Too Square For Foursquare?

There’s an awful lot of excitement about Foursquare, a mobile social media service that lets you share and broadcast your location. Based on your activity, you badges and can become the mayor of a particular location (e.g. Starbucks) by visiting it more often than other Foursquare users.

After being scolded by Robert Scoble recently for not getting Foursquare, I decided to try it out. Although my test was fairly brief, it didn’t take long to realize Foursquare isn’t my cup of tea. While I can certainly see the appeal for some people, the idea of broadcasting my location doesn’t feel right. In fact, it makes me think of George Orwell’s “1984″ as opposed to feeling that I’m on the cutting edge of social media activity.

Hey, we’re living in a world where we’re increasingly sharing more of what we do, think, see and eat but where does it end? For me, Twitter and my blogs are the tools to share things. At the same time, I like the idea of other people not exactly knowing where I’m located and what I’m doing.

Sure, you have to submit your location to Foursquare so it’s not like your mobile device is broadcast beacon. And I get that some (many?) people may like the idea of being able to tell friends where they are and what they’re doing so they can easily connect but there are other ways to do it – Twitter and Facebook.

My lack of interest in Foursquare may be off-base, and I may be overly concerned about my privacy or the amount of information that really needs to be shared with other people, but my spider-sense tingles when it comes to the service.

Is it just me or does Foursquare not resonate with other people? Am I missing something?

via www.markevanstech.com

Unlike Mark, I am perfectly happy to share my geoloco publicly: hell, I am Mr Publicy.

But I don’t like Foursquare’s game aspect: becoming the mayor of a diner or bar doesn’t move me much.

I was once in a geoloco deathmatch with Joi Ito in the dim dark days of Plazes, when we were tagging wifi spots. Maybe that’s what burned me out to the game side of geoloco.

And I similarly don’t click with Gowalla.

I use BrightKite fitfully, but it’s too heavyweight, with yet another social network, blogging platform, photos, etc.

What I would really like to see is something tightly reliant on my Twitter network, that would let me simply post my geolocation and people could find out where I was by looking at a map page. I may hack something kludgey, like a short URL to a google maps page. Since I have the sto.ly domain sort of working through bit.ly, that should be easy enough.

8 January 2010 Permalink

Newspaper site reformation 1.1

This is dumb. Why can’t I join more than one regional network on Facebook? Another reason why groupings (ad hoc collections of people based on shared attributes) are better than groups (defined, membership-based collections of people).

18 June 2007 Permalink

Serendipity 2.0: going fulltime on Dopplr

The folks at Dopplr, who I have not spoken to directly, have apparently built the ‘ships passing in the night’ app that I have cried out for for years (see here, for example).

The premise is simple, plug in your travel schedule, and a bunch of traveling fools as your social network, and bingo: you will know who is going to be in some time (or your home town) when you are.

The interface is clean and simple.

Above you see a list of my trips. Note that I can’t seem to be able to access the RSS feed. Might be a polling interval issue. Dopplr supports iCal subscription from calendar apps.

Above you see my (tiny) set of pals. At the moment, only Petteri, from Jaiku. He invited me to Dopplr. And he’s boring, since he isn’t traveling in the near term, although I just met him, here in San Francisco, the other day.

If you click on a specific place, you see a page like this:

I didn’t add a note, yet.

Above you see a prospective map of my travels. And below, the same itineraries arrayed in a timeline view:

This last view shows one of the snags, I think. The app seems very day focused: I can’t seem to be able to state the time of day that I will arrive somewhere, and that is critical if you are planning to meet for lunch or dinner.

I love the feel of the app, but I will have to wait for a few dozen friends to get into the beta before I can get the feel of it’s actual social usage patterns.

And of course, I need the RSS feed to work. So, I am replacing my old timeline, built using 30boxes, with Dopplr, as soon as the RSS is up.

One last note. Dopplr creates a fuzzy version of your photo to display in a public page. Here’s the stoweboyd page:

It doesn’t look to me like the public page can be disabled at the moment, either.

There is an SMS interface to Dopplr, but you have to text a +44 number, and I decided to wait until they have a US SMS number set up.

More to follow.

27 April 2007 Permalink

Stowe Boyd Gets Direction

The nice folks at Nokia shipped me some new toys to fool with, one of which distinguished itself immediately as something I’d like to keep in my kit forever: a bluetooth-enabled GPS unit, designated the LD-1W.

I have a real interest in geoloco apps — like Plazes.com — but without a GPS unit, I have been unable to actually determine my lat long coordinates, except through various laborious online tools that translate street addresses. Fine, so long as you know where you are. And of course, any sort of GPS directions application requires a GPS gizmo.

So I installed a trial of Wayfinder software onto a Nokia N90, and tried connecting to the device. Seemed to work, but no dice. Then I remembered (duh!) that the GPS unit needs to be outdoors to communicate with the satellites it uses to determine coordinates on the Earth. I wandered down the street, and captured this screenshot.

[Getting the picture posed small problems: had to use a second camera phone to take th epicture, and of course the day was intensely bright. I had to step under a tree to take the photo, and even then the glare made it next to impossible.]

There doesn’t seem to be an integration of the GPS data into the Nokia Lifeblog software, but that would be a cool option: tag stamping blog posts from the phone, whether photos, video, or text, with lat and long.

15 February 2006 Permalink

First Take: Rrove

While in San Francisco last week, I met with David Quiec, who gave me the rundown on his startup Web 2.0 company, called Rrove.

Rrove (pronounced “rove”) is a mashup leveraging the various map solutions, like Google’s. Using a bookmarklet — once you’ve created an account — you can save locations found on Google, Yahoo, Mapquest, and MSN, and then post ratings, comments, and tags on those saved locations. Then they can be managed and shared with others all in one place. This solves the problem of trying to remember which service you used for some location, and of course, makes it social, since you can look through the comments of those in your network (‘community’ at Rrrove), to see what’s a good choice for lunch in the Fillmore district, or a hotel in Soho.

Here’s a screenshow showing a specific location’s reviews by two users. Note the ‘find nearby places’:

The tags thrown on locations can lead to a simple approach to finding what you’re after, although I think they need to support set operations (union of all locations tagged “sushi”, “san francisco” and rated 4 or higher by someone I know, for example) or users will be swamped with too many hits.

Creating a community seems straightforward: you add users to your network. But in fact, the obvious hook — making users’ names linked to a profile that includes an ‘add to community’ button — is absent. This has to get fixed. They do make it easy to delete people, thank god.

Currently, no mashup with Flickr or Plazes, but that seems an obvious direction: pulling pictures from geotagged pictures in these services, for example.

All in all, a cool geoloco app. I am planning to use it for a few weeks, at least, and see what updates they put in place. I know that David walked away with a long list of things to consider from our conversation: RSS, blog javascript widgets, and so on. Enough for weeks of work! That will teach him to have a coffee with me.

29 January 2006 Permalink