Services like Foursquare , Gowalla and others make it easy to post your physical location to the web – but what makes people want to do that at all? Fifteen-month old Foursquare is adding 100,000 new users every week and Facebook has made it clear that location is a feature it is preparing to offer soon . What’s the motivation for users to register online where in the off-line world they are? We asked some users of these services and found that they had varied and interesting answers. Sponsor Service May Vary Of course location services vary widely in nature. Nick Bicanic’s startup EchoEcho , for example, is a very discrete service for letting one friend know where you are at a time, emphasizing extreme ease of use. OK Magazine’s new celebrity stalking location app might represent the other end of the spectrum. Most people who shared their experiences with us were using one of the big social location apps: Foursquare, Gowalla, Google Latitude or BrightKite. Real world businesses are starting to make interesting use of these services (here’s one list of twenty one different examples ). The types of places users check in to are somewhat diverse, too. Though the stereotype of Foursquare users as youthful bar-hoppers is largely confirmed by the numbers. According to a data visualization by the independent group BitsyBot Labs , bar check-ins on the service beat out check-ins at places of education and parks almost all last week. Bars were about equal with the arts and entertainment category. Food and shopping reign supreme, but on most days travel tops drinking, too. Those numbers tell you something about aggregate activities, but why do individuals participate in this in the first place? It’s emotional – and it’s different for different people. Will location apps become far more popular once mobile coupons become ubiquitous and people can save money by using such services? Maybe, but there are clearly other types of incentives already available. Serendipity and Connection San Francisco entrepreneur Pat Diven uses location based social networks for probably the best-known reason, and in the types of circumstances you might expect. He’s checked in on Foursquare more than four hundred times, including at the bloggers’ event WordCamp, more than three times at an Apple store and at more than twenty different pizza places. His Plancast account, where he records not where he is – but where he will be – indicates that he’s the kind of guy who likes both big tech conferences and things like camping in Big Sur or beer and music parties in the countryside. “I use location for chance meetups with people I know in the city,” he said last Friday afternoon, via a Twitter client on his phone. “It’s worked a few times.” Diven also raised a common concern, articulated as a sophisticated social network user might: “Hoping for more granular control soon!” He’s a good example of an active person, who both exposes a lot of their activity publicly and has entirely private accounts on other services. Diven exposes enough, though, that I was able to see a lot of information about what he likes to do just by looking around online – I didn’t speak to him for this article beyond trading a single Tweet. He’s been doing this for long enough (his Twitter account is more than three years old) that he’s sure to have decided that a certain amount of public exposure was worth it to him. Cambridge-based experimental tech CEO Shava Nerad is on the other side of the country and has a different take on the use of location apps to connect with other people. She says for her it’s simple. “I have friends who work in coffee shops and we like to spontaneously clump to co-work,” she said by iPhone early Saturday evening. “The rest doesn’t matter to me.” Nerad’s public Foursquare history is much tamer than many peoples’ – though she did once win a badge for checking in after 3am on a week night, so apparently it’s not all about working. Portland, Oregon consultant Mike M. says he uses location services to track people more than to meet them. His son works in Emergency Medical Services and he keeps an eye on him using Google’s service Latitude , “hoping he stays safe.” (I called him Mr. M. just because I don’t want to see his kid get in trouble.) Location apps for tracking people around medical matters? That kind of thing makes many people take pause. Some of the same types of tracking technology is being incorporated into medicine and is in many cases causing a substantial reconsideration of patient privacy. In the consumer world, it’s different. I showed my dental hygienist last week who else was checked in to the dentist’s office on Foursquare at the same time I was and her first reaction was concern about HIPPA. She decided that no one could stop the patients themselves from exposing their own location, she just couldn’t confirm to me whether or not she actually knew who those people were. Much more straight-forward, in the people connection department, was my wife’s comment left on Facebook last week when she got home and I was gone. I had checked in to a coffee shop, pushed the update from Foursquare to Facebook and she commented “there you are! I was wondering where you went.” Be it for chance or as an exercise in caution, the uses of location services for tracking other people are just beginning to become clear. For the Win Many of the popular location based social networks present themselves as games. They give points to users for going to new or multiple places, then tally the points up against the user’s friends. Does that really motivate people to check in? Does it motivate people to go more or different places? Apparently, it does. New York City author, social media consultant and mom Tamar Weinberg says “people disagree with the concept of badges, but I think it’s fun to chase after new opportunity & status.” Hutch Carpenter, almost Weinberg’s exact opposite as an enterprise engineering platform executive in San Francisco, and a dad, says he sees it that way too. “I second that,” he said of Weinberg’s explanation. That ethos of location-based public achievement may go trans-generational, too. Carpenter checked in on Foursquare at Toy Story 3 this Saturday, said it was his six year old son’s first trip to a movie theatre, and pushed the update to Twitter . This game play isn’t necessarily about narcissism. Virginia-based developer Alex Stone , who says he’s made several friends because of Foursquare, says of competing service Gowalla that “[its] quest for items and trip pins has led me to discover some really cool spots in my own small town.” As a Personal History The thing that surprised me most when I asked people why they use location based social networks is how many of them say they use it primarily for their own tracking of their personal history. It’s a lazy diary, people say. I thought, naively, that I was the only one who felt that way. Some people say they use it to help with their expense tracking on business travels. Buffalo, NY web developer Adrian Roselli told me Friday that he started using BrightKite “so I could post photos in real-time while traveling and associating each with locations on maps.” He says he publishes the RSS feed of his check-in history to a map he can view later, to trace his route. That’s really geeky, but according to his check-ins Roselli spent Friday night having desert with a woman and Saturday morning on a charity bike ride. So apparently – you can push a check-in feed to a map and still maintain some connection to the kinds of things that normal people do. Several people told me they are doing technical things like that with their check-in histories, for self-awareness. When I went to New York with my wife earlier this month, she grew very tired of me pulling out my phone to check-in everywhere we went. But once we got home she admitted it was nice to be able to scroll back through the updates to Facebook I published and remember all the places we had been. Or, as Palo Alto’s Spencer Schoeben told me this week-end, “I love looking back at my check-in history and remembering the awesome things I’ve done.” Schoeben is a 16-year old founder of one startup company and CEO of another, so he’s recording a busy young man’s history with those check ins. Schoeben has reason to be proud of his accomplishments – and maybe we all do. The one rational for checking in that no one I talked to claimed for themselves – but that one very perceptive person quietly told me was probably more common than not – was showing off. “To non-explicitly brag about your coolness and/or importance, based on where you eat, drink, work, and travel.” That makes sense to me. Heck, I’ll own it myself, to some degree. Did I feel a little cool when I checked in at Manhattan’s underground ping pong venue and bar called SpinNY and wrote “Crazy place, ping pong balls flying everywhere, hitting me while I drink beer and blog.” Yeah, I did. Was I aware of what I was doing the next weekend when I checked in to two Mid Century Modern furniture stores in a row? Yes, throw me to the type of piranhas that eat people like me! I was aware of what I was doing. There are clearly many different reasons people use location based social networks. Many of us use them for several different reasons ourselves, at different times. There are of course other sides of the story, ranging from the very serious to the somewhat serious – Dan Tynan wrote this weekend at IT World about why you should consider not participating in these kinds of services. Tynan writes a blog called Thank You For Not Sharing , which says it includes “a fair amount of whining.” (It’s really quite funny.) Presuming you’re fully informed (though that’s another matter) then whether these services are for you comes down largely to your circumstances and your attitude. They aren’t for everyone. But they are a good experience for some people, as the stories above illustrate. If you’ve ever wondered why on earth someone would use a service like this – that’s why. Discuss

Click here to read more

The Exceptional Performance crew at Yahoo has launched ” Boomerang .” “Boomerang is a piece of Javascript that you add to your web pages, where it measures the performance of your website from your end user’s point of view. It has the ability to send this data back to your server for further analysis. With Boomerang, you find out exactly how fast your users think your site is.” Sponsor Lovingly hand-crafted with the assistance of the Yahoo Developer Network , the EP team thinks that Boomerang will help reduce the disconnect between push and pull. When we launch a site or write a blog or anything else online, a combination of our experience and expectations give us a sense of how our site will be used. The problem is, nobody is free of the chains of their own objectivity. If you’re an intuitive person, or someone with a very strong point of view, stats can be either a harsh corrective or a pleasant affirmation of your gut feelings. Boomerang hopes to help you see your site from the end-user’s point of view. Among the uses of Boomerang, the team has listed these possible measurements. + A page’s perceived performance – it takes into account the moments at which a page becomes usable for a reader + Perceived performance of dynamic pages + User bandwidth + Component load time + Network latency Boomerang API is downloadable here. Boomerang’s github pag e is here. Knock yourselves out you crazy kids. Discuss

Click here to read more

In a TED talk earlier this year in Edmonton, serial entrepreneur Cameron Herold tackles a subject that we’ve written about here on ReadWriteStart before : how to raise the next generation of entrepreneurs and how to foster a culture that encourages startups. Herold wants to see parents and schools nurture entrepreneurial traits, traits like tenacity, leadership, introspection, networking, and sales. “We miss an opportunity to find kids that have entrepreneurial traits,” says Herold, “and to show them that being an entrepreneur is a cool thing.” Sponsor In his talk, Herold rails against the school system for grooming kids for “good jobs,” but not promoting entrepreneurship as a viable career option. And while that’s not a new argument , Herold’s talk goes one step farther and invokes a troubling dichotomy: that you’re either a student or you’re an entrepreneur. Arguing that entrepreneurs tend to be poor students and suffer from ADD and bipolar disorders, Herold seems to posit a choice that young kids must take: a path of education or one of entrepreneurship. What we do, says Herold, is give kids Ritalin to force them into a specific type: “Don’t be an entrepreneur, be a student.” But what his argument also suggests, perhaps, is that kids who struggle in school don’t need help, they just need a good business opportunity. The video is embedded below. What do you think? Discuss

Click here to read more

According to a report by SMobile Systems , entitled ” Threat Analysis of the Android Market ,” Google allows one-fifth of its Android applications to access private data that could be used for malicious purposes. Surveying 48,694 Android applications, or 68% of currently available apps, 29 were additionally found to request information from the user that have been well-documented as fitting the profile of known spyware. Sponsor Open access to the Android by developer talent and the openness of the system to manipulation are currently balanced. Here are some additional findings. “A full eight applications explicitly request a specific permission that would allow the device to brick itself, or render it absolutely unusable. 383 applications were found to have the ability to read or use the authentication credentials from another service or application. Finally, 3% of all of the Market submissions that have been analyzed could allow an application to send unknown premium SMS messages without the user’s interaction or authorization.” How can a company that relies on reliability allow so many potentially screwy apps access to its customers? That’s the price of openness. ” The Android Market offers the ability for developers to create any application they choose with the community regulating whether the application is appropriate and safe, as opposed to relying on a formal screening process….The Android Market offers flexibility that markets such as the Apple App Store do not by allowing anyone to develop and publish an application to the Market’s consumers. This presents the opportunity to easily defraud innocent consumers for financial gain.” Whether the freedom is worth the risk is currently being answered by users and by advertisers. But another question users, and Google itself might ask, is how a system like the Android Market might be kept open but made safer. Discuss

Click here to read more

Last week on his blog, Ben Horowitz of Andreessen Horowitz diagnosed ” Second Startup Syndrome ,” a condition that many successful entrepreneurs often suffer from. Second Startup Syndrome, says Horowitz, can derail entrepreneurs as they move from one successful startup to founding their next company. Second Startup Syndrome places too much emphasis on business models and not enough on developing the core product, says Horowitz. The company glosses over important details “assuming that what worked the first time will automagically work the second time.” Sponsor But even without suffering from Second Startup Syndrome, a second startup can simply fail to get off the ground. Markets, technologies can quickly change. Past Results Not Indicative of Future Performance Such was the case with Jeff Ready’s company Volt Capital. Ready had planned for Volt Capital to take advantage of some of the natural language processing technology of his past company Corvigo, a successful anti-spam service that he’d just founded and sold. Volt Capital was designed to be a hedge fund, utilizing some of the AI expertise to analyze the stock market. But due to a combination of factors – even before the economy took a nosedive – Volt Capital never got off the ground. Ready was stuck with a major technology investment that he used to successful launch his most recent company, Scale Computing , a data storage service. Volt Capital had built a supercomputer in order to store and process the information it would receive daily from the markets — around 40-60 GB per day. At first, says Ready, he and his business partners thought they would use this hardware to start a virtualization service. After all, VMWare had just gone public and it seemed a good market. But as Ready started to do some research, he found that he’d be better off working to address a storage, rather than a virtualization, solution. Listen and Learn Although it’s easier, perhaps, to learn from a mistake, Ready says it’s just as important for entrepreneurs to learn from their successes as well. You cannot simply assume that because something worked in one company that it will transfer to another. Evolve your idea “before you write a line of code,” urges Ready. He stresses the importance of doing the right research before your engineers get to work. And while plenty can be found via Google, sometimes it’s best to go to people directly. “Cold calling,” recommends Ready, who picked up the phone himself and surveyed a variety of businesses in order to gauge where to develop his next business. It sounds intimidating, perhaps, but these aren’t sales calls. You’re asking for advice, says Ready, and you can earnestly tell the recipient of your call that it’ll be “the most interesting phone conversation you have that day.” These phone conversations can provide you with a good glimpse into the direction of the industry and into the minds of your potential customers. The conversations can provide powerful anecdotes when you make pitches to investors, adds Ready. And these people make great call-backs when you can offer them beta access to your new product or service. The approach that Ready took with forging the direction for Scale Computing placed a lot of value on being “genuine, candid, and useful.” It seems as though these qualities might be good antidotes to Second Startup Syndrome. Discuss

Click here to read more