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.
Seve
n 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.
