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10 ideas: the evolution of geolocal

I remember when my Yahoo colleague Thad White showed me phones that Sprint was working on that would allow users to show where they were based on the location of their phone. He and I got pretty excited about all the cool things you would be able to share given that information -- how much easier it would be to connect with friends, share restaurant recommendations, and even get great deals from local businesses.
  

This was in 2003. 

Seven years later, who would've guessed the advent and adoption of location-based services wouldn't be really driven by the telcos, but instead by application developers thanks to (sorta) open platforms and the ubiquity of social networks/graphs? Although it's taken longer than I would've guessed, most of the advent of geolocal services has happened in the last year. Now, location-based elements are everywhere on your phone, and it seems like the growth rate of sign ups is accelerating.

Foursquare, Gowalla and Booyah's MyTown are all leading the charge, with Google Buzz (via Voice and Gmail), Yelp, Twitter and soon-to-be Facebook all throwing their hat in the ring. Everyone has a slightly different angle, but it's not always clear why/what the user benefit is of endless check-ins and badge awards. A lot of them are using social gaming mechanics (no surprise) to help juice engagement, but with mixed results.

Based on my experience, here are a few ways I think these services can better hit the mark.

1) Have a clearer purpose and value proposition.

I always get asked why I use Foursquare, and a lot of the reason is that I believe in the promise of what the service will ultimately provide, and I'd like to be along for that ride. That and I want to be SuperMayor of everything. But most people don't care.

With Foursquare, and with its fast-growing engaged audience and good content, I can more easily argue that it's a good service for connecting with friends, finding good tips on locales, and even get deals and coupons at local businesses. I find that value proposition less clear on GoWalla and MyTown. On both of those services, I find a much smaller segment of my social network participating (even with MyTown arguing it's the most active local service, although I think the value of MyTown's authenticity is debatable). I find less local content from users and deals on Gowalla.

Google Buzz's geolocal integration is interesting to me in that I think it's pretty well equipped to help local friends connect (although it's really hard to get to on an iPhone). Twitter's geolocal integraiton is weak, but it's also at the beginning, and the Tweetie integration will change things. I'm guessing Facebook can stroll in here and really kick butt though when it wants to. If I were the other geolocal services, I'd be working hard to capture local content since the social network is not a sustainable competitive advantage for any of them.

Leading: Foursquare (for now). First-mover advantage seems to be paying off here in higher quality interactions, content and value for new users. Some of my early-adopter friends have left Foursquare, but I find most of my following friends are now signing up. Good sign that it's becoming mainstream.

2) Incentivize behavior clearly.

Why should I check-in? My motivation is a little bit twisted because I'm more of an early adopter of these services. But when using most of these, it's hard to understand why. As time goes by, and more people join, and more local content is available, I think it'll become clearer, but for now, it's difficult to see. Except on Booyah's MyTown.

Make no mistake, the Booyah guys know that they're creating a geolocal, social game. No surprise, given the Booyah founders are ex-Blizzard World of Warcraft geniuses. Sign up for Booyah, and you're thrust into a world where you're not just checking in at Caesar's Palace in Vegas, you're buying and trading it, building your own town, and building your empire in this game. It seems like the Booyah guys believe that by creating a very obvious game, they can apply those mechanics to the local industry, and suddenly make a more engaged community around local content.

I think it's a fascinating approach as it's not about simply adding social game mechanics to a vertical. It's making a vertical a game. That said, I think that the quality of interactions may be suspect, as I can easily check-in and buy local businesses without really even being close to them. So is there really a relationship with the business, or is there something there that can be extracted as value in the local channel? Maybe not, but maybe that doesn't matter given they can make money off microtransactions and the virtual economy around their players' moves. (Update: I talked with someone at Booyah, and he mentioned that their philosophy is any check-in is valuable to the brand because they're expressing their affinity for the brand. That said, they are planning to increae the point value of check-ins based on the quality (e.g., check in to Caesar's Palace while in Oregon may grant you 1 point. Check in while in Vegas may grant you 10 points).

Leading: Booyah's MyTown. If I were Gowalla or Foursquare, I'd spend a lot more time here as the value driven by early adopters will wear out over time, and it'll become more difficult to grow at a rapid rate if those users are not truly hubs in their social wheel.

3) Own the local business relationship. (Esp. coupons and local deals)

The local business angle seems like a huge opportunity to me. These services shoud directly cater to businesses, making it easy for them to create badges and coupons for their businesses, and getting them into the databases for the geolocal services. If I knew there were hundreds of deals available to me at the places I regularly visit, or at their competitors, or nearby, I would use that app to a much greater extent.

For example, knowing that it's lunchtime, and that I'm mobile, and that I usually go out for Vietnamese, show me places nearby that are open, that people love, that friends are at (ideally), and that have special deals right now.

Btw, it's pretty easy to sell the business on getting involved when you offer to provided aggregated user data back to them (e.g., how many times people are checking in there, or at competitors, or nearby). This would be a natural for Yelp to do, but their geolocal service is terrible. Hey Gowalla, give up on the tour guides and doubledown here. Don't let anyone else own this. Partner with folks like MerchantCircle (disclaimer: I'm an advisor) to get access to deep micro-level local content.

Leading: Big Fat Nobody. Foursquare seems to have more traction here, but not sure that means anything right now. MyTown has local ads, which is a no-brainer, but only the beginning.

4) Make the social aspect more social.

Social is important because it's what separates these services from static review-based directories. I've met up with friends via Foursquare (airports are popular places), but it's truly serendipitous. They're all good at showing you when people were recently there, but make it tough to actually connect with each other if you're not there at the exact moment. For example, if my buddy Dave Shen (Foursquare King) was at SFO, but then went into the Admirals Lounge, it'd be great to know that when I check in at SFO (e.g., show that he was just at SFO, but then went to Admirals Lounge, which is really close). There's not really a privacy issue since we've already agreed to share this info, so make it happen.

Gowalla lets you collect and leave things for people, which is an interesting game concept, taking a page from geocaching, but is far from social. A better approach would be to turn this into gifts that you can leave for specific friends the next time they check in or if they go somewhere else. Or what if you got advanced and were able to buy real things at stores for them to pick up when they checked in (e.g., I"m thinking about buying drinks for someone I see checked in at the same place). A little bold, but certainly more social.

Google Voice/Buzz does this nicely by overlaying friends information on a map. Not bad, but when nobody is using it, it doesn't mean much.

Leading: Foursquare, but only because they seem to have the best adoption with social networks. You gotta have the people. I think Facebook wins this when its stuff debuts unless one of the start-ups invests here.

5) Help me organize.

This may be hard to do until there's greater adoption, but I wish there were a way to better organize groups of people. Most of the social interactions are one to one. But it would be cool to see that right now, five of my friends are within a 2 mile radius. If I then wanted to invite them all to join me at a local bar, and instantly send out that invitation, that could be very powerful. Especially useful, when I can tell a business, hey, I'm bringing a mini mob to your location, can you comp me some drinks as a thank you? Think of it as an instantaneous Evite. Google Latitude wants to do this, but no adoption...

6) Use gaming elements wisely.

Gaming mechanics are tricky. The core geolocal startups all use them. MyTown uses the most because they fully admit they're a game. It's working for them. Foursquare sticks with badges, and a twist on leaderboards (mayorships). That seems to work well with early adopters, and giving some nice rewards for newbies. But it doesn't go very far, and how many badges can you earn before the concept has depreciating returns? There's really little other gaming mechanic.

I wrote about Gowalla's collecting concept, which I don't really see how that's driving return visits and engagement. Seems very random.

The gaming mechanics have to be well aligned with the incentives and value proposition. For Foursquare, perhaps what they've done is enough in terms of avoiding becoming a game. But given the incredibly high level of user activity that MyTown seems to have, I think most of the services could benefit from going further with gaming elements, as long as they serve the user and advance the experience.

7) Leverage alerts better.

Admittedly, this is a little hard to get right, but I would love to be able to get alerts when my friends are close by, and be able to invite them to join me. I get alerts when they check-in, but only right when they do it. Not especially conducive for setting up chance meetings. Also, it's really hard to discover local deals on all these services. Why not turn on a Roam feature, which pings me as I approach businesses that are offering deals? Or where the business has announced something special (e.g., like happy hour, or a lunch special, etc.).

8) Provide filters

So I just suggested a couple ideas that would surely increase the noise. Now, you need to provide the tools that let me dial in relevance a little easier. I'm a very noisy person on Foursquare, with all of my check-ins. I know that's annoying. Especially since I decided to turn off alerts altogether. Yes, I know I'm a hypocrite. I ping everyone, but refuse to be pinged. But if there were filters that let me control the kind of alerts, and from which people, then I'd turn them back on. Don't turn into Twitter, geolocal services, which can easily become a wasteland of check-in alerts that turn everyone off from using the service altogether.

9) Continue to delight with discovery.

I wish these services did more with the joy of discovery in the local space. There are so many fun things they can do, helping me connect with interesting businesses, people and local information. Gowalla does a good job of this, and it's one of the things I really like about the service. No one else is really touching it yet, but I think there's something there. With the right balance of alerts, local content and a dash of serendipity, these services can become powerful guides to a local experience.

10) Improve performance and user experience.

All of these services are way too frickin slow. Slow to get to load the app (OK, blame iPhone for some of this), slow to get to a check-in button, slow to refresh local business data, slow to respond to clicks.

Do you hear me Google Buzz? Could you possibly bury the ability to check in any further in your iPhone app (I know, Steve's not playing fair, but still). It's not just my phone, as I've seen this on others. You have to make it brain-dead simple to check-in. Also, the user experiences are pretty sterile. Gowalla is fairly elegant, although perhaps not the most efficient. Foursquare finally improved their experience. Yelp is terrible, and makes it clear that this concept is totally a bolt-on. MyTown has a pretty generic experience, but the sounds and clicks are easy and actually fun (sound effects!). They're at least making some strides to make it more entertaining.

Btw, good job Foursquare on becoming stricter on actually being at a location to check-in, but your tweaks have pushed my favorite check-ins way down the list, or sometimes it's a little flaky at recognizing that I'm even at a venue. More tweaks to come, I'm sure.

Finally, I'm getting check-in fatigue. I can't check in on all of you. Check.in is an iPhone app that tries to aggregate check-ins across all of them, but their database is so terrible, that it doesn't provide value yet. But they get it. I can't do it on all of the services. Make it easy and fast for me to do so, and you'll already be ahead of the game.

google buzz and some ideas to give it some more sting

the internet is too noisy.

with twitter belching out bazillions of useless, irrelevant tweets. with facebook lifestreams overrun with useless notifications about leveling up in mafiafarm. with thousands of irrelevant search results cluttering my path to action. in some ways, perhaps the internet is more inefficient than ever. less useful than before.  that's debatable.

 you have to give credit to google buzz for trying to tackle this problem in focusing on how to help you get more relevant information from your social network. when i worked with some great yahoos to anticipate and tackle this issue with yahoo 360 in 2005, we thought that by helping you filter lifestream content, news and people based upon your relationship, we could reduce the clutter. e.g., show me stuff only from my co-workers, or my family, or people who are single and interested in dating, for example. facebook and google buzz have later incorporated these concepts well in different ways.

but the overall problem really isn't solved in any of these implementations, although it's certainly better managed than before. the issue is that you can't easily discern the value of a publisher's content based on your relationship to your publisher. for example, just because you're my best friend, doesn't mean i want my newsfeed cluttered with all your crappy foursquare badge announcements. (btw, i humbly apologize to all my friends who have been subjected to this by me; unfortunately, they've removed me as a friend already and won't see my apology :) ). if i just mute you, or mute the application, i might miss something that is really valuable: e.g., the foursquare news alert that you're in my area, or that you have something really important family news to share.

both fb and goog try to also showcase content based upon how your network is reacting to that content. e.g., it'll show you a post higher up if a bunch of friends have talked about it. but the problem still exists. e.g., i earn a badge that is banal and the news gets autoposted, five "friends" (or people who are mere acquaintances) reply that "foursquare sucks" and suddenly the post is at the top of my list because it appears to be "important".

how do you tackle that problem? well, i have some ideas below, among a bunch of other suggestions that maybe will help google buzz, and yahoo buzz and facebook for that matter...  it's always easy to throw these out there when you don't know the rationale or factors a product team is facing, so cut them some slack. :) btw, there is a lot more just general buzz feedback below ... the noise problem is an ongoing one that maybe i'll dedicate another full post in examining.

(also, i'm not going to focus anything on the goog criticism for how it rolled the product out. they were aggressive, they got feedback. they responded quickly. that's what you're supposed to do. that's why we don't work at IBM. kudos for taking a chance.)

buzz organization

1. it's still noisy. if i have a talkative friend, they dominate my feed. if i mute them, i miss good content. what if you let the user help set the priority level? think email. the sender can say whether it's high priority, low priority, confidential, etc. what if a sender could say "announcement" or "trivial" or whatever to help provide context? not 100% effective, but it's another tool. i'm not sure how the "like" feature is used, but i'm hoping if a user earns more "likes" that it is a factor in determining the user's relevance and importance typically in a post.

2. show me most recent. i don't get why this simple sort isn't there. i'm required to view the newsfeed in google by what's determined to be the most important/relevant. if i'm a habitual user, i'm going to want to see the latest posts, not just the ones that goog deems to be important. maybe it's there, and i'm just missing it.

3. the power of groups. i love the ability to publish posts to specific groups, but i'd like to be able to filter my lists by groups, too. eg., show me only posts from coworkers right now.

4. search better not broader. why must Search search all of buzz? e.g., i just want to see posts from my network about google. when i type "American Idol" into buzz search, i get the entire population's results. irrelevant in this case. make it a search option.

buzz content

5. hello, is anybody here? i think this is perhaps the most critical challenge right now. smart move to integrate buzz first into a google front door (e.g., gmail) vs having it launch as a standalone. you need to be somewhere where people spend a lot of time. the problem is, all my 650 friends are spending time on facebook. the 2,000+ people in my google contacts list, (who are the backbone of buzz) are not posting to buzz, and aren't motivated to do so. so my buzz feed is filled with posts from heidi perry. :) (i love heidi, but i know she doesn't want to dominate my feed either). options? some ideas on this problem below:

6. help me find RELEVANT people and content more easily. search profiles better, allow hashtags (or some other tagging model). offer suggestions based upon what i'm talking about or what's in my lifestream already.

7. allow buzz reactions at a wider level of product integrations. i should be able to buzz search results, buzz youtube videos buzz blogger posts, etc. from WITHIN those verticals directly, not from within buzz, which is the current problem (maybe later when more people use buzz the problem will be different). i'm sure the ShareThis people are going to have this integration when the Buzz API is revealed, speaking of...

8. where's the API? ok, it hasn't even been a month, but as a content developer, i want that buzz api so i can make it easy to post my app content to buzz. then again, isn't this where zynga stepped in and ruined all the fun? better make it easier for readers to control their views of what publishers say. maybe give publishers categories of posts to assist them in getting relevant posts into the stream.

buzz design

9. can you put some life into my lifestream? for something that showcases personal content and posts, the product sure feels sterile. taking out the pictures of the commenters really seems to take away the visual punch. instead, i just get a bunch of (yawn) nicely formatted Arial characters. why not let people customize this? highlight in blue whenever people in my "Friends" group comment or post? you don't have to get all myspace on it, but take off the dental hygienist gloves, will ya?

10. increase the volume. the design is clean, but not necessarily efficient. i count 1 - 1.5 google buzz posts top of fold in gmail compared to facebook's 3-5. i loathe scrolling. btw, thanks for collapsing the multiple posts in my feed, but the little drop box denoting this wastes vertical space.

11. you really going to ask me to change my online behavior in order to buzz? i know it's early, but forcing me to go to gmail to buzz and interact forces me to establish it as a front door to my online experience, and frankly, it's not. i use gmail. it's not my home. address this by putting buzz interaction points throughout google and beyond its primary-color walls (can't wait to see it in chrome)

buzz collaboration

12. is there an easier way to collaborate? i read that sergei used buzz to write an op-ed piece. cool that he asked for feedback, and i'm guessing that he went back and edited the post based on that feedback. it still seems a little stilted, especially within the confines of the buzz design, in order to do this. why not let an author give permission to people to edit the post directly? isn't that truly collaboration?

13. async vs sync. these platforms are inherently asynchronous, but only by design. seems that, especially with gtalk integration, it should be made easier for participants to move an async conversation to real-time. perhaps this is already enabled, and it was just hard for me to see it given my network.

14. index everything. ok, easy for me to say this to google, but if i were a startup, and i wanted to juice things, i would make every single fricking post a separate indexable page (think blip.fm for music posts). this is relevant to collaboration because it allows posts to take on a life of their own, even if it's a limited a life. something i can go back to, revise, edit, research and move ahead. i really wish my newsfeed were permanent.

buzz community

15. incent me to participate and reap those rewards. newsfeeds are frequently about social capital exchanges, especially for the publishers and influencers. incent me to participate. use social gaming mechanics. let my profile highlight the fact that i'm vociferous, or that i have a lot of positive feedback from readers, or that i frequently post on "x" categories. all information that i can then re-use to filter my buzz experience to be more relevant.

16. encourage passive users to participate longer or become active. nothing wrong with being a lurker, but often it's only because that person is waiting for the right content to react to. make it easier for a passive user to rate/categorize content (an easy first step to participation), and then perhaps highlight relevant content to react to (e.g., i've indicated an interest in skiing from my interests, whom i follow, etc., so highlight some potentially relevant content based on this that i might want to react to)

17. geolocal. i'm a superfan of LBS, and i really dig the Google Voice, Maps and Buzz integration, but it's in its infancy. i think there's a ton of potential here (just calling it out; not super-interested in ripping it up knowing it has a ways to go).

ok i'm tired of typing, and you're tired of reading. check out buzz if you haven't and if you're interested in this stuff. will be neat to see where they go next with it. i'm always glad to see google advance a product it has built from scratch (instead of bought).

(btw, posterous, it totally drives me nuts that you don't allow a basic photo upload tool from your webpost mechanism. i know you love email, but give people some basic options for the love of pete.)

5 ways google health could be better

I tweeted over the weekend about how I wondered whether Google Health was completely useless, or just partially useless. Well, someone asked why, and since Twitter only gives you 140 characters to respond, I thought I'd write a really really quick post on the topic to respond back. I just picked 5 from the top of my head, but if I had more than 10 minutes, I could probably easily come up with 50.

The whole reason for this is that I worked on taxes over the weekend, and it took me several hours to go through all our medical bills, itemizations, and health insurance paperwork. We're parents of a special-needs child, and we spend a lot more time with the health care industry than I'd wish on anyone, so maybe we have a unique perspective (although the more I learn, sadly, not so unique). In short, the health care industry is kind of jacked, so it feels like there's room to innovate. Yeah, I know Steve Case and Doug Hirsch are probably smirking since they both ran startups that tried to tackle this, nevertheless, work with what you've got, right?

1) Physicians Index. Yeah, thanks for the link to Google Yellow Pages. Why not leverage your community better? Can't someone make an Angie's List for physicians? I'd pay $100/year for the best recommendations/reviews on everyone in the medical community, as written by patients. I know Goog has a link to some reviews, but mostly not, and they're buried, and they're not relevant. Five stars and a description doesn't cut it. Why not rate on quality, time waiting, expertise, bedside manner, etc? Sure, you don't always want to rely 100% on cardiothoracic referrals from the same guy who reviewed the donut shop down the street, but right now there's an absence of community reviews out there. If I wanted the Yellow Pages, I'd use the Yellow Pages. Even better, look at my medical info I've submitted, and make suggestions. Also, know my schedule (leverage Calendar data) and suggest professionals that can accommodate my schedule better. Finally, can't you learn my health care provider or insurance preferences and then refine the searches? Apply just 5% of your search juice prowess to this site. Ta-da, now you're better than Yellow Pages.

2) Create a Contact. Really? You want me to make a pseudo address book for you? Why does this create value for me? Why not store information on billing, or provide a better mechanism for medical providers to provide contact info or other details other than what's generically available? (Maybe that exists, but I can't see it since I'm not a provider). At minimum, why don't you let me store billing information here? See #3)

3) Lack of Billing/Claim Information. Ok, i get it. The whole thing about the health care industry is that the information is hard to get. It's not universally stored, nevermind consistently online. That's tough. So why don't you do something about it, at minimum putting in the hands of users? Look at Mint.com. Crap, that site is just beautiful in how it aggregates account information, and stores it in a meaningful way that is easy to parse. Can't I give you my login information, and let you scrape the data from the major providers? No? What if I uploaded claims forms to you? (PDF/Doc scanners?) Not that? What if I emailed my receipts/claims to you (e.g., TripIt style).  Still no good? Crap, just give me a web form where I can type in the details myself. Link to provider, treatment, claim status, oh and let me link to my HSA/FSA accounts, too, since there's a good chance I'm sending requests for pre-tax reimbursement, too. You let me do that, then bingo, I now have a reason to fill out your Create a Contact. Also, you can begin to infer payment data as to how well insurance companies reimburse for what treatments, and how fast (holy crap, that'd be totally useful information that I'd be willing to pay for in suggestion #1). Finally, let me export/track data in aggregate easily at tax time so I don't waste a bunch of hours doing it myself.

4) Why Am I Working So Hard? I love what you're trying to do by getting me to write up my complete medical history (good luck with that one), but can't you make that an easier experience? What about a "medical interview" where you're doing a Q & A style analysis? Something that guides me through the process? Or what if you made it progressive? Everyday, email me a question, or when I log into Google, ask me one more thing to help fill that out, because looking at it right now, I ain't got time for the pain of filling out all those forms. If you're going to still do it the hard way, at least make it easier and more convenient for me. Think about Lose It on the iPhone. Great app, and easy to access as I eat and exercise (or not).

5) Where's the Love? In case you missed it, one of the biggest parts of a health site has to be the community. OK, I'm biased because I run community sites, but search Google Groups, Yahoo Groups, and look at the success of Daily Strength (go ask Brandon Long who built those first two things -- he gets it). They thrive because of the people in there. Managing your health sucks. The community helps it suck less. Suggest communities for me to join based upon what I tell you. Make that a bigger part of your experience, because while I'm not going to tell you my latest asthma symptom each day, I am instead very likely to log in every day to see what my Parents of Autistic Children support group has to say about what treatments they're finding successful, and how they're coping through the day. While I'm there, maybe I'll help build the other stuff. Btw, I know Marissa loves plain-white design, but could you do anything to make your service feel less like a tool, and more like a place I can build a relationship with? You're asking me to give you very personal information. Don't make me feel like I'm in the doctor's office filling out forms next to some guy with whooping cough. Actually, if you could do that, it could be kinda funny.

Notice that I didn't rip on y'all for not getting significant medical providers signed up for Google Health to transfer medical records. I totally get how hard that is. But while you're focusing so much on trying to solve that problem, you're neglecting to do something today that you could easily have a major impact on the people you serve. You could do this in about 4-6 weeks I think. Don't have the time? Ok, find some team and pay them $100K, because hell, that's the most it should take.