iPhone app or a Facebook page or a deals coupon but these will never make up for a lack of quality content.

Slide 62 But to be more precise, it’s not just about digital content to connect with your audience and with your customers, it’s about local and localised content. This means that you need to reach your audience in a manner with which they’re familiar and comfortable with. Localising to a local language is a good first step but just as importantly, it’s about local knowledge. You, as business owners or employees are in a unique position to know your local area and to give unique insights that other people just don’t know. Let me give you a specific recent example ...

Slide 63 I fly in and out of Berlin’s Tegel airport because Berlin is the European headquarters for Nokia’s Location & Commerce group. This airport is as well known in the city by its airport code, TXL, as it is by its’ full name, Berlin Otto Lilienthal Airport. Last week, whilst in Berlin I was given this tee-shirt. Everyone I know in Berlin immediately understood the local reference, not only to TXL but also the hexagon on the tee-shirt, because the main terminal at Tegel is hexagonal in shape. Local knowledge, local information, local insight.

Slide 64 I fly in and out of Berlin’s Tegel airport because Berlin is the European headquarters for Nokia’s Location & Commerce group. This airport is as well known in the city by its airport code, TXL, as it is by its’ full name, Berlin Otto Lilienthal Airport. Last week, whilst in Berlin I was given this tee-shirt. Everyone I know in Berlin immediately understood the local reference, not only to TXL but also the hexagon on the tee-shirt, because the main terminal at Tegel is hexagonal in shape. Local knowledge, local information, local insight.

Slide 65 I fly in and out of Berlin’s Tegel airport because Berlin is the European headquarters for Nokia’s Location & Commerce group. This airport is as well known in the city by its airport code, TXL, as it is by its’ full name, Berlin Otto Lilienthal Airport. Last week, whilst in Berlin I was given this tee-shirt. Everyone I know in Berlin immediately understood the local reference, not only to TXL but also the hexagon on the tee-shirt, because the main terminal at Tegel is hexagonal in shape. Local knowledge, local information, local insight.

Slide 66 Now, if any industry sector can be said to have a wealth of local, digital, content, it’s the classified market. So, as I begin to wrap this up, I thought it would be a good idea to look at a case study of how one player approaches the trinity of social, of local and of mobile. I choose a classified business from a purely personal perspective. A classifieds business I’ve known as a consumer for a good many years and one who has transitioned from printed media to take on digital media ... so, with the caveat that this is very much a critique and not a criticism ...

Slide 67 I looked at Friday-Ad and for the purposes of this case study I’m looking to get my hands on a nice cheap MacBook Air. The first experience on my laptop is good. The site works out that I’m in the United Kingdom, probably via the domain name and possibly some IP geolocation. Now most modern browsers have built in geolocation facilities so I was a bit surprised to be asked to manually enter my postal code when my browser could have a pretty good idea of where I am. There’s a nice set of social icons present, with the usual suspects of Facebook, Twitter and Google+. To be honest, for an organisation with the pedigree and heritage of Friday-Ad, 1,500 likes and 425 Tweets sounds a bit low to me and it’s not clear what, precisely is being liked or tweeted about. The site, the UK site, or something else? What’s more confusing is the second set of just Facebook and Google+ icons below; this time with 22 likes and no +’s. Maybe this is for me to like of plus the UK site. Or ... not. For an end user, this is not clear at all, in fact it’s contradictory and confusing.

Slide 68

... but let’s not get bogged down in details, so I punch on my postal code and click the button helpfully labelled “Go Local!”.

Slide 69 Good. My postal code has been accepted and the site knows that I’m in Teddington in South West London. But hang on a moment. Remember those confusing social buttons? They’re still here and I’m more confused. The one’s at the top are now at zero and the ones underneath, which I previously thought might be for the UK are now for Teddington and yet the numbers are still exactly the same, 22 likes and no plus’s. I’m still confused.

Slide 70 So in an attempt to find what it is I’m being asked to like I hover my mouse pointer over the like button. But nothing happens. No clues and I’m left clueless. So I mouse over the tweet button and nothing happens here. But wait. I’m a bit of a geek and I notice that there’s a URL in the browsers status bar. I’m also geeky enough to work out that I would be Tweeting about Friday Ad in Teddington. But I wonder how many of the Friday Ad’s non geeky, or to put it another way, normal users would notice this.

Slide 71 So, after searching, I find the MacBook Air I want. It’s not really local but it’s a good price. Then I notice another set of Tweet and Like buttons. This time on the right hand in a box helpfully labelled Options. I am now officially confused. On this page there’s 3 Like buttons, 2 Tweet buttons 2 Google+ buttons, one Email To A Friend button and one Send button which I have no idea what would happen if I click it. Friday-Ad obviously has a social strategy but it’s just not clear how it works for the user and what it is that I’d be liking or plusing or recommending or sending. I have social button overload.

Slide 72 So I retreat from the laptop web experience and go mobile. My first port of call is my phone’s app store but there’s nothing I can find. This is not a bad thing as it does allow all flavours of today’s smartphone market to reach Friday-Ad. I go to www.Friday-ad.co.uk and the site notes I’m on a mobile browser and redirects me to the mobile site. This is good. Again, it knows I’m in the UK and this time, unlike on a laptop browser I’m offered a use current location option.

Slide 73

I click through the phone’s warning and I can see that the mobile site now knows where I am. Good.

Slide 74 Not let’s find that MacBook Air. OK. There’s nothing in my local area. Let’s refine the search. Oh, I see. The default is within 10 miles. So I tap the little “x” to remove the distance and tap go.

Slide 75 Still no results. But I found my MacBook Air on the non mobile site. So I tap refine search and then the penny drops. I need to tap refine search, remove the distance constraint, and then tap on refine search again. Really?

Slide 76 So eventually after some experimentation, I find my MacBook Air. And the social element, well if I scroll down I can tweet or like this ad. At least I think it’s that ad. Once again there’s absolutely no context here at all and if I want to do something with Google+ which is on the main site, well I’m out of luck,

Now I want to re-iterate this was a critique and not a criticism. Friday Ad has a business built around local content and local content with a strong and intuitive way of allowing people to interact with it. Friday Ad has a mobile presence as well and one which works intuitively and simply, leveraging browser detection to offer me the mobile site and geolocation. Friday-Ad also knows and uses the major social networks, but it’s this one piece of the puzzle which isn’t cohesive or intuitive for a non technically literate user to comprehend. But overall I think Friday-Ad does a pretty good job. Yes, there could be some more polish applied but overall the key elements of social, local and mobile are all there, even if the fit isn’t a snug one in places.

Slide 77 So please, do mobile and let your products and services break free of the desktop ...

Slide 78 Do social and build a presence and community around your offerings ...

Slide 79 Do local and bring local relevance to your content and to your audience ...

Slide 80 But unless you have money to burn, don't do SoLoMo just because you hear that it's the current trend you need to be part of. It's interesting to note that even as SoLoMo continues to be trumpeted as the next big thing that you have to invest in, there's a buzzword compliant newcomer snapping at SoLoMo's heels.

Slide 81 If recent commentary is to be believed, you now need to invest in ToDaClo ... touch and data and the cloud.

Slide 82 Buzzwords do not make a successful business, service or offering, and I leave you with the ultimate buzzword offering, which Schuyler Erlse sprung on an unsuspecting audience at FOSS4G recently.

Slide 83 Thank you for listening.

SoLoMo, Or Just Social, Local And Mobile?

2012-06-12 19:26

hyperlocal, which I approached from the point of view of a hopeful sceptic, turned out to be more hype than local, SoLoMo gave me the same feeling of unease.

One of the many things I like about writing talks for a conference is that the talk often morphs during the writing process as I research the theme and try to make the narrative at least vaguely coherent. Of course, it also helps that when you're asked to be a speaker at a conference, the organisers often want the title and abstract up to 3 months ahead of proceedings. 3 months is a long time in the tech industry and a lot can change.

Which brings me to the talk I gave a month ago at the Location Business Summit in Amsterdam and again today at the Click 6.0 Digital Marketing conference in Dubai.

I'd originally wanted to talk about the importance of digital maps in SoLoMo, the much touted convergence of social, local and mobile. The more I researched this, the more a feeling of déjà vu crept into my thinking. I was sure I'd seen a much talked about and much feted tech phenomenon turn out to be more hype than substance. Much as hyperlocal, which I approached from the point of view of a hopeful sceptic, turned out to be more hype than local, SoLoMo gave me the same feeling of unease.

For those of you who like this sort of thing (and I really need to check my web analytics sometime to see if anyone actually does like this sort of thing or whether I'm merely deluded; either one of these options is entirely plausible), the slide deck, with titles helpfully annotated into Arabic by one of my colleagues in Nokia's Berlin office, plus notes are below.

[scribd id=100297520 key=key-1uwzl4kofy5rl0j6f7g0 mode=list]

Slide 1

Welcome back. Now I’m aware that you’ve all just had your lunch but maybe, just maybe, the observant amongst you will have noticed that this slide behind me isn’t the talk that’s advertised in the conference brochure and schedule. This talk was supposed to be “The 3rd. Generation Of The Map; The Importance of Location in SoLoMo”. But during the process of writing and researching this talk, it changed and became “SoLoMo, Or Just Social, Local and Mobile?”. This is not a bad thing. My talks often morph during their creation, hopefully becoming something which is a bit more focused and relevant for a given audience. But firstly, I should introduce myself …

Slide 2

So, hello, I’m Gary. I’m a self-confessed map addict, a geo-technologist and a geographer. I’m Director of Places for Nokia’s Location and Commerce group. Prior to Nokia I led Yahoo’s Geotechnologies group in the United Kingdom. I’m a founder of the Location Forum, a co-founder of WhereCamp EU, I sit on the Council for the AGI, the UK’s Association for Geographic Information, I’m the chair of the W3G conference and I’m also a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.

Slide 3

As you might be able to tell from the title of this talk, I like social and social media …

Slide 4

Based on social networking theory from the 1980's, social networks and social media are one of today's dominant forces for communication on the internet and the web.

Slide 5

And even though a lot of the social networks that originally launched are no longer with us, we're a social species and social networks are here to stay in some form or other for the foreseeable future of the web

Slide 6

Whether it's a social network for your professional profile

Slide 7

... for your friends and family to share stuff

Slide 8

... for your more technically literate friends and colleagues to share stuff

Slide 9

... or for expressing yourself in 140 characters or less, probably everyone in this room knows and uses social networks to a greater or lesser degree

Slide 10

I also like local ...

Slide 11

I travel a lot, both for work and for when I'm not working. Online local sources of information, both those which are place related and via social media, are to me utterly invaluable.

Slide 12

Local is both a global and a intensely personal thing. My idea of what's relevant and local will differ entirely from yours most of the time. Local maps and local place information allow me to find the things that are important to me, like where to find a good cup of coffee in a new city ...

Slide 13

...where the hotel I’m staying at in a new city is located ...

Slide 14

... and other more detailed information about that place.

Slide 15

I also like mobile ...

Slide 16

I like the fact that the social and local services I've come to rely on are not tied to the internet connection at home or at work and that I don't have to have access to a desktop computer or a laptop to use them. My mobile is more than a phone, it's a computer with an internet connection in my back pocket. I use my mobile all the time and I'm not alone; a recent ComScore report shows that in the US more people now spend time on Facebook and Twitter on mobile than they do on those company's respective web sites.

Slide 17

But do I like SoLoMo ... ?

Slide 18

SoLoMo is one of those fantastic acronyms that the tech industry creates on a regular basis, the aggregation and the convergence of the three things I've just talked about ... social, local and mobile.

Slide 19

It even has a manifesto for "everything marketeers need to know about the convergence of social, local and mobile". Given what I've been showing you on the last 16 or so slides, I should love the concept of SoLoMo .... shouldn't I?

Slide 20

But SoLoMo has an odd sense of deja vu for me. I freely admit this is in part down to my healthy sense of cynicism and skepticism where marketing and advertising is concerned but I'm sure we've been here before, where a buzzword or an acronym has been heralded to be the next “big thing” only for the harsh light of day and the passage of time to show otherwise.

Slide 21

Remember the "year of the map" ... ?

Slide 22

The explosion of maps APIs, first from Yahoo!, then from Nokia, Google, Bing, OpenStreetMap and many others have revolutionised maps with only a few lines of JavaScript code. Suddenly maps were everywhere, whether they actually needed to be or not.

Slide 23

Now it's true, that some amazing work has come out of the mapping API, such as Stamen's Pretty Maps that mashes up Flickr’s Alpha shapes, urban areas from Natural Earth and OpenStreetMap road, highway and path data; and which showed that you could produce maps, such as where I live on the outskirts of London ...

Slide 24

... and here in Dubai, that weren't only like no map you'd seen before but were almost works of art in their own right.

Slide 25

It also meant that people even went so far as to link the Twitter API and Modest Maps and make maps for individuals, such as this map that Aaron Cope, ex of Flickr, made for me.

Slide 26

But in becoming widespread, digital maps started to become a commodity and for every good use of a map, the number of maps that are just plain wrong started to increase, such as this, digitally produced, totally wrong map of a local bus route in London, which has been helpfully corrected by a local resident …

Slide 27

Or a combination of online digital maps, from Google and incorrect spatial data from the US State Department being used as a justification for a border dispute between Nicaragua and Costa Rica in 2010.

Slide 28

Then there was the "check-in economy" which was going to revolutionise advertising and local commerce through checking into a place on your location enabled smartphone. Companies such as Brightkite, Gowalla, Facebook's Places and Foursquare were hailed by the media as the standard bearers for this. Time has not been kind here.

Slide 29

Who here remembers Brightkite? One of the earlier LBS apps to take advantage of the check-in phenomenon. Wikipedia's entry on Brightkite says it all ... "Brightkite was a location based social network" ...

Slide 30

So farewell Brightkite, there's always Gowalla, Facebook Places and Foursquare.

Slide 31

Ah. "Gowalla was a location based social network". I'm having a bit of deja vu here again.

Slide 32

So, no more Brightkite or Gowalla. There's still Facebook Places and Foursquare. And after Facebook's recent IPO, surely Facebook can't get it wrong can it?

Slide 33

Actually Facebook Places lasted just over a year and for a lot of that time, it was only available in the US and automagically turned itself on when I was in Silicon Valley and turned itself off again once I got home to London.

Slide 34

So of the 4 poster children of the check-in economy only Foursquare is left and, apparently, still going strong. Maybe the "check-in economy" didn't really exist.

Slide 35

Fast forward to today and in addition to SoLoMo, there's The Cloud

Slide 36

Slide 37

Slide 38

So the "year of the map”, "the check-in economy" and other buzzwords, such as hyperlocal, never really materialised and either were over-used or failed to live up to their much hyped potential.

Slide 39

So back to SoLoMo and back to the convergence of social, local and mobile.

Slide 40

It has to be said that I’m very wary of SoLoMo as a concept, though not of the converging technologies that make up SoLoMo and I encourage you all to be equally wary, as I hope you'll see.

Slide 41

Firstly the concept of social. SoLoMo encourages your business to be social. But almost everything on the internet now is already social, either as an established social network or as a component to existing ventures.

Slide 42

Although Twitter launched in 2006, it's over the last 4 or 5 years that it's become an established part of the internet. Sharing people’s thoughts and trivial day-to-day activities, through to breaking news, from celebrity news, through political events to natural disasters.

Slide 43

Ditto for YouTube, started in 2005 and acquired by Google a year later.

Slide 44

There's also Tumblr, founded in 2007

Slide 45

And of course, Facebook, launched in 2004.

Slide 46

All of these services and plenty more besides have permanently changed people's expectations and habits of how they use the internet and how they share content with their social community. Even before Facebook's recent IPO, this one site has become a magnet for how brands reach and interact with their customers.

The often overlooked solution to vying for social attention is to make social a key aspect to all of your business and all of the departments that make up your business. "Doing social" can have a benefit but only if it's a core part of the way in which you interact with your customers, past, present and future. Simply having a Twitter account or a Facebook page does not a social strategy make.

Slide 47

Another truism is that there's much much more to mobile and to mobility than just Apple's smartphone offering.

Slide 48

There are a lot of smartphones about and that number continues to grow. In the last 2 years in the United States alone, smartphone growth has risen from under 30% to 50%, whilst there’s been a corresponding fall in feature phone growth, from just over 70% to meet smartphones at 50% in March of this year.

Slide 49

It's true that most companies these days go down the mobile app route and that often means that the starting point is to focus on a single platform. Yet despite what you read in the media, often the social media, there are other platforms out there besides iOS.

Slide 50

There's Windows Phone, and despite me working for Nokia and having a potential bias here, I have to say that this platform is growing fast and offers a differentiating factor to a startup or company expanding into mobile that iOS, with it's massive array of apps, can't now offer.

Slide 51

And then of course, there's Google's Android OS as well. By all means develop, launch and keep updated a mobile app. But don't get complacent and think that your mobile strategy will be successful just because you have a mobile presence on a single mobile platform. Even if you're aggressive and target all of the mobile platforms, there's still the cost and effort involved in maintaining a mobile presence across disparate environments.

Slide 52

Although relatively recent and still somewhat fragmented from a standards point of view, HTML5 is looking to be a viable alternative option for a mobile presence and indeed, some companies, including the Financial Times, are focusing entirely on HTML5 to cut development costs and to work around the restrictions and limitations that each platform's app store or app marketplace has, particularly around revenue generation.

Slide 53

But there's more to mobile than just smartphones, there's also the growing number of tablets

Slide 54

From Apple's iconic iPad

Slide 55

Through Amazon's newcomer, the Kindle Fire plus many other table variants running Android.

Slide 56

And beyond the smartphone and the tablet, there's the connected TV, which is becoming more and more one of the every growing number of screens that vies for our attention on a daily basis.

Slide 57

Finally, in addition to social and to mobile, there's local. But local is more than just localised and relevant information, deals and coupons.

Slide 58

In just the same way in which the "check-in economy" never really materialised, the "deals economy" is not having an easy time. Groupon, once the poster child of local commerce, has had a rough ride, with vendors finding out the hard way that good deals for their customers doesn't necessarily equate to good business for a business. Indeed, the rumours of Groupon's near bankruptcy have forced the company to postpone their promised IPO. And as with social and mobile, the local marketplace is already filled to near overflowing point with competitors and it can be hard for a newcomer to vie for customer's attention against the competition.

To do local successfully, it's not just about choosing to partner with the right tool, say Foursquare vs. Gowalla or Groupon vs. Living Social and hoping that you've chosen a partner with longevity. As with social, it's not just about engaging with your audience. As with mobile, it's not just about putting the tick next to the box that say "have mobile app". It's about looking long and hard at your business and its offering and rewiring it from a local perspective in a way that makes sense for your offering and your audience. It's about convincing your staff and your investors that doing this makes sense for you and for your business. Putting a tick next to the box that says "do SoLoMo" simply isn't enough.

Slide 59

So if SoLoMo is more than just adding social, local and mobile together to be buzzword compliant, what is the success factor in all of this? The answer is content. The internet remains one of the best ways we have today to reach an audience, both as an individual and as a business and that audience is hungry for content ...

Slide 60

... specifically for digital content. More specifically, an audience that is hungry for quality, current and relevant content. Content that can tell a great story which can boost your brand, content that explains your products and services clearly and unambiguously, content that creates loyalty, that makes your social, mobile and local presence compelling and sticky, content that builds a community around it, via comments, Facebook Likes, Tweets and so on. The harsh fact is that in the fields of social, local and mobile there's a simple equation ... no content or irrelevant content equals no business. You may have an iPhone app or a Facebook page or a deals coupon but these will never make up for a lack of quality content.

Slide 61

But to be more precise, it’s not just about digital content to connect with your audience and with your customers, it’s about local and localised content. This means that you need to reach your audience in a manner with which they’re familiar and comfortable with. Localising to a local language is a good first step but just as importantly, it’s about local knowledge. You, as business owners or employees are in a unique position to know your local area and to give unique insights that other people just don’t know. Let me give you a specific recent example …

Slide 62

I fly in and out of Berlin’s Tegel airport because Berlin is the European headquarters for Nokia’s Location & Commerce group. This airport is as well known in the city by its airport code, TXL, as it is by its’ full name, Berlin Otto Lilienthal Airport.

Slide 63

Last week, whilst in Berlin I was given this tee-shirt. Everyone I know in Berlin immediately understood the local reference, not only to TXL but also the hexagon on the tee-shirt ...

Slide 64

... because the main terminal at Tegel is hexagonal in shape. Local knowledge, local information, local insight.

Slide 65

And as a recent study has shown, there’s an Arabic speaking market right here in the Emirates and surrounding nations that is ready and waiting for localised content, localised commerce and localised services. In April of this year, a study by Plus7 polled over 4000 local phone owners giving a unique insight into what people are looking for on their mobile device. More interestingly, the study showed that consumers usually look for information on the mobile web and via mobile apps before they purchase a product or service. Although most of the people surveyed preferred cash on delivery for products and services, mobile e-commerce is increasing across the region. Sagar Shetty, co-founder and Director of Plus7, commented that

“Although mobile advertising is still in its infancy in this region, this study demonstrates that the uptake of mobile internet and e-commerce is quite high. The adoption of smartphones, 3G networks and data plans provides a ripe environment for advertisers looking to reach consumers through a variety of platforms including mobile browsers and apps. As usage increases, mobile advertising will play a key role in the development of the mobile ecosystem.”

Slide 66

So please, do mobile and let your products and services break free of the desktop ...

Slide 67

Do social and build a presence and community around your offerings ...

Slide 68

Do local and bring local relevance to your content and to your audience ...

Slide 69

But unless you have money to burn, don't do SoLoMo just because you hear that it's the current trend you need to be part of. It's interesting to note that even as SoLoMo continues to be trumpeted as the next big thing that you have to invest in, there's a buzzword compliant newcomer snapping at SoLoMo's heels

Slide 70

If recent commentary is to be believed, you now need to invest in ToDaClo ... touch and data and the cloud.

Slide 71

Buzzwords do not make a successful business, service or offering, and I leave you with the ultimate buzzword offering, which Schuyler Erlse sprung on an unsuspecting audience at FOSS4G recently.

Slide 72

Thank you for listening

Check In, Get Acquired, Check Out. Farewell Gowalla

2012-03-12 08:57

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.

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.

And now, 3 months after they were acquired by Facebook in December 2011, both the Gowalla smartphone app and website started to announce

Thank you for going out with Gowalla. It was a pleasure to journey with you around the world. Download your check-ins, photos and lists here soon.

So long Gowalla. You were one of the first movers in the so called check-in economy. It was fun while it lasted. Only time will tell whether Foursquare's seemingly unbeatable lead will continue.

Wikipedia's Gowalla entry has the final word on the subject.

Gowalla was a location-based social network

The past tense says it all.

Communicating To The Communicators (At The CIPR Social Media Conference)

2011-04-14 14:51

CIPR Social Media Conference 2011, allegedly talking about something called The Smartphone Web, to just such a room full of seasoned communicators.

Regular readers of this blog will be aware of my comfort zones when it comes to speaking at conferences. If there's maps, geography or location involved, however tenuous the connection, I'm well within my comfort zone. But speaking to a room full of seasoned communicators, such as Public Relations professionals? That's way outside of my comfort zone.

Nonetheless, on Monday of this week I found myself at the Chartered Institute of Public Relations, in London's Russell Square, at the CIPR Social Media Conference 2011, allegedly talking about something called The Smartphone Web, to just such a room full of seasoned communicators.

I say allegedly talking about The Smartphone Web, as that was the theme and title that the conference organizers asked me to opine on. But as is so often the case, when I sat down to start to write the talk, it morphed into something slightly different.

There's been a meteoric proliferation in social media over the last few years, driven not only by increased awareness and availability of social networks but also by the increasing use of smartphones and the sensors that these devices have built into them. Whereas before, social networking was chiefly about sharing thoughts, comments, views and links, social networking now also allows the sharing of photos and videos, the sharing of location and checking-in to locations. You'll note that I cunningly managed to work location in there, thus retreating ever so slightly to my comfort zone. And so it was that what started out as The Smartphone Web, ended up as The (Geo) (Mobile) (Smart) Social Web.

After a brief introduction and displaying my own set of social media credentials, I looked at the history of social media, of smartphones, of the sensors within these devices and of the convergence of all of these factors into the social media experience we now know and use on a daily basis.

As so many times in the past, writing this talk was an education in itself, and my initial assumptions that social networking and media was a relatively recent, post Web 2.0 bubble, phenomenon, were quickly disabused as I traced the forebears of today's social web as far back as the late 1960's when CompuServe was founded.

I also touched on some of the side effects of today's social web; how social media accounts have become the single-sign-on for lots of online services, bypassing contenders such as OpenID and how you can build web presences entirely from existing social media content with a few simple lines of PHP code. How social media acts not only as a social broadcast medium but also a social conversation medium. How our own social media interactions can form a valuable aide memoire (where was that bar we went to two weeks ago?) and provide insights into our own lives.

I finished the talk with a brief look to the future; how the next billion people getting online are predicted to do so via a phone and not via a laptop or desktop computer and how social media has drawn attention to some of recent time's tumultuous events, such as recent natural disasters and events in the Middle East.

Due to pressures of work I wasn't able to attend the entirety of the one day conference but was lucky enough to arrive in time to see Euan Semple give a fascinating (and at times highly amusing) talk on What Wikileaks Has Taught Us About The Web. I've always liked reading Euan's Twitter stream and to finally meet a social media contact face-to-face was a great way of rounding the day off.

Photo Credits: Lily Monster on Flickr.

Geolocating Yourself? In Europe, You're Not Alone

2010-10-14 11:32

recent study by Orange and TNS, makes for some interesting reading for the location industry. Although it should be taken with a large pinch of salt from the pot labelled lies, damned lies and statistics, the study's report shows the significant increase in use of geolocation services within the mobile space.

In the UK, France, Spain and Poland, geolocation services occupy the 3rd, 2nd, 1st and 2nd slots respectively for most used mobile services. While the report only breaks geolocation down into two categories, streetmap/GPS and social networks, it's not difficult to see how the perception that location is finally going mainstream is worth some merit.

Exposure 2010, the recent study by Orange and TNS, makes for some interesting reading for the location industry. Although it should be taken with a large pinch of salt from the pot labelled lies, damned lies and statistics, the study's report shows the significant increase in use of geolocation services within the mobile space.

It would have been nice to see a deeper breakdown by mapping service and social network but, in Europe at least, location and place seem to be making significant strides towards ubiquity.

Coverage of the report is available in a variety of places online including the EIN presswire as well as an overview of the study from Orange UK.

Photo Credits: Marc Levin on Flickr.

Quantity Or Quality? The Problem Of Junk POIs

2010-10-13 14:17

recent talk to the British Computer Society's Geospatial Specialist Group, I touched on the "race to own the Place Space". While the more traditional geographic data providers, such as Navteq and Tele Atlas are working away adding Points Of Interest to their data sets, it's the smaller, social location startups, that are getting the most attention and media coverage. With their apps running on smartphone hardware, Foursquare, Gowalla and Facebook Places, amongst others, are using crowd sourcing techniques to build a large data set of their own.

For them to do this, the barriers to entry have to be very low. Ask a user for too much information and you'll substantially reduce the number of Places that get created; and thereby hangs the biggest challenge for these data sets. Both the companies and their users want the Holy Grail of data, quantity and quality. But the lower the barriers to entry, the more quality suffers, unless there's a dedicated attempt to manage and clean up the resultant data set.

In my recent talk to the British Computer Society's Geospatial Specialist Group, I touched on the "race to own the Place Space". While the more traditional geographic data providers, such as Navteq and Tele Atlas are working away adding Points Of Interest to their data sets, it's the smaller, social location startups, that are getting the most attention and media coverage. With their apps running on smartphone hardware, Foursquare, Gowalla and Facebook Places, amongst others, are using crowd sourcing techniques to build a large data set of their own.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the Foursquare entry for the BCS itself. According to the BCS website, the London HQ of the UK's Chartered Institude for IT is at The Davidson Building, 5 Southampton Street, London, WC2E 7HA. Now compare that to Foursquare, which lists BCS HQ LONDON as 5 south hompton road, The strand, london, london uk. Complete with interesting use of capitalisation. That's the first problem.

Foursquare helpfully shows this on a map but evidently uses the provided address information as opposed to any associated geo-coordinate that was gleaned from the onboard GPS on whichever smartphone was used to create this "place". Google has evidently tried to interpret south hompton road and displays the map at the first entry that Google's reverse geocoder returns, which is 5 Hampton Road, in Hampton Hill. That's not Covent Garden. That's not even Central London. That's way out in the suburbs of Richmond-upon-Thames. That's the second problem.

But there's also more than one entry in Foursquare for the BCS in London which highlights the third problem; large amounts of duplicate Places created by users either unwilling to search too closely for an existing Place or who are trying to subvert the gaming aspect to social location apps in order to gain points or recognition in the community for number of Places created, number of Mayorships gained and so on.

Quantity? Yes. Quality? Sadly no. Foursquare are reliant on their user community to clear up their data and as this example shows, that's not always an effective strategy. As an industry we may be building a massive Place based view of the world but we've a long way to go before we can rely on data produced in this manner.

A geographic nod of the hat must go to Harry Wood for spotting this classic example of a "junk POI"; I'm not singling Foursquare out for any particular opprobrium here by the way, all of the social location data sets have their own howlers, as do the commercial POI data sets, ready and waiting for people to stumble across.

The Plains Of Awkward Public Family Interactions And The Bay Of Flames

2010-10-08 09:34

tracking your location, xkcd, the webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math and language has branched out into making maps. The updated map of online communities shows the volume of daily social activity across all of the online world, and not just the high profile ones that get the press coverage.

Click through for the full size versions and loose yourself in the plains of awkward public family interactions, the Bay Of Flames and other geographical wonders.

Not content with pointing out the fun you can have with tracking your location, xkcd, the webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math and language has branched out into making maps. The updated map of online communities shows the volume of daily social activity across all of the online world, and not just the high profile ones that get the press coverage.

Click through for the full size versions and loose yourself in the plains of awkward public family interactions, the Bay Of Flames and other geographical wonders.

Retiring The Theory of Stuff; But First, A Corollary

2010-05-04 16:52

Theory of Stuff out to pasture. It's had a good life. It's appeared in 5 of my talk decks (or so Spotlight tells me), in 3 of my blog posts and continues to generate hits on my blog (or so my analytics tells me).

When I tell people I'm going to talk about my theory, a Mexican wave of shoulder slumping passes through the room, coupled with a prolonged sigh from an audience who've just resigned themselves to a slow painful death over the coming minutes. Luckily things perk up when my introductory slide of Anne Elk (Miss) and her Theory appears but even so, it's time to quit whilst you're ahead.

But before I do ...

It's time to put the Theory of Stuff out to pasture. It's had a good life. It's appeared in 5 of my talk decks (or so Spotlight tells me), in 3 of my blog posts and continues to generate hits on my blog (or so my analytics tells me).

But before I do ...

One of the great thing's about O'Reilly's Where 2.0 conference is the vast number of people you meet who just fizz with ideas and intelligence in this somewhat nebulous space that we call location, place or geo. One such person is Sally Applin; she owns the domain sally.com so that's got her off to a good start. After Where 2.0 she pointed me to her own theory that voyeurism and narcissism sell software.

People like to look at themselves and at other people. If they can do it at the same time–then the application will succeed! Look at Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, MySpace, Skype–basically any software that allows for both looking at others and self viewing, self reading, self posting etc…will sell. We’re on the chimp ladder. We like to compare ourselves and compete.

If you generalise software out to the slightly more generic terms ofservice or product; you'll see that Sally's theory complements the Theory of Stuff quite nicely and even provides an exemplar of those businesses and ventures that prove the theory.

This is especially interesting when you look at the success (to date at least) of ventures in the social space, such as Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare. What else are these is not an online way of saying "look at me, here I am, this is what I'm doing" and in doing so generating a vast sea of highly localised and personalised data into the bargain? Photo Credits: wili_hybrid on Flickr.

There Isn't An App For That

2010-04-19 16:47

Flickr and Twitpic? There's an app for that. Pixelpipe seems to work for me.

Want to update your status on multiple social networking sites, such as Twitter and Facebook? There's an app for that. Tweetdeck seems to work for me.

Want to upload photos to multiple social networking and photo sharing sites, such as Flickr and Twitpic? There's an app for that. Pixelpipe seems to work for me.

Want to update your status on multiple social networking sites, such as Twitter and Facebook? There's an app for that. Tweetdeck seems to work for me.

Want to check in to multiple place based services, such as Foursquare and Gowalla? There's an app for that. check.in seems to work for me.

Want to change your profile photo or biographical information for all of your online accounts. There's an app ... oh ... wait. There isn't an app for that. But there's a app crying out to be written.