Social Media Goals for the New Year

Every year I think people will start to get the hang of social media. After all, it's really not much different from what we've done as a society forever, just more rapid-fire. Every year I am proven wrong.

Perhaps we need to consider better behavior on social media as a New Year Resolution for it to take effect. So here's my attempt at guidance.

Background

When I got to college, few people had heard of email and even fewer used it. Usenet was a foreign concept to nearly everyone I knew in meat-space, but with so much traffic I knew it wasn't hurting for users. Before there was a web, I understood the notion of choosing my words carefully. Archives of all my posts would surely stick around for many years, I thought, and so they have. I can still find stuff I posted back in 1992.

As the web happened and it became easier for anyone to share anything, and as email flourished (back when we had time to read it instead of filtering it), I adopted a variation on an old idea of how to behave in email — never write something in an email you wouldn't want to be posted on the front page of The New York Times. Nowadays maybe it's a tweet on the front page of the Fail Blog.

I think we should all accept that with the ubiquity of cell phone cameras, let alone all the surveillance cameras, web cams, and soon airborne drones made by 12-year-olds, everything you do runs the risk of being scrutinized and posted online for the world to judge. By posting your own contributions to social media sites, you (and I) continue to drive it.

When Facebook's co-founder's sister (who is also Facebook's former marketing director) posted a photo to Facebook and was surprised to see it tweeted by someone she didn't know, claiming it as an invasion of privacy, the collective web laughed at her. She became the holiday poster child for how confusing Facebook's privacy settings are to understand and implement — and she's the sister of the face of the company.

It also makes her follow-up tweet all the more laughable, partly because I doubt she asked the permission of her family members before posting their photos online:

Digital etiquette: always ask permission before posting a friend's photo publicly. It's not about privacy settings, it's about human decency

— Randi Zuckerberg (@randizuckerberg) December 26, 2012

What You Can Do as a Social Media User

Most importantly, don't think that just because you have locked down your social media accounts, no one that you haven't authorized can see it. An errant retweet or a misunderstood setting are all it takes to make that notion come crashing down. Just look at Zuckerberg's sister — she clearly doesn't understand either of the platforms she uses despite what she thinks.

I have my own set of rules I follow and I try to lead by example. That doesn't mean all mine are right, but I had to start somewhere.

• For the most part, I do not post photos of people without their permission. Exceptions include crowd shots.


• I don't post photos of children, though when there are exceptions I do not post names with the photos.


• When I do take general place or crowd photos, I avoid posting ones with the faces of children visible.


• I avoid posting photos with faces visible when I am making fun of a particular fashion choice.


• I don't create venues for homes.


• I don't post photos with street addresses visible.


• I don't embed GPS information when tweeting from someone's home.


• I don't retweet tweets from a protected account (unless I have permission or it's a particularly good insult to me).


• I don't tag people in photos without permission or prior experience that it will be fine.


• I don't tag friends in places when I am out, which is also why I don't auto-tweet my Foursquare check-ins (on top of the fact that it's annoying).


• I don't include information about friend or family schedules in posts, especially when they are travelling.


• I do not sync my phone with any cloud service or allow any auto-posting. I'd rather pick and choose than run the risk of the wrong image making it to the wrong place.

It's worth noting that I have violated all of these at least once, sometimes by accident and sometimes by stupidity. In a handful of cases I have been rightly chastised.

When it comes to kids (anyone's kids), I work to make sure I don't put enough information out there that a motivated offender couldn't just drive up to a kid on the street and spout enough information to make the kid think it's safe to get into his car. I wish more parents on Facebook made that effort.

What You Should Do as a Person in the World

Accept that everyone has a camera and can post photos and videos of you at any time. Accept that you may appear unintentionally in crowd photos that appear on everything from locked-down Facebook pages to the local news to band fliers and so on.

When you have a friend who keeps posting photos of you that you don't want posted, you should confront him or her. At some point you'll have to decide between how cautious or uptight you want to be versus how much that friendship means to you.

If you are a Facebook user, you can control whether or not you get tagged in photos (as a link to your Facebook page only) and you can even un-tag yourself.

Either behave or own your pile of crazy.

Related

• Facebook security hole allows anyone to view private New Year's Midnight Delivery messages and photos, December 30, 2012.


• How much data did Facebook have on one man? 1,200 pages of data in 57 categories, December 28, 2012


• Zuckerberg's Etiquette Sham, December 28, 2012.


• Mark Zuckerberg's Sister Complains Of Facebook Privacy Breach, December 26, 2012.


• Yes, Randi Zuckerberg, Please Lecture Us About 'Human Decency', December 26, 2012

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Picplz Shutting Down, as Free Services Often Do

Picplz is a photo/image editing and sharing app/service that has been compared to Instagram and long referred to as the Android alternative (Instagram didn't support Android until recently).

At 10:17pm EST on a Friday night (last night), June 1, Picplz sent out the following cryptic tweet:

tmblr.co/ZUq_PyMaUlXD

— picplz (@picplz) June 2, 2012

Even though I hate shortened-URL-only tweets, Picplz doesn't tweet often so I followed it to read this in the brief blog post:

On July 3, 2012, picplz will shut down permanently, and all photos and user data will be deleted. Until then, users may download their own photos by clicking on the download link next to each photo in their photo feed.

And that's it. Just about a month before it's gone. Just over 30 days to manually download each one of my photos.

My take? Oh well. It's a free service that just saw the darling of the photo manipulation and sharing space (Instagram) get bought up for an absurd amount of money. I suspect Picplz just gave up. I knew going into it that at some point I'd have to pull my stuff out (hence my regular requests on the support forum for an RSS feed of my full history).

In December 2010 I wrote about our reliance on and sense of entitlement to free services in You Get What You Pay For. This is the same thing. It's a perfect example of how you need to be prepared from the start that your favorite free service will change or go away. When it does, don't expect great (or even good or maybe any) notice or customer service.

Years ago I started using Brightkite to post images (and track my travels, share them with Twitter and Facebook, live as an online gallery, feed to mapping services, etc.). When Brightkite went away I dabbled in Gowalla and sensed its demise, so tried out Plyce, which also changed direction. I found Picplz and still dabbled in others just in case Picplz went away. Now I just need to choose my next photo posting platform and hope I can get a couple years out of that one, too.

In the meantime, I will be writing a script to wade through my 1,400+ Picplz photos and pull down all my images, descriptions and geo-data. Considering I paid nothing to use the service for over a year and a half, I think this is a fair cost to me.

Related

• You Get What You Pay For


• Brightkite Yields to Foursquare, Gowalla, Etc.


• Brightkite Changes Direction


• Why We Check In: The Reasons People Use Location-Based Social Networks (my Brightkite use is referenced in the article)


• Brightkite Tries Another Angle

Update: Sunday, June 3, 2012

This post got a lot of traffic overnight and didn't realize why at first. It seems I scooped the regular tech news outlets and so for a while this post was the only one out there. Cool. These other posts have popped up since then:

• PicPlz shutting down permanently on July 3rd, all photos to be deleted pre-fireworks at Engadget.


• Photo-sharing service Picplz to shut down on 3 July at TheNextWeb.


• The Instagram Effect? Mobile Photo Sharing App PicPlz To Shut Down Permanently On July 3 at TechCrunch.


• Photo Sharing App Picplz to Shut Down on July 3 at Mashable.


• Photo-sharing app PicPlz calling it quits on July 3 at GigaOM.


• Instagram Competitor picplz Shutting Down July 3rd at Geekosystem.

Interestingly, less than two months ago Lifehacker ran the article Don't Bother with Instagram; Here are Five Better Alternatives for Android. Of those five, Picplz is going away and Lightbox Photos got gobbled up by Facebook.

Update: Sunday, June 3, 2012, 11:20pm

Earlier tonight Picplz tweeted out some hope for those of us with lots of photos who don't really have the time to download each photo individually:

Also, soon we will provide an export solution as a thanks to you, our loyal and devoted users. We already miss you.

— picplz (@picplz) June 3, 2012

Update: June 15, 2012

Picplz notified users (via another cryptic tweet that led to a blog post) on Wednesday that it would make each user's photo archive available as a download. Users would be notified via email when their archives were ready. I received my email late last night and am in the process of downloading my 1.5GB archive now (so I have no idea the formats of anything).

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Why All the Food Photos? (at evolt.org)

How can you not share something so tasty?

The Internet has a thing for cats. There's really no denying it, at least when taken in the whole of the internet.

Social media, on the other hand, seems to have a thing for food. While social media is just one aspect of the Internet, we can take comfort that social media's penchant for food is not about cat food or edible cats. It is hard to deny, however, that social media, with its friendliness to instant image uploads, constant quick commentary, and location-based tendency, is dominated by food.

Read the full article at evolt.org

I wrote an article for evolt.org yesterday that goes into a little detail on why people do this, along with some of my reasons. Go read the full article, including some of my own food photos, at evolt.org. If you are like me and post photos of your meals, snacks, or other random food bits, feel free to leave some comments here or there with your own reasons. I suspect some of the reasons I listed will look familiar to you.

Judge by how many of the Social Media Club chapter events center around food.

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You Get What You Pay For

First off, let me apologize for ending the title of this post with a preposition. I am playing off an idiom, so I think I have some leeway. Besides, "You get that for which you pay" just doesn't roll off the tongue.

In the last week I have watched two free web services I use announce (in some fashion) that they are going away. This has caused a good deal of frustration and anger on behalf of users. And it's all just a repeat of things I have seen on the web for 15 years now.

I have watched the Brightkite blog, Facebook page and Brightkite/Twitter accounts get hammered with angry and abusive comments from users (Brightkite Yields to Foursquare, Gowalla, Etc.).

I have watched on Twitter as people have derided Yahoo's decision to shut down del.icio.us, the place where they have shared and stored bookmarks for years (Leaked Slide Shows Yahoo Is Killing Delicious & Other Web Apps at Mashable).

I felt vindicated when Google decided to pull the plug on Google Wave, partly owing to the fact that nobody could quite figure out how to wield something that was a floor wax and a dessert topping all in one (Google Wave is Dead at ReadWriteWeb).

I have watched as some of the URL shorteners on which we have come to rely for services like Twitter have announced that they are going away, or have just disappeared (List of URL Shorteners Grows Shortener).

I, and perhaps the entire web, breathed a sigh of relief when Geocities announced it was going to take a dirt nap — and finally did (Wait - GeoCities Still Exists?).

I remember when both Hotmail and Yahoo decided it was time to start charging for access to some of the more enhanced features of the free email they offered users (Say Goodbye to Free Email).

I saw people panic when they might lose access to all sorts of free video, photos, and even text content from CNN, Salon, and others (End of the Free Content Ride?).

We Get It; You've Been There, What's Your Point?

These services all have a couple key things in common:

1. Users have put a lot of time, energy, and apparently emotion into these services.


2. They are free.

The second point, in my opinion, should mitigate the first point. If you as a user are not paying to use a service, then is it a wise decision to build your social life or your business around it? Do you as a user not realize that these organizations owe you nothing?

As Brightkite announced the shuttering of its core service with only a week heads-up, they were kind enough to allow users to grab their data via RSS feeds. Yahoo hasn't even formalized the future of del.icio.us, but already fans have found a way to grab the data. But in both of these cases, if you as a user aren't backing up your data, keeping an archive, or storing it elsewhere, whose fault is it really that you might lose it all?

Is it wise to build a social media marketing campaign on Facebook, a platform notorious for changing the rules (features, privacy controls, layout, etc.) on a whim? Is relying on a free URL shortener service a good idea as the only method to present links to your highly developed web marketing campaigns? Should you really run your entire business on the features offered by Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, etc? If you have to alert staff/friends/partners to something important in a timely fashion, can you really trust Twitter to do what you need?

The culture of the web (nee Internet) has always been one of an open and sharing environment, where people and organizations post information that they understand will be shared/borrowed/stolen/derided. Somehow users of the web have come to expect that everything is, or should be, free. Look at the proliferation of sites to steal movies and music as an example on one end of the spectrum. On the other end is the reliance on Wikipedia by every school kid across the country instead of a purchased encyclopedia.

Let's all take some time to evaluate our plans and what we are doing. When that vendor who builds Facebook campaigns comes back to tell you that what he/she built last year won't work this year due to a Facebook change, there is your cost. When you have to take time from your real work to download all your bookmarks just so you can try to find a way to share them again or even get them into your browser, there is your cost. When you build a business on the back of a Twitter API and have to retool your entire platform due to an arbitrary change in how you call the service, there is your cost. When your Google Doc is sitting in "the cloud" and you're sitting in a meeting without wifi just before you have to present it, there is your cost.

This cost, however, ignores something that can't be measured on your end with dollars. The cost of sharing your personal information, your activities, your habits, are all your daily cost for using many of these services.

You may be under the impression that I have something against these free services. The use of this very blog should tell you otherwise. Instead I have something against users who have an expectation of free, top-notch service from organizations who are really only around as far as their cash flow can sustain them.

I keep my bookmarks on my local machine and just share the files between computers. I have been archiving my Brightkite photos since I started using the service, and archiving the posts to Twitter and Facebook, all the while backing up my Twitter stream. I use locally-installed software (MS Word, OpenOffice) writing to generic formats (RTF, etc.) and keep the files I need where I can access them (file vault on my site). I pay for a personal email service in addition to maintaining a free one. Other than Twitter, with its character limits, I avoid URL shorteners (and have no interest in rolling my own). I signed up for Diaspora in the hopes that I can funnel all my social media chaos to the one place I can take it with me. I keep a landline in my house so when the power goes out I can still make a phone call to 911.

I don't tweet my disgust when Facebook changes its layout. I don't post angry comments on Brightkite's wall when they kill a service. I don't try to organize people to take their time to rebuild Google Wave when I cannot. I don't punch my co-worker when he buys me a sandwich and the deli failed to exclude the mayo.

Let's all take some personal responsibility and stop relying solely on something simply because it's free. Your favorite free thing is different or gone (or will be). Suck it up and move on.

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Brightkite Yields to Foursquare, Gowalla, Etc.

Brighkite has made an announcement today that affects me and a handful of other people (not counting all the people on Facebook whose timelines I inadvertently spam): Brightkite is dropping check-ins, posts and streams.

Brightkite started 3 years ago with a Twitter-like ability to share your random musings. However, it took the Twitter idea further and integrated built-in photo sharing and geolocation for each post. It was a while before Twitter even opted to offer location in tweets, and it still relies on third-party services to link photos. Brightkite also allowed for comments on posts and more robust friend (and fan) management. But being better or first didn't quite count (which reminds me, does anyone have a Betamax VCR I can borrow?). From Brightkite regarding place check-ins, photos, and user/place streams:

These features were the defining element to our company 2 and 3 years ago, but we no longer believe they are sufficiently unique or defining to be our focus, so we are dropping them.

Brightkite itself is not going away. It will focus on its group text feature, something for which I do not have any need. I did practically eulogize the loss of these features three months ago when Brightkite announced its first change in direction (Brightkite Changes Direction). I'll spare you the recap.

Others Starting to Offer Similar Features

This isn't the only change in the location-based social media space, however. The idea of attaching photos to places and not just tweets has been gaining traction. Last March, Gowalla offered the ability to attach photos to a place (The Location-Based Wars Rage On: Gowalla Adds Comments, Photos & More). Users checking in to a place can see images from other users or contribute their own. The interface for the mobile application is a bit clunky, and it's not a major feature of the service, but it re-creates some of what we saw in Brighkite.

Gowalla announced just a few days ago that it is going to integrate with Foursquare and Facebook places, allowing users to see their friends in one stream of activity. This is a converse of the single-point check-in service offered by Check.in, offered by Brighkite, that allows users to check in to Brighkite, Foursquare and Gowalla at once using some place matching tricks.

Just yesterday Mashable posted a theory that Foursquare is going to add photo sharing, based on a screen shot from a user and comments made by the Foursquare CEO about new features in the works. If Foursquare is really offering this feature, it essentially re-creates a core feature of Brigktkite. Whether it will offer a stream of photos with comments is anyone's guess. If it does pan out, it keeps Foursquare ahead of Gowalla, owing partly to Foursquare's Tips feature (Brightkite Photo Tips, anyone?).

Gowalla and Foursquare aren't the only players in the location-based world of photos. For those who know me, Foodspotting is right up my alley, allowing users to post food photos that are associated with food venues. SCVNGR also allows people to post photos with places as part of its overall game model, awarding points for the activity. There just isn't a good way to access those photos for users who are just checking in to a place to play the game. Facebook Places tries to offer some of these features, but it gets lost in the mountain of other things users can do on Facebook and certainly has its own batch of privacy issues beyond just giving up your location.

While users can now associate a tweet with a place and post a photo readily from their mobile phones, the existing photo sharing services don't provide a way to see all images associated with a place. That is why place-centric services are starting to see the value of relying on user-generated imagery to bolster their core offering — checking in to places. In the end, being able to see photos of food, the venue, the crowd, the lighting, specials, and the local drunk may be far more compelling reasons to use a check-in service than earning badges or pins.

That Brighkite is stepping away from this saddens me, but there are clearly going to be others offering at least some of those core features in the near future.

Related Articles:

• Thanksgiving and Social Media, Redux


• Brightkite Changes Direction


• Why We Check In: The Reasons People Use Location-Based Social Networks (my Brightkite use is referenced in the article)


• Securing Facebook Places (from Your Friends)


• Twitter Pushes into Places


• Travelogues, Places and Meetups


• Brightkite Tries Another Angle


• The Future of Check-ins at evolt.org


• Mapping Location-Based Social Media at evolt.org


• Real World Hyperlinks at evolt.org


• Don't Let Social Media Get You Robbed (or Stalked)


• Enjoying Thanksgiving with Social Media


• We are thankful for... at the Brightkite blog

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Thanksgiving and Social Media, Redux

I finally get to eat.

Two years ago I hosted Thanksgiving dinner in my shoebox of a house and managed to pull it off without setting anyone on fire. Back then, my experience with social media was limited and my favorite social media tool was Brightkite.

In addition to a free meal, my family also got to experience some of the potential of social media in the form of the Brightkite wall, which was a constant stream of posts and photos from Thanksgiving meals across the country. Amazingly, they sat transfixed as it scrolled across my TV and they got a kick out of seeing a slice of everyone else's holiday.

Watching the Brightkite wall, waiting for guests.

Last year I wrote up a blog post, Enjoying Thanksgiving with Social Media, that detailed my previous year's experience and it was picked up by Brightkite on their blog: We are thankful for.... They were even kind enough to provide a link to a Brightkite wall with some search terms already selected (Brightkite only). That was back when Brightkite was still enjoying a fair amount of photo postings and had not been thoroughly overrun with spammers.

Mashable, the site for all things social media related, posted an article titled HOW TO: Plan the Perfect Thanksgiving With the Help of Social Media (although the title tag says "social web"). The article, however, has little to do with social media and instead talks about web sites focused on helping you prepare meals, travel, and generally survive the holiday chaos.

If you prefer the idea of a wall showing all the latest Thanksgiving tweets, many Twitter tools allow you to follow specific terms and hashtags, meaning you can build your own if you already have one of those tools. If you want something a little more interesting, the Brighkite wall still works and allows you to aggregate tweets in addition to posts from Brightkite. TwitterFall is another projection-friendly (or TV-screen-friendly) option for viewing tweets in a cascade down your screen. There will be more noise (spam) on it than two years ago, but it's at least a way to see live posts come through. Sadly, there is no way to aggregate all the photos that make it to Gowalla, the various Twitter image services, Facebook, and so on. But then, it's probably better to spend time with the family anyway.

I'm resisting the urge to turn this into a post about the TSA pat-down policies and the opt-out day that many are calling for on the web that coincides with the start of holiday travel, but if you want to cash in on the chaos via a new Foursquare badge, then you may just need to check in to an airport some time over the next couple days. We'll see if I get it when I do an airport run shortly...

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Election Day Tools

If you are in the United States and not dead, it's kind of hard to miss all the chaos leading up to election day next week. Surprisingly, not a lot of people seem to know where their voting place is or even if they are registered to vote.

Conveniently, Google has made a gadget available for you to drop onto your site to help give people the kind of self-service they need. If you are a web builder (I assume that some of you reading this are), then you can customize the Google Election Center App and grab the code to drop it on your own site to help random voters (even if you are using a limited CMS, the code should still do the trick). As long as users enter a valid address (the example address above is a business address, so it won't return any results), they will see the polling place in Google Maps and directions to get there from the submitted address. In addition, a list of election candidates is provided (in random order).

If the app looks familiar, it's also living on the home page of the Voting Information Project, and the data it uses comes from that very organization.

As a little extra motivation to exercise a right guaranteed to you in the United States Constitution, for which so many have fought and/or died to retain and extend to all citizens, which makes you kind of an ungrateful jerk if you don't vote, Foursquare is offering badges for people who check in to polling places. Read up in this post on Mashable: This Year, Civic Participation Gets You an "I Voted" Foursquare Badge. On November 2 you can wander over to Foursquare's tracking page to see how people across the country are doing (provided they check in).

If you are still wondering who gets your vote and you are far too lazy to do your own research and track down your own unbiased resources, then a Mashable guest writer has provided 17 Web Resources to Help You Decide on Election Day. I suggest you don't wait until election day to decide.

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Location-Based SM Examples in the Real World (at evolt.org)

Whenever I speak about social media I usually field a few questions related to the location-based social media services. These include Foursquare, SCVNGR, Gowalla, Brightkite, Loopt, and now Facebook Places. The questions revolve around who is using them and why. While it's possible to see and explain the potential in these services, sometimes tangible examples are needed, and usually more than just explaining how awesome drink specials can be once you're the "mayor" of a venue. I wrote up some examples for evolt.org, and the article is now live on the site. The examples I use:

• The Ferris Bueller's Day Off Movie Experience


• NFL


• National Post at Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF)


• Universities


• STD Testing

Of course, the day after I wrote this article, more stories came out about location-based services and real world applications, but I'll save those for a follow-up article. Now go read the article: Location-Based SM Examples in the Real World

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Social Media Day in Buffalo #smdayBUF

Back in early June, the web site Mashable, known for reporting on all sorts of things related to social media among its other topics, posted an idea for creating a worldwide social media day (Join Mashable in Celebrating Social Media Day). They quickly mobilized some major cities for an event, and for smaller markets supported them with a Mashable-sponsored Meetup site (Meetup is the platform used to organize all sorts of real-life meetings based around random ideas).

Over here in Buffalo, a group of people mobilized about halfway through the month to start planning an event here in town. In record time, they got a Meetup page built, created a Twitter hashtag for the event, secured a venue, hired a DJ, and managed to trick social-media-savvy businesses into donating goods for an auction. All of this was managed using Twitter and the Meetup Buffalo page. @veganjesus (Norm Boyer) even set up a Foursquare venue just for the event (sadly, not everyone knew, so no swarm badge unlock). While my plan was to just enjoy the evening, I got pressed into service trying to make a Twitter wall, and simply cheated and used a Brighkite wall instead (yes, that was my sole contribution).

With only 50 RSVPs, one media outlet reported 140+ guests, and it seemed like far more than that cycling through the night. Scheduled for only two hours, the event went past midnight and turned out to be a huge success as people, many of whom had never met face to face but knew each other online, ended up getting along quite well, sometimes with surprising results.

You can surf the tweets that kept popping up all night with the local hashtag #smdayBUF.

In case you haven't figured it out by now, this post is really just a quick recap of the night and a great way to link to all the people who contributed something to the event. Catch all those links below, after you watch this Skunkpost video with some interesting interviews:

I suggest you jump to 2:26 and look for the burning question I posted a couple times over the course of the night. If the embed didn't work for you, watch the video on the Skunkpost site.

The event organizers: @skunkworks716 (Keith Stephen), @KatieKraw (Katie Krawczyk), @BlockClub (Patrick Finan), @Wingalls (Will Ingalls), @Djlopro (DJ LoPro), @TonyCityLove (Tony Maggiotto, Jr.), and @arampino (Amber Rampino). There were many others who helped out, lent support, provided gear, took photos, ate the food, stole some prizes, made the AV work, danced, and so on. In all, it truly was a community effort.

If you were there and you left early (say, before midnight), then you missed a good breakdance battle.

Related links:

• Photos from Clark Dever
• Social Media Day in Buffalo, NY Photos – #smdayBUF #smday (Clark Dever's blog)
• Photos from Block Club
• Happy Social Media Day! (Day-of announcements at Mashable for the worldwide activities)
• Buffalo Gets Social on June 30 (Announcement at Buffalo Rising)
• Facebook, Twitter, Myspace Celebration in Buffalo (Written story by local CBS affiliate, WGRZ)

Update: Read all about #smdayBUF 2.0, held on Tuesday, July 27 at Templeton Landing, as covered in the post Event Profile: #smdayBUF & #smdayBUF 2.0 by @TonyCityLove (Tony Maggiotto, Jr.). It even has a couple of my photos from the event.

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Travelogues, Places and Meetups

Today on ReadWriteWeb, Marshall Kirkpatrick (Co-Editor and Vice President of Content Development) has posted an article titled Why We Check In: The Reasons People Use Location Based Social Networks. In the article he explores why people use services like Foursquare and Gowalla to post their physical location for the world to see. Given that Facebook is planning to add location features and Twitter is pushing its own Twitter Places feature, this is a question many people ask — including those who use the services. As a regular user, I am often asked why and this time I had an opportunity to provide an answer for this article.

Marshall put the question out on the Twitters (yes, I am being ironical), and thanks to a retweet, it came my way. I responded with a couple tweets (below) about using Brightkite as my own travelogue. I thought what I was talking about was relatively unique. Apparently so did Marshall, because he comments on how many people made similar statements, about how they also used these services as some form of personal history.

My ego aside, which I suspect we all know is no small task, the article also discusses how the game nature of some services motivates people, while the human connection (almost forced serendipity) is a motivator for others. While the article isn't exactly scientific (at all), his polling certainly demonstrates some trends. Though there are no big surprises, the anecdotal examples are interesting.

Meanwhile, over at Mashable there is an article discussing Twitter Places, What Twitter Places Means for the Future of Location. You may recall me wondering how Twitter Places in its current form can really take over the world of location-social media in my post Twitter Pushes into Places. Mashable offers some reasons to ponder:

1. Location-Sharing to Become Mainstream
2. Boost Interest in Geo-location Apps
3. Promoted Places

In these examples, it's not that Twitter is going to take the lead, but instead that Twitter is simply going to use its "star power" to popularize and legitimize things we are already doing, or that other services are already doing.

While I've got you thinking about all these interesting bits related to location-based social media (we really need a simpler, universal name for that), take a look at this article from ReadWriteWeb: Is Geofencing the Next Evolution for Location Apps? Location Labs Thinks So. It essentially describes the thing I've always wanted Brightkite to do — notify me when I or a friend have entered some geographic area or zone and let us know each other is there. Certainly there is more to the service than this, but even if all you want is auto-checkins, then you may want to read this article.

If you've made it this far, then you may actually be interested in this stuff. If so, and you are interested in meeting people in your area who play and/or work in this space, Mashable is sponsoring a worldwide social media meetup on Wednesday, June 30. Many cities are getting in on the action. In fact, you could come to Buffalo and participate in our Mashable Meetup. If you don't, you'll be just like the other 6 billion people on the planet, and that's ok.

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The Future of Check-ins (at evolt.org)

Last week Mashable featured a post asking if location-based services are all just hype. Continuing the geolocation theme Mashable has a new post, What the Future Holds for the Checkin, by a guest blogger/columnist. I have a reservations about how well this article delves into future opportunities, so I just toss a few out here.

Please header over to evolt.org to read my article, The Future of Check-ins. It will only be there for eternity, or until the world ends, so make sure you head over there soon. To make sure you see this link, I am repeating it:

Read The Future of Check-ins at evolt.org

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Too Much Hype over Location-Based Services?

Chris Treadaway is founder and CEO of Lasso, a "hyper-local advertising platform for media outlets and small businesses." He was recently on a panel in Austin, Texas with Gowalla CEO Josh Williams, where he may have seemed like a buzz kill to many in the crowd.

Chris tells his story in a post on Mashable titled Are Location-Based Services All Hype? As an avid user of Foursquare, Brightkite and to a lesser extent Gowalla (and the quasi-aggregator Check.in), you might be surprised to hear that I tend to agree. Not that the concept is hype, but that the potential for monetizing it is hype.

In his commentary he offers some metrics that we don't see today, but that can provide real-time (or near-real-time) feedback on how location-based applications are being used:

• Percent of Active Users: What is the percentage of users who have checked in during the last day? The last week? This will give us an indication of utility and/or fatigue.
• Revenue: Exactly how is all of this translating into revenue? For the LBS app companies? For brands that advertise? For local businesses?
• Average Number of Checkins Per Day: How often do people check in? Is this derivative metric improving or declining? This will tell us about the value proposition of checking in for the average consumer.
• Time Spent in Application: What is the average time spent per day inside the application per user? This informs the market about the experience consumers have with the application and how well it captures users' attention.
• Percent of Users Who Have Been Inactive Over the Last Month: How many people installed a location-based app but got tired of it and now no longer effectively use it?

While I don't agree with some of his assertions about what motivates people to use these services, the article is a good read from someone who is in the industry and trying to survive off it.

Related

• Mapping Location-Based Social Media (this article is also at evolt.org)
• Don't Let Social Media Get You Robbed (or Stalked)

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Mapping Location-Based Social Media

If you have been paying any attention to the social media space for the last few years, then you've watched the rise in location-based social media. A few years ago Loopt and Brighkite offered the ability for users to check in to a physical location. Then came Google Latitude, Foursquare and Gowalla. Each one had its selling point — games, competition, badges, pins, notifying when your friends are near, creating a history of your travels, and so on.

Part of the appeal of these tools is seeing where you have been, almost like a travelogue for a person, as well as tracking others (friends or family). Brighkite, for example, has offered a GeoRSS/KML feed for some time that you can feed into Google Maps or MapQuest, or really anything that can read the geo-tagged posts. It has taken some time, but the rest of the web is finally catching up:

• Twitter is asking for your location, and displaying map links with tweets.
• Facebook has announced its intent to track location.
• Smart phone utilities are popping up to make it easier to track activity in a place.

Go ahead and read the rest of the article (and see the swanky screen shots) at evolt.org: Mapping Location-Based Social Media

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More Social Media Privacy News

Yesterday the Wall Street Journal technology blog posted an article titled Google Buzz Exemplifies Privacy Problems, FTC Commissioner Says. The outgoing FTC Commissioner said that technology companies, specifically Google, are being too cavalier with the personal data of consumers. While qualifying her remarks as not official FTC comments, she said that the launch of Google Buzz was irresponsible conduct on the part of Google.

If you don't know to what she is referring, here's the greatly simplified breakdown. When Buzz launched, Google wanted to get people into it quickly and get them connected to their friends. To do this, Google essentially scoured your Gmail contacts and set them up as "friends" in this new service, allowing them to be seen as such by the general public. The awkward social case where this is a problem is when you use your Gmail account to court someone who isn't your spouse or significant other. In the professional world, reporters could instantly have their connections to otherwise anonymous sources or informants exposed. There was a firestorm of anger from users and Google quickly scrambled to close that gaping hole, as well as some others.

That the FTC commissioner specifically calls out Google, so recently in the news for this fiasco, doesn't let others off the hook. Facebook has been through its share of privacy dust-ups with users as it keeps pushing to make everything public.

Google Buzz also got its share of abuse at the SXSWi keynote speech by Danah Boyd, a Social Media Researcher at Microsoft Research New England and Fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. SXSW is precisely the event where a product/service like Buzz should be shining, as was the case for Foursquare last year, and not getting panned. Facebook got its share of a thumping in her speech, too, as she cited users who inadvertently adopted more public settings.

Meanwhile, in the world of sharing too much for robbers and stalkers, the world of geo-tagged and location-aware services saw a bit of a jump. Mashable reports that Foursquare Adds Almost 100,000 Users in 10 Days. To be clear, there weren't 100,000 people at SXSW, and many of those people already had Foursquare accounts anyway.

Apparently people have no problem sharing personal, potentially risky, bits about their lives. Just as long as they pick and choose what to share, that is. The FTC cannot regulate poor decision making skills by consumers, but it can at least step in when a company goes too far and just burps out lots of private data. For everyone else, I recommend you read the safety tips in my post Don't Let Social Media Get You Robbed (or Stalked) from earlier this month.

Related news bits:

• Google Buzz: Privacy nightmare at Cnet on February 10, 2010.
• WARNING: Google Buzz Has A Huge Privacy Flaw at Silicon Alley Insider on February 10, 2010.
• Facebook's Privacy Changes Draw More Scrutiny at the New York Times technology blog on December 10, 2009.
• Facebook Privacy Complaint Ignites War of Words at PCWorld on December 17, 2009.
• Google Buzz Gets Some Serious Privacy Tweaks at Mashable.
• FTC on Google Buzz: Consumer Privacy Cannot Be Run in Beta at Mashable.
• SXSW 2010: Google and Facebook failed on privacy, says Danah Boyd at the Telegraph blogs on March 14, 2010.
• Facebook To Pay $9.5 Million in Privacy Settlement at ReadWriteWeb on March 18, 2010.

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FourWhere: The Spawn of Google Maps and Foursquare

Both ReadWriteWeb (FourWhere Mashes Up Foursquare and Google Maps) and Mashable (Foursquare + Google Maps = FourWhere) are covering the emergence of a new service/site/product called FourWhere. The concept here is very simple — take Foursquare locations and feed them into Google Maps, providing a simple view of all the venues in an area.

Click for a larger view.

FourWhere takes it a little further, however, and allows you to filter venues so that you only see venues with tips. This is particularly handy to help filter out all the gas stations and office locations that I just don't care about. In addition, I can click on a venue to see all the tips/comments associated with it, making it much easier to make a decision about where I might want to go (or avoid).

Click for a larger view.

The site launched today and is running slowly, probably owing to a spike in traffic from the press it received and/or my browser's distaste for Java.

If you read my post Don't Let Social Media Get You Robbed (or Stalked), then now might be a great time to make sure people aren't submitting your home address to Foursquare and leaving tips about your nice new TV.

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"Real World Hyperlinks" Article at evolt.org

You may be wondering what this graphic means. Perhaps it's your first time seeing it, but perhaps you've seen it here and there and not understood its significance. It is called a Quick Response Code, or QR code. If you've got a cell phone camera and a reader (many already do), then you can use this little guy as a hyperlink in the real world.

I've got more history, examples, suggestions, and even a glimpse at the competing code Microsoft is pushing all in my new article over at evolt.org: Real World Hyperlinks

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Don't Let Social Media Get You Robbed (or Stalked)

If you are one of the millions of people using social media to report where you are, you may have been tuned in to all the buzz lately about the site Please Rob Me. The concept is very simple, when you use applications like Gowalla, Foursquare, Brighkite, Loopt or anything else that broadcasts your location, you run the risk of telling the world that you aren't at home and it's ripe for the picking. You can compound it by advertising to potential stalkers (not much of an issue for me, but certainly if you're popular).

The geolocation features built into these applications not only tell people where you are, but if they have any familiarity with you, the area, or just spend a few minutes reading your history, they can pretty quickly posit for how long you will be away. This isn't limited to just geolocation-broadcasting services — you can just as easily use Twitter or Facebook (among others) to inadvertently tell people you are away from home or at a particular place.

That it took all the press around the Please Rob Me site to cause people to consider this is almost laughable. Granted, the site is pretty overt in how it conveniently aggregates all the data for visitors, but it's not doing anything that an interested party couldn't do on his or her own in a few minutes. All the site does is show all the Tweets from Foursquare users as they check in — not very complex. To quote from its Why page:

The danger is publicly telling people where you are. This is because it leaves one place you're definitely not... home. So here we are; on one end we're leaving lights on when we're going on a holiday, and on the other we're telling everybody on the internet we're not home.

So how can you enjoy social media with geolocation features and still minimize your risk?

Techniques for Safe Check-ins

These are just three options. I employ each of these and find them fairly easy to follow. None of these will stop the old fashioned thief (who doesn't use social media), but they can make it a little harder for those casing you online.

Time Shift

Remember, you don't have to check in to a location as soon as you get there.

Let that sink in for a moment. I see people check in to locations as soon as they walk in the door, but they don't need to. Sure, you may not get the immediate benefit of knowing which of your friends might be nearby, but maybe you should sort that out in advance.

For example, I am known among my friends for posting photos of my meals through Brightkite. What many of them don't realize is that I often check in to a location after I have already left or (if it's near my house) as I am leaving. This has caused a couple awkward moments when a nearby friend is notified of my proximity and comes looking for me.

Hide Your Check-ins

Hide your check-ins from all but your trusted friends. And I don't mean those Facebook friends who you met once while in a mosh pit or that you haven't seen since second grade.

You don't need to Tweet to the entire world where you are. Sure, if it's a major event and you want to brag then go for it, but understand the risk. If you Tweet or check in for every morning visit to the local coffee hut, not only will people know where you are right now, you will be telling them where you are tomorrow or next week. Establishing a pattern of behavior makes it easy for someone to predict your moves.

Consider hiding your Foursquare check-ins and not Tweeting every one; you can still participate in the overall game. Lock down your Facebook profile from the general public. Consider disabling the geotagging from third-party applications that feed to Twitter.

Get a House Sitter

Some of you may be aware that I was just in Houston speaking at a conference. I was more than happy to post my progress via Foursquare check-ins, Brightkite photos, and an assault of Tweets. Anybody could have wandered over to my house for some pillaging, but would have been surprised to find that someone was already there. In fact, I was able to split the duties across two people, so it was better populated than when I am in town.

If you have the luxury of a roommate, house sitter, guard dog, militia, etc., then you may be in good shape already. But consider whether that person at your house is someone you want to put at risk (granted a rather remote risk), or if that person is comfortable with being on watch.

Related articles:

Continue to read up, you may come up with some ideas that work better for you than my suggestions.

• The dark side of geo: PleaseRobMe.com at CNET.
• Are We All Asking to Be Robbed? at Mashable.
• Google Buzz: Privacy nightmare at CNET.
• Facebook Privacy Complaint Ignites War of Words at PCWorld.
• Twitter Your Way to Getting Robbed at Mashable.
• HOW TO: Make Your Small Business Geolocation-Ready at Mashable.
• How Robbers Did Their Dirty Deeds Before Foursquare at Mashable.
• Friday Poll: Do Location Check-In Services Freak You Out? at Mashable.

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Enjoying Thanksgiving with Social Media

A lot can be said about the value of social media, with arguments for real business value or ways to stay connected with friends and family or even that most of it is just egocentric drivel. As one of the purveyors of egocentric drivel in my Twitter stream, I can understand that it's not for everybody. I did find a way to garner at least some faint interest in naysayers, however.

Last year I hosted Thanksgiving dinner at my pocket-sized house and practically counter-free kitchen for a dozen people. Since I had been in the kitchen almost non-stop since the prior afternoon I wasn't in much of a position to entertain my guests, but I did have something they found fascinating. I had just discovered the Brightkite Wall.

For those who don't know, Brightkite is a microblogging service, like Twitter, that also has built-in support for photos and geolocation, allowing you to "check in" to a location and post messages and images about the place (or event, etc.). It predates Foursquare, but does not use the game model at all and allows you to check in from anywhere in the world, not a restricted list of pre-defined cities.

Watching the Brightkite wall, waiting for guests.

The Brightkite Wall essentially turns your display into a simple electronic billboard, showing a stream of posts (text and images) as they come through the service. Last year I fed this directly to my television and let my family watch people comment and post photos throughout the day, watching shot after shot of peoples' meals, kitchens, families, turkey failures, plate mishaps, and comments about naps. It seemed a little voyeuristic, but it was also a great way to experience Thanksgiving across the country as a whole, feeling some sort of connection with people I've never met. We watched meals ebb and flow with the timezones, people try to juggle more than one stop, and many missives about things for which people were thankful (and more than a few for what they were not thankful). It became quite an interactive affair in my house as everyone commented on their favorite images or updates and as they pressed me to post photos of our meal.

Some guests before dinner.

I finally get to eat.

This year I am not hosting, but I am bringing my laptop so, just in case anyone remembers, we can fire it up and watch this little slice of Americana play itself out throughout the day.

If you want to try this yourself, I have some configuration suggestions. First of all, you don't have to have a Brightkite account to use the wall. I recommend creating a Universe Stream instead of limiting it to one geographic area, one person, or one search term. Make sure you disable check-ins. You don't need to see that some guy named Ed checked in at 1313 Mockingbird Lane, you just want to see the comments and photos. If you want to see Twitter posts, you can enter Twitter search terms. These will help filter the tweets that get folded into the stream. You may need to adjust settings when you do it — when I ran this last year I didn't worry about Twitter spam or vulgarities.

Click for a full-size view of the configuration screen.

This little experiment made it much easier to explain what social media is and how it works, and I think it made for a richer Thanksgiving. I do recommend a big enough display that people can see from across the room, since nobody who's overeaten on Thanksgiving wants to be crowded by others around a laptop.

Enjoy your Thanksgiving and I look forward to your Brighkite posts (and tweets).

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