This video is flat out fantastic. Great animation and excellent metrics. Well done!
You will be shocked at the percentage of email that is spam. Take a guess what do you think it would be?
The Three New Features
First, we discussed the core philosophy underlying the recent changes at Twitter. As Ryan told me, the company is maturing and asked itself at the beginning of the year, “What are we going to do when we grow up?” The answer is: Grow the platform while enabling developers to do more unique things with it.
The first new feature we discussed is Places, also known as Points of Interest. This new feature, Ryan explained to me, is not like Foursquare () or Gowalla (), where users check in. Instead, developers will be able to attach location-based metadata and use it to enhance their products.
Here’s an example: Say you tweet from a park. Twitter’s new Places feature will recognize your location and then allow you to access relevant metadata, including the ability to see other tweets from that location and who those tweets are coming from. Places is less like a Foursquare competitor and more like a subset of another new feature rolling out later this year, Annotations.
Annotations, which launches next quarter, allows developers to attach little pieces of metadata to tweets. This could be anything from location to tags to notes. Sarver believes that the feature will be huge, but that the company shouldn’t decide what data should be attached or how people use that data. Those decisions, he said, are up to developers.
The final new feature announced today is User Streams, which will make Twitter apps real-time. Instead of waiting for API calls every few minutes to update your TweetDeck (
) or Seesmic Desktop (
Wow. The groups at Gowalla & Foursquare HQs are crying somewhere.
Last week, I wrote about check-in fatigue. While there is a lot of excitement right now surrounding location-based apps, and particularly the ones where you “check-in” places, trying to use all of them can be exhausting, as I found out at SXSW. So what’s the solution? Do you just pick one and stick with it? You could, but there’s no guarantee that all of your friends will pick the same one as you. So the guys behind Brightkite
have a better solution.
Check.in
So how does it work? Well, for the time being it’s actually a mobile web app. Eventually, the plan is to release a native app version for the different platforms, but in order to get it out there relatively quickly, they made a web version that works on mobile browser that offer HTML5 support for location (currently the iPhone and Android phones). When you load it up, the browser asks for permission to pull your coordinates, and a few seconds later it pulls up a list of venues it believes
Can't wait to try it!
Image of a VIP fence via Flickr/Adrants
The Interactive portion of the conference drew over 12,000 attendees this year, and the rumor going round is this is the first year that Interactive has more badge-holders than Music. But the same rumor went around last year, and who cares, Music's still got all the wrist-banders too. Burning Man gets bigger every year, but it's (reportedly) pretty much as cool as ever. What's different at this year's SXSWi?
Two things ...
The prevalence of non-tech
The Chevy concept cars, the Sobe Lounge, the Zone Bar Lounge, the Snacks for People in Lounges Lounge ... More than ever, SXSWi is just a mass of people ready to be sold the same shit everyone else gets sold. At least the AOL Seed Lounge (disclosure: I edit a blog for AOL) was advertising a technology and provided public laptops, where one could sit and write about how SXSW is dying. But the crass commercialization of non-tech sponsors is turning SXSWi into another generic mega-conference: A better money-maker with less focus and respect for its attendees. We are hungry mouths waiting for free protein bars and Starbucks Via. This can't happen at Burning Man, because Burning Man eschews all corporate sponsorship. But did it have to happen at SXSWi? Was the money from Microsoft and AOL not sufficiently complemented with a little Pepsi booth and some free beer? Did the conference have to throw us to the ravenous (and irrelevant) megabrands? I posit no.
Because Chevy and Sobe and Monster Energy didn't just bring their booth babes to Austin. They brought their social media managers. And at the other end, so did all the shitty little startups that want to get picked up by "early adopters" because normal people are too smart to buy into their ill-conceived ideas about how the Internet should bottleneck through them. They want bloggers and better websites and startups to use their shortcodes or their microsites or their 2d barcodes. The new people all want to sell things to the old people and to each other.
Access
I am part of the mid-to-high-profile blogger/media crowd; I'm entitled, but I know how shitty I sound saying that I'm entitled. We're the crowd who demands VIP access. We are hurt when we don't get it. And yes, we feel more deserving than newer attendees, because even though we too were once n00bs, our circle is now the one putting on the panels and throwing the parties.
But it's become too hard to find our friends at the big parties. Because Gawker wants the publicity, it throws a giant party, and 4200 people sign up for a space of about 800 capacity. So Gawker sets up a VIP section that's pretty much like the regular section with a couch. And I end up spending half the night outside that section or talking over the fence to my non-VIP friends.
Tiered access cuts crowds apart and hurts people's chances of making meaningful interactions. The fence eventually shuts out more and more of us. Ashton Kutcher showed up at the Foursquare party, and the VIP balcony got so crowded that Foursquare's CEO couldn't get his own staff in. Contrast that to B.J. Novak's quiet appearance on the same balcony last year, when Ricky Van Veen oversaw a modest little CollegeHumor party.
As the balconies and entrance lines overflow, migrant crowds of big-shit and friend-of-big-shit bloggers seek the optimal balance between small crowd and free drink, some even developing develop algorithms and apps to aid in the process. We spend our time searching for a party, squeezing into the party, yelling to people about other parties that may be happening elsewhere, then giving up and grabbing beer with Scott Beale at the Ginger Man (so it's not all bad).
This is not sour grapes!
People can be just as unhappy on either side of the VIP fence. But that fence is a symptom of a disease. The disease is a crowd of new attendees that I don't want to meet. They may want to meet me, I don't know, but I think they mostly just want to sell me something.
Maybe I'm late on this, maybe SXSW Interactive already died. Gawker's publisher Nick Denton stopped coming years ago. (His former competitor Jason Calacanis showed up at the Gawker party anyway.) But I think a real phase change happened this year. SXSWi is now a tiered event. The social castes are set. And it is no longer a magical place.
Maybe the organizers can drop the most annoying sponsors or limit attendance or raise the price. The first is doubtful, the second only marginally helpful, the last unfortunate. So can somebody please tell me, how do I get into TED?
Some valid points. The VIP sections were silly. Nothing special.
The huge parties that thousands register for? The ones only 500 can attend? It should be by invite only. Was outrageous.
Sponsors make a conference possible. Ends must meet.
The whole piece is recycled complaints from every conference.
*yawn*
Pelago
knows that just about every location-based app in the world is seeking coverage right now just prior to SXSW where they will all battle Highlander-style. So they approached me with a pretty smart pitch: curing the “social rut.” What they mean by that is these days, despite the prevalence of social networks, people are actually less social than ever because they’re being roped into playing games like Farmville and Mafia Wars for hours on end. Sitting in their rooms. Alone.
While that may be a part of social networking (a rather large, hugely profitably part), it’s not really social. That’s why location-based networks excite me: they have the potential to bridge social networking with actual social activity. And that’s exactly how Pelago is positioning the latest version of its location-based app, Whrrl 3
The core idea behind the new iPhone app (which launched in the store today) is that people inspire others to do things. So when you see a friend is out doing something fun, you may want to join them. Or it may entice you to go out and do something else, and hope others see it on Whrrl and join in. It’s the grouping of people with similar interests into “Societies” that is a key to Whrrl 3. For example, a basic society is that each venue in the application has its own set of “regulars.” If you visit the place enough times, you unlock the badge making you a regular, and giving you access to member-level activities, such as recommendations and specials nearby.
One of these societies, launching alongside the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas this week is the Austin Underground which “will provide members with at-your-fingertips access to the hottest parties, events, and other fun things to do at the conference,” according to Whrrl. Over 50 merchants in Austin are participating to provide exclusive offers, apparently. To unlock the membership, you have to check-in at some of the following places: Four Seasons Hotel Austin, Outback Steakhouse, Cool River Cafe, Chuggin’ Monkey, J Black’s, Red Fez and Third Base, and others.
Other key features of Whrrl 3 include Recommendations — you create these (with photos, if you choose), to let others in your social graph (or your society) know fun things to do in an area. Ideas, are recommendations served up to you from societies you’re a part of, your friends, or Whrrl’s algorithms. Fun Facts are shown each time you check-in to a venue, with information about it. And of course, there is a point system (Influence Points) that turn the whole thing into one big game. What’s interesting about Whrrl’s game is that you can get point by inspiring others to do things with the app. Points also allow you to level up in your societies for more special deals.
All of this is an extension of the “footstreams” idea that Whrrl launched last December. That’s where they also first introduced the society idea as well. The key to both of those is about real people doing real things in the real world. That, in turn, shows what you’re interested in, and allows Whrrl to clump you into these groups with out like-minded people.
Find Whrrl 3 in the App Store here
very cool
foursquare.com Foursquare’s new statistics page will share information about users with business owners.
11:10 a.m. | Updated Corrected the name of the AJ Bombers restaurant.
Foursquare, a location-based social network, plans to distribute a new analytics tool and dashboard in the coming weeks that will give business owners access to a range of information and statistics about visitors to their establishments.
Tristan Walker, director of business development at Foursquare, said that the latest features were intended to help local merchants run their stores by giving them more information about their customers.
“We’re trying to give businesses more retention with current customers and the ability to add new customers with specials,” said Mr. Walker.
Businesses will be able to see a range of real-time data about Foursquare usage, including who has “checked in” to the place via Foursquare, when they arrived, the male-to-female customer ratio and which times of day are more active for certain customers. Business owners will also be able to offer instant promotions to try to engage new customers and keep current ones.
Remember this from two days ago-
http://worthingtonwire.com/why-location-based-apps-are-getting-traction
Location based apps are a goldmine of valuable information and a targeted distribution method.
Impressive.
