Gowalla: Social City Travel Guide
Gowalla evolves to a social city travel guide: check-ins as a commodity, storytelling at heart; http://eicker.at/Gowalla
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Gerrit Eicker
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Gerrit Eicker
Facebook Places: Where We Go
Facebook adds time to location sharing: Where we are, where we go, and where we’ve been; http://eicker.at/WhereWeGo
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Gerrit Eicker
Facebook: “Add where you are to anything you share – In the past, you needed a smart phone to easily share your location. Now you can share your location from your computer, too, and say: Where you’ve been. Remember where you were in your favourite photos. Where you are now. If friends are nearby, they might just meet you there. Where you’re going. Friends who have been there can give you tips or even join in the plan.”
TC: “It was almost exactly one year ago that Facebook launched Places, their location-based offering. … Fast forward to today: Foursquare recently raised a large round of funding valuing them at $600 million. And Facebook is killing off Places. – To be clear, Facebook is not ducking out of the location game itself. In fact, you could say that they’re doubling-down on it. But they are moving away from the game that the ‘check-in’ services have been playing. And a result of that is Places being killed off and being replaced by new ‘Nearby’ area… This is smart, as it’s something none of the other location services have really nailed yet. And now that location is being emphasized on every Facebook action (though it can easily be turned off) – and not just on mobile…”
IF: “Facebook will remove the Places check-in feed from its mobile apps and interface, a company spokesperson confirms with us. Rather than check-in, users will be able to add their city-level location or tag a specific Place in any post. … When users post content from the web, mobile site, or smartphone apps, they’ll have the option to tag a Place, whether they’re there currently or just want to mention it. As TechCrunch illustrates, Facebook’s foot-traffic incentivizing Check-in Deals will still be available, with users seeing the option to redeem them appended to the news feed story of their mention of a location.”
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Gerrit Eicker
Skype Acquires GroupMe
Skype acquires group messaging service GroupMe, to help users stay in touch and make decisions; http://eicker.at/SkypeGroupMe
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Gerrit Eicker
Skype: “I’m delighted to announce we’re acquiring GroupMe, a provider of mobile group messaging services that helps users stay in touch and make decisions. – This acquisition is another step towards our vision to provide a global multi-modal and multi-platform communications experience. It complements our existing leadership in voice and video communications by providing best in class mobile text-based communications and innovative features around group messaging that enable users to connect, share locations and photos and make plans with their closest ties.”
GroupMe: “Today, we have entered into an agreement to be acquired by Skype. Over the last few months, we had been in talks with Skype that started with discussions about potential commercial partnerships. As we got to know the core Skype team better, though, and as our conversations evolved, it quickly became evident that our visions were perfectly aligned. Both companies are focused on changing the way the world communicates, and helping people stay in touch with the people they really know. With a shared vision – an ambitious one – we decided our efforts to own real-time communications and the real life network could be best executed as one company.”
VB: “Both Facebook and Google recently released their own offerings targeted at group messaging with Facebook Messenger and Google+’s Huddle. Skype’s decision to buy GroupMe shows it wants to make sure it also has its group communication bases covered. It should pair well with the services it already offers, including video calling, global calling, instant messaging, and text messaging services. – Skype is still in the process of being acquired by Microsoft. The big M said in May that it would buy Skype for $8.5 billion and as soon as the deal is completed, we will likely see Skype integrated into Xbox 360, Kinect, Windows Phone and Office 365. GroupMe’s application and technology would also help Microsoft flesh out its mobile offerings as it continues to expand Windows Phone 7’s presence and capabilities.”
pC: “Far from being a messaging service aimed only at enterprises (like Yammer, for example), GroupMe has been making some strides into the consumer market by linking up with brands and events to increase its profile and relevance there as well: earlier this year it announced that the music event Lollapalooza and the TV show Dexter would both be using GroupMe’s APIs in their apps for their respective audiences to add more social features and to connect with each other via those platforms.”
GigaOM: “Skype so far has been reliant on its instant messaging and voice (and video) call offerings to engage its hundreds of millions of users. However, the mobile phone changes that behavior – shifting the focus to more instantaneous services such a GroupMe in addition to a combination of other communication mediums – SMS, mobile phone, Beluga, Twitter and Facebook Messages in addition to email. – Skype, which has been one of the earliest beneficiaries of the iPhone boom, has seen lightweight group messaging clients like GroupMe gaining in popularity and it is right to be worried. … The fact remains that the sands of time were against GroupMe. The oncoming competition from Facebook Messenger, Google’s Huddle and most importantly Apple’s iMessage were going to fundamentally increase the pressure on GroupMe, which in turn decided that it was better to find comfort in the arms of a much larger company. … From a long-term perspective, Skype as an entity is going to have an identity crisis. It cannot figure out whether it wants to be a friend to the consumers or whether it wants to be a corporation- focused collaboration company.“
Gerrit Eicker
Facebook Places: Marketing Opportunities
Facebook Places offers a bunch of marketing opportunities: Claim your place, next to your page; http://j.mp/9YwmZX
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Gerrit Eicker
TC: “One incentive that Facebook is using to encourage businesses to create a Places page is advertising. Facebook says that ‘Once you claim your Place, you’ll be able to advertise it just as you advertise your Facebook Page. To advertise your Place, click ‘I want to advertise something I have on Facebook’ in the ad creation flow and choose your Place from the drop-down menu.’ Advertising is completely self serve and seems fairly simple. Currently, you cannot target people who check-in to your Place, but a business can target people who ‘Like’ your Place page if you have performed a Page to Place merge.”
SEL: “One of the questions that came up after the formal launch of Facebook Places last night was: how will this affect Google Places (among others)? As an aside, I have to say it’s really strange that these products have nearly the identical name. It’s almost like Honda offering a car with a particular name and then Toyota coming out with a car with the same model name. … However from a local business standpoint the two Places are conceptually if not practically quite similar. Local businesses can claim their Places pages on both sites and use them as promotional tools in several ways. I’m not going to enumerate the relative merits or practical aspects of this comparison here; I’ll leave that for another article or articles plural. … In fact, Facebook Places may actually help Google Places rather than harm it. By raising awareness of the need to ‘claim’ your listing generally Google Places may see an increase in local business activity on its pages. Claiming your listings at both Places will be on the list of must-do local online promotions for small businesses going forward.”
FC: “With Places, not only does Facebook get to add a potentially money-spinning stream of data to all Places players (namely, your location and location habits, which is data ripe for mining for marketing), but it also gets a new network – the location database of local businesses. Facebook had data in businesses before, but the fact that it’ll now be able to geolocate them means Facebook will likely build up plans for location-sensitive advertising, tied to which particular shop you’re in (imaging a competitors ad popping up when youre checked in, offering lower prices or a promotional discount). It lets Facebook potentially build up a powerful ‘points of interest’ database, should it every feel like leaping into the personal navigation or augmented reality games. It lets Facebook’s app developers come up with creative uses for the data that we haven’t even thought about yet.”
eMarketer: “Location will give Facebook a new way to target and sell advertising. Mobile hasn’t been a part of Facebook’s ad offerings until now, but that will change. By offering ways for marketers to target Facebook users not only on the online service but also when they are on the go and using Facebook on their mobile phones, it opens up all-new avenues for interaction. In particular, Places gives local businesses a great reason to advertise on Facebook. Many of them already have a Facebook Page; by creating a new Facebook Place (essentially a page where people can check in and see who else they know who has checked in), businesses can give customers ‘the power to tell their friends about your business,’ as the Places advertising FAQ says.”
Gerrit Eicker
Facebook Places: Where We Are
Facebook Places introduces the masses to location-based sharing: Who, What, When, and Now… Where; http://j.mp/c32fU0
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Gerrit Eicker
Facebook: “Starting today, you can immediately tell people about that favorite spot with Facebook Places. You can share where you are and the friends you’re with in real time from your mobile device. … To get started, you’ll need the most recent version of the Facebook application for iPhone. You also can access Places from touch.facebook.com if your mobile browser supports HTML 5 and geolocation. … With Places, you are in control of what you share and the people you share with. You choose whether or not to share your location when you check in at a place. When you check in, you can tag friends who are with you but only if their settings allow it. When you are tagged, you are always notified.”
TC: “‘There was so much to do before we launched this,’ Zuckerberg said with a smile on his face. He said that what they’re focusing on at launch is a solid core. The three main things they’re focusing on is helping people share where they are, helping people see who is around them, and helping people seeing what’s going on. The basics. – When asked about checking-in to watching television shows or the like, Zuckerberg joked, ‘there’s a lot of stuff we’re not doing.'”
RWW: “Facebook may be moving fast, but Zuckerberg and co. are being careful to ease their 500 million users in – making nice with location pioneers Gowalla and Foursquare; emphasizing user benefits, not marketing possibilities; and sharing gooey anecdotes about how Facebook Places creates a living history of the world. … The new Facebook Places is ‘opt-in,’ which in this case means Facebook assumes you want to be part of Places and share your location information with your friends, but not necessarily the whole Internet (we’re working on a ‘How to disable Facebook Places’ post now for those who aren’t ready for the location revolution). … Facebook has introduced this feature in a compelling way to mainstream users who are learning and loving the social web, and it seems destined to be a raging hit. A lot of attractive possibilities open up when users share location data.”
O’Reilly: “Martin May, a founder of location check-in service Brightkite, summed it up with a tweet, ‘So far, FB Places is pretty much ‘been there, done that’…of course at FB size‘. The key feature of Facebook Places is the number of users that are suddenly impacted. Tens of millions of people across the US will now be able to share their location with their friends for the time ever (of course they could have always joined one of the existing services, but they didn’t). Facebook Places in many ways just validated the location check-in space while at the same time they owned it. As Dennis Crowley, the Foursquare founder, has said (and many others) check-in data is a commodity. The value will come in the reviews, ratings and other data that they are able to glean from their users’ behaviors.”
Guardian: “Facebook knows that, and the only thing that matters about adding location data to Facebook profiles is how secure and uncomplicated the privacy settings are. One person’s ‘granularity’ is another person’s ‘complicated’, and Facebook had better hope users can turn privacy up to 11. – I’d argue that of all the features Facebook has launched, and every momentary backlash, this is by far the biggest opportunity for a serious balls up. That’s down to Facebook’s scale of half a billion people, the public’s discomfort with the commercial uses of their data (at least for those who care to think about it) and the uniquely risky implications of location services that go wrong. – If they get it right, on the other hand, it could finally deliver the promise of location-based-services to the mainstream. In technology at least, that’s big news.“
Gerrit Eicker
Foursquare: Brands Push Tips
Foursquare lets established brands push information, moving from a mere game to a location platform; http://j.mp/cjpinv
Gerrit Eicker 08:40 on 13. September 2011 Permalink |
ATD: “Gowalla, long-time rival to Foursquare, today announced a new direction for its social location service. The Austin, Texas-based company will attempt to offer a hybrid between a social app and a content guide, focused around local experiences. – Instead of checking in, Gowalla users will now create ‘stories’ when they meet up to hang out together. These are basically group check-ins, as on Facebook where a user can tag multiple friends at a place. After that, any tagged person can contribute photos and other content to the story, capturing it as a communal experience.”
VB: “Check-ins are a bit more of a transactional model, we wanted something that was faster and more connected and saved that memory in a way that I could share with my friends,” Gowalla founder and chief executive Josh Williams (pictured) said. “Our goal is to inspire people to get out.”
GigaOM: “Gowalla, like many other check-in services, has had trouble keeping pace with Foursquare. But the location startup is relaunching its service with an eye toward becoming more of a city travel guide, downplaying the role of check-ins in favor of discovery, travel and storytelling. – The relaunch is an important step for Gowalla, which needs to find a better way to differentiate itself. It had tried to emphasize games early on with virtual goods called items, which could be collected and traded. But it announced last month that it was ending the use of items and was refocusing on its core mission of encouraging people to go out and explore the world.”
Gowalla: “[W]e will be removing Items completely with the next release of Gowalla. While they have been a trademark feature of Gowalla since the beginning – one that our entire team poured much effort and passion into – fewer than half a percent of our active community makes use of them. It now causes more distraction than joy for the vast majority of our community.”
TC: “So will this small pivot work for Gowalla? Well, they’re certainly focusing on the right areas. Check-ins are now a commodity, the real value of location lies in both augmenting personal experiences and providing useful information. Gowalla is trying to find the sweet spot between both. They’re a mobile travel guide and a well-conceived location-based sharing tool. … You can also share all of this data to Facebook and Twitter – and yes, you can still check-in through Gowalla and send it to Foursquare. – The travel aspect is potentially even bigger. While there are a lot of people going after this problem, no one has nailed the mobile travel guide so far. When someone does, it’s going to be massive. Gowalla has a pretty decent shot of doing something unique here because of all the data they’ve been collecting over time.“