My favorite takeaways from this clip are:
You need to “be social” and not “do social”
Creating content is the future (especially video), bypassing traditional media.
Personally, I am no fan of Facebook because of all the privacy issues and lack of care for users. It is a necessary evil because of work and non-Twittering family. I need to learn a bit more, obviously.
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.
When I wrote that location would be this year’s Twitter at SXSW, I also meant that Twitter’s geolocation would be this year’s Twitter at SXSW. The service has just turned on geolocation on its website today for the first time.
While Twitter’s geolocation feature has been live through its API since last November, there was no sign of integration into the main twitter.com site until now. As you can see in the screenshot above, for tweets tagged with location, right next to the source of the tweet there is a location placemarker. When you hover over it, it turns blue, and clicking on it brings up a little Google map showing the location that tweet was sent from.
And the real race is on.
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.
