Tag: gowalla
What Twitter Places Means for the Future of Location
by Ranju Chaudhary on Jun.28, 2010, under Latest Web Technologies, What's Happening?
Despite the bungled launch and short hiatus, Twitter Places is back in action. The feature has huge implications for the geo-location space and the location-sharing movement.
Places is a big improvement on Twitter’s
previous geo-location offering, which was never widely adopted or embraced by the majority of users. Whereas before users had to adjust their settings and agree to posting every single tweet with their geo-coordinates, now Twitterers are presented with an elegant way to attach a place to their tweet, one tweet at a time.
Right now Places is a Twitter web and mobile experience only, but soon developers will integrate the Places API into their applications and services. Only then will we see Twitter Places reach its full potential. If Twitter can fix the issues crippling the service, then Places has the power to turn location-sharing into a mainstream behavior and significantly boost interest in applications likeFoursquare
— not to mention the monetization potential of location-based ads.
1. Location-Sharing to Become Mainstream
As trendy and hip as Foursquare may be, it’s still only reaching a small subset of the online population. WhileFacebook — due to its size and reach — is the most mainstream of the social networks, Twitter might have the best chance at making location-sharing a common behavior.
Twitter is still the primary purveyor of real-time information and news, and location needs real-time visibility to thrive. Location-sharing amongst friends is certainly well suited for Facebook’s purposes, but the value of location supersedes knowing where your friends are.
Just two years ago, Twitter and its 140 character updates seemed silly, if not absurd. Now everyone from all walks of life including athletes, politicians, celebrities and media are tweeting. Location-sharing — via applications that use geo-location to tie locations to places for the purpose of letting users broadcast where they are — is prime for a breakout moment. Twitter can help take it there.
The tweet has proved to be a powerful and revolutionary way to communicate and spread information. Add location, in the form of places, to these messages and we could see a surge of interest.
Places add context to tweets, which means that breaking news — whether it be related to a natural disaster, event, conference or other situation unfolding in real-time — flowing out in the form of tweets can be localized for further value. It’s this context that will finally help location-sharing holdouts understand why location matters and how they could benefit.
2. Boost Interest in Geo-location Apps
As it stands, Twitter is not a threat to location-based social games like Foursquare and Gowalla. In fact, it’s a complimentary service that will positively impact user uptake.
Given that Places integrates with both services, users of Foursquare and Gowalla have double the incentive to continue updating their friends on their whereabouts. Checkins from either service are tied to places on Twitter, which means those updates get sucked into the Twitter Place feeds/streams.
Checkins will also have broader reach on Twitter via the Twitter Place page, which means more exposure for Foursquare and Gowalla. More exposure will translate into more users who checkin more often, and so on, and so forth.
Plus, as location-sharing becomes more accepted, users will begin to appreciate the added values that Gowalla and Foursquare bring to the table. Saving money — whether that be at Starbucks, Domino’s or Sports Authority — is something that never gets old.
3. Promoted Places
With Places, Twitter has an opportunity to serve up highly targeted advertisements in the form of Promoted Tweets.
Ads could appear atop the Places tweet stream — a.k.a. search results for tweets at a particular place — and engage Twitter users with specific messages about a locale. Obviously this a feature that brands like Starbucks — an early Promoted Tweets user and Foursquare early adopter — could use for store-specific promotions or messages. Perhaps there’s even a “Promoted Places” product brewing that will function similarly to the new Promoted Trends feature.
“Promoted Places” may just be a projection at this point, but we are quite certain that Twitter’s current fixation on advertising revenue will extend to Places.
Rally Up is a Location Based Network For People Who Like Privacy
by neetika on Apr.01, 2010, under Gadgets, Latest Web Technologies
A new geolocation app for the iPhone was released today called Rally Up. What differentiates Rally Up from the likes of Foursquare and Gowalla is that it has a strong focus on privacy and sharing content. Rally Up bills itself as “a social network for real friends” and its focus is on letting people share messages and photos with the people they trust.
To this end, Rally Up takes a very different approach to friends lists and friends management from other social applications. For instance, Rally Up doesn’t integrate with Twitter. What!? I hear you gasp. As the saying goes, “it’s not a flaw, it’s a feature.”
The point of Rally Up isn’t to create or tap into yet another social network, it’s to be able to be selective about who you share information with.
For instance, when you add a user as a friend, you have different options that control how information is shared with them and how information is received by them. This “slider” can be changed at will.
Here are your options:
- Real friends – These are people that you want to know about, meaning you will see their activity in your feed and get push notifications of what they are doing. So your boyfriend or girlfriend or your sister are the types of people you might put in this category.
- Feed friends – You’ll get updates from these individuals in your feed, but you won’t get push notifications. So your co-workers or your gym buddies might go here. You like to know what they are up to, but you don’t need to be alerted at all times.
- Lurk – This is a pretty cool option, it lets you see what your friend is doing but they won’t see your check-ins. Likewise, you won’t get any push notifications about them. So when you’re shopping for a birthday present for someone, you might want to put them in the Lurk category.
- Mute – OK, so you know that girl from high school that you kind of sort of remember but can’t really place who keeps friending you on Facebook and LinkedIn andFoursquare? You don’t want to be rude and might feel obligated to accept her as a friend, but you really don’t care about what she’s doing, nor do you want her to know what party you are going to. So mute her. She won’t see your updates and you won’t see hers. If you feel like unmuting later, you can always do so.
When it comes to check-ins, Rally Up has a lot more granularity in that regard too. For instance, you can designate locations as being private. That means that someone can see that you checked in at home, but “home” is never defined by a GPS location. Likewise, if you don’t want people to know details about where you work, you can designate your workplace as being private.
You can also create temporary locations for things like parties or conferences, without having to add those locations permanently to the database. At conferences especially, I always see tons of locations created for a specific event, only for those locations to be discarded after the event is over. Temporary locations make sense because you can check-in, but not clutter up the map for everyone else.
Rally Up also lets you use check-ins to let people know that you are headed to an event. So if you’re en route to a place, you can check-in and your friends can know you are going and then choose to meet you there.
Rally Up also lets you send personal messages and it integrates push notifications to give an SMS effect, but without charging for messages. That’s pretty cool.
Rally Up is free and is available for the iPhone now. As you can see from the above sceenshot, it’s also coming soon to the iPad.
If you want to take advantage of location-based social networks but want more control over who sees what, you might want to give Rally Up a shot.
What do you think about privacy when it comes to location-based networks? Let us know!
