The founder and CEO of Plancast Mark Hendrickson decided to stop working on the effort full time and wrote a detailed post mortem in January. The service was about sharing your plans with others. Here's what he said about how geography mattered. This reads like the post mortem of many other social network startups that didn't make it.
Geographic Limitations
Geographic specificity is another inherent limitation to a plan’s value. Unlike virtually all other content types (with the exception of check-ins), plans provide most of their value to others when those users live or can travel near enough to join.
I may share plans for a ton of great events in San Francisco, but few to none of my friends who live outside of the Bay Area are going to care. In fact, they’ll find it annoying to witness something they’ll miss out on. Sure, they might appreciate simply knowing what I’m up to, but the value to that kind of surveillance is rather modest all by itself.
This is especially problematic when trying to expand the service into new locations. New users will have a hard time finding enough local friends who are either on the service and sharing their plans already, or those who are willing to join them on a new service upon invitation. People who encounter the service from non-urban locations have the hardest time, since there aren’t many events going on in their area in general, let alone posted to Plancast. Trying to view all events simply listed within their location or categories of interest yields little for them to enjoy.
- TechCrunch
by Adena Schutzberg on 02/16 at 03:00 AM |
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Google announced a Public Alerts page on Jan 25. The idea is to keep you informed of emergency alerts for floods, tornadoes, winter storms, and other dangers that may be headed your way. But, it's completely query driven, not location-based in this first attempt. Google is seeking feedback. Mano Marks noted on Twitter he'd worked on this project in the past.
- Google Blog
MapQuest launched an HTML5 client.
- press release
Adam Sadilek of the University of Rochester has developed a tool to predict one's location based on friend's locations known through Twitter. How well? It can locate you to within 100 meters with up to 85% accuracy.
"You can actually infer a lot of things about people, even though they are pretty careful about how they manage their online behaviour," he reports.
- New Scientist
by Adena Schutzberg on 01/26 at 05:30 AM |
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Pulse, still in Nokia Beta Labs, aims to be a "one click" soution to share and archive all the relevant data of a mobile conversation. The example in the video below is not all that compelling: Mom at kid's soccer game, captures daughter scoring on video, shares with Dad, plans celebration over pizze, sends Dad map. It's very private and apparently stores all the data for each Pulse "conversation." Like many in the YouTube stream comments, I'm not sure I get it.
via Tnooz
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by Adena Schutzberg on 11/28 at 03:00 AM |
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GeoIQ Social is the first and only product that provides self-service analysis of social media data by time and location.
It's offered as offered as part of the GeoIQ product suite.
- GeoIQ Blog
by Adena Schutzberg on 10/26 at 05:11 AM |
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Wow was almost exactly a year ago when we were all agog about a new Facebook announcement about location? It didn't go over that well here at Directions Media (APB coverage). And, now word from Facebook it didn't work out as planned.
When Facebook announced a host of new tools and features earlier Tuesday, the company revealed that it would be integrating location-based data into the broader Facebook experience. As a side effect of this, Facebook is killing off the dedicated Places location-based feature within its mobile apps.
What this means is that you will no longer be able to simply check-in directly to a location on Facebook. Instead, you can add your location to a status update, while tagging any of your friends who may be with you. You can also add your location to photos.
Scribbal continues by noting Facebook is conceding defeat to Foursquare. Frankly, I think it's a good move. Location is part of other things, not always THE thing.
- Scribbal
by Adena Schutzberg on 08/24 at 04:38 AM |
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