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Why We Check In: The Reasons People Use Location Based Social Networks

cgseo — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 14:00:23 +0000

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

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Why We Check In: The Reasons People Use Location Based Social Networks

Yahoo Lets Loose With a Boomerang – Automatic Website Testing

cgseo — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 02:12:00 +0000

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

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Yahoo Lets Loose With a Boomerang – Automatic Website Testing

Education or Entrepreneurship: Do You Have to Make a Choice?

cgseo — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 02:05:04 +0000

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

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Education or Entrepreneurship: Do You Have to Make a Choice?

20% of Android Apps Seize Private Data

cgseo — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 03:32:00 +0000

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

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20% of Android Apps Seize Private Data

Avoiding Second Startup Syndrome

cgseo — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 01:50:20 +0000

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

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Avoiding Second Startup Syndrome

Is Venture Capital Broken?

cgseo — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 22:30:27 +0000

When angel investor Chris Sacca announced the launch of his new investment firm Lowercase Capital on Friday, he positioned the news with a lengthy essay – the firm’s “creed” – titled “Venture Capital is Broken.” In it, Sacca observes that ten years ago, it cost over a million dollars for a tech business to launch, with steep hardware, software, office, and Internet costs, not to mention the “lavish parties so print media would write about their pipe dreams.” Sponsor Lowercase Capital’s Creed But today, it is far easier and far less expensive for entrepreneurs to design, code, and launch web services. But, Sacca writes, “many traditional VC funds have been loath to admit this reality and downsize their five hundred million dollar hauls. Why? They are paid fees based upon their total amount of money managed, thus there is no incentive for them to be smaller. Yet, as they try to inject those piles of money into early stage companies, interests become misaligned and an inherent conflict between the investor and the founder often arises. Fund returns, the companies, the entrepreneurs, and the users all suffer as a result.” Sacca contends that Lowercase Capital recognizes the shift in the tech and investment landscape and that the firm offers more than just investment and money management. “We dive in to work with teams that obsess over user experiences, customer happiness, and that, to quote Paul Graham, ‘make something people want.’ Along with relatively small amounts of money, we give them the time, attention, and the empathy that catalyze winning outcomes for all involved. Rolling up our sleeves, we help design front pages, invent new services, prioritize product features, negotiate partnerships, and deal with the everyday professional and personal challenges of startup life.” Is the VC Model Broken? Discussions about whether or not the VC model is broken have been ongoing for some time, although arguably what constitutes “broken” might different for investors and for entrepreneurs. Late last year, Steven Kaplan of University of Chicago professor and Josh Lerner of Harvard Business School published a study claiming “It Ain’t Broke.” But others in the investment and tech communities continue to argue otherwise. In a video interview with GigaOm last month, entrepreneur/investor Chris Dixon, for example, makes a strong case for a shakeup in the way in which traditional VC funding works. What do you think? Is venture capital broken? And do firms like Sacca’s Lowercase Capital point the way for alternative systems of funding and support for entrepreneurs? Discuss

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Is Venture Capital Broken?

Weekly Wrap-up: Android Steals Market Share, Starbucks Goes Free, Google Earth on iPad, And More…

cgseo — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 13:00:00 +0000

This week’s top story was about that escalating battle we love to watch: Android and iPhone’s fight for market share. We also continued our exploration of the significant Internet trends of 2010: Parliament loves the Internet of Things ; augmented reality leader Layar turns 1; and there’s a dream team quietly gathering behind the real-time Web service SuperFeedr. Read on for more. Sponsor Top Stories of the Week Android Steals Market Share from iPhone Free Wi-Fi is Just a Small Part of Starbucks’ Plan: Free Access to Paid Content Coming Fall 2010 Forrst: Stack Overflow Meets Tumblr Iceland Passes Proposal to Become ‘New Media Haven’ Google Earth on iPad…Wow! More coverage and analysis from ReadWriteWeb Real-Time Web The Dream Team Quietly Gathering Behind Real-Time Service SuperFeedr Love Big Data? Infochimps Have an API Call for That The Dark Figure Of Social Media: What Can Twitter Teach Criminologists? More Real-Time Web coverage . Don’t miss the next wave of opportunity on the Web supported by real-time technology! Get ReadWriteWeb’s report, The Real-Time Web and its Future . Augmented Reality Layar Celebrates 1st Birthday With New Features and Partnerships More Augmented Reality coverage Augmented Reality for Marketers and Developers: Our Newest Research Report We’re pleased to announce ReadWriteWeb’s latest premium report, Augmented Reality for Marketers and Developers: Analysis of the Leaders, the Challenges and the Future . This report will help you develop a sophisticated understanding of Augmented Reality (AR), the mobile and Web technology that places data on top of a user’s view of the physical world. The research included will help you decrease your AR development time to market by learning from the first wave of early adopters. AR offers a new marketing and product paradigm for a high impact, high value customer experience. More than 1,000 AR campaigns were kicked-off last year and we expect to see many more in 2010. In this report, we profile key AR development companies, their campaigns as well as development lessons learned. For more information or to buy the report, visit here . Mobile Web Android Steals Market Share from iPhone Hackers Port Flash to Jailbroken iOS From Your Mouth to a Thousand Ears, New Apps Make Mobile Podcasting Easy More Mobile Web coverage Internet of Things Parliament of Things More Internet of Things coverage Check Out The ReadWriteWeb iPhone App We recently launched the official ReadWriteWeb iPhone app . As well as enabling you to read ReadWriteWeb while on the go or lying on the couch, we’ve made it easy to share ReadWriteWeb posts directly from your iPhone, on Twitter and Facebook. You can also follow the RWW team on Twitter, directly from the app. We invite you to download it now from iTunes . ReadWriteStart Our channel ReadWriteStart , sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark , is dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs. The Startup Toolkit: A Canvas For You to Sketch Your Business Framework Should Startups Worry about Their Company Culture? Y Combinator Hosts a Job Fair for Startups Tomorrow ReadWriteCloud Our channel ReadWriteCloud , sponsored by VMware and Intel, is dedicated to Virtualization and Cloud Computing. Gaming in the Cloud: OnLive Launches Tomorrow Weekly Poll: Is Mailing Your Data to the Cloud the Right Solution? Majority of Tech Experts Think Work Will Be Cloud-Based by 2020, Finds Pew Research Center ReadWriteEnterprise Our channel ReadWriteEnterprise is devoted to ‘enterprise 2.0′ and using social software inside organizations. 5 Ways Google Can Up Its Game Against Office 2010 Jive Bets on the Twitter Firehose and the Data Intensified Social Enterprise Open-Source Social Network Elgg Launching Hosted Service Enjoy your weekend everyone. Subscribe to Weekly Wrap-up You can subscribe to the Weekly Wrap-up by RSS or by email below. RWW Weekly Wrap-up Email Subscription form: Discuss

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Weekly Wrap-up: Android Steals Market Share, Starbucks Goes Free, Google Earth on iPad, And More…

The Dark Figure Of Social Media: What Can Twitter Teach Criminologists?

cgseo — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 19:45:00 +0000

The “Dark Figure of Crime” is not, as one would imagine, a London-fog-bedecked, cloak-and-dagger figure slinking down a shadowy alleyway. It sounds very Hollywood, but “The Dark Figure” is simply a term used by statisticians to describe a crime that goes unreported. Serious and even violent crimes go unreported for a myriad of social, political and personal reasons. What does this have to do with Twitter? Criminologists have for years grappled with that dark figure, and while police science research on social media is in its infancy, the ability to compare official and real-time crowdsourced data could change how we research crime. Sponsor Guest author Laura Madison is the co-founder of the Canadian Association of Police on Social Media. She will be publishing the results of a survey regarding Twitter use by North American and U.K. in the coming weeks. She tweets @org9 and @canadianpolice . Crime that has been reported by victims – a burglary for example – is only a percentage of what is actually occurring in our communities. How do we know? We use what are called social surveys. Some of the survey questions could be: “Have you been the victim of a burglary in the past five years?” and “Did you report it to police?” We then look at the official reported crimes involving burglary and compare that with social survey results. All of this is very interesting but what does this have to do with social media, annotation, metadata and Twitter’s Promoted Tweets? For me as a social scientist on Twitter, there’s an exciting potential for everyone from governments to nonprofits to utilize the power of real-time to hypothesize, design, conduct and finally utilize analytics. If good research design is defined as “the analysis of data in a manner that aims to combine relevance to the research purpose with economy in procedure,” then Twitter’s new promotional platform not only adheres to this principle but advances the potential for rapid-paced and geographically salient research results on just about any topic. Possibilities For Policing Agencies As a criminologist I think a lot about how social media can be utilized in my field and in the field of police sciences. We can study attitudes about crime, fear of crime, urban myths, moral panics, laws, legislation, police services, victim impact, sentencing reform, prison reform and restorative justice. We can look at social media studies and compare them to official crime rates and government social surveys, reports and peer-published research and analysis. We can do research around issues such as the Facebook panic button and other social media applications directed at sex offender detection, and importantly we can elicit responses from those who currently use social media. Policing agencies, for example, could use their annual communications budgets to purchase a number of Promotional Tweets to, for instance, alert the public about a wanted person or request information from targeted geographic population. They could use polls to gauge performance, community perceptions, satisfaction and reform. Then they can use the associated data for back-end analytics and to illustrate what I call user-to-user “resonance chains” that show where their tweets went and who retweeted them, and lay out this info for further proactive planning. For a good example of this in action check out @vpdcanada , @trafficservices and @deputysloly ; a further good source for police information on social media is @cops2point0 . What Must Happen Next With all of the positive out of the way, let’s look at some issues that may need to be addressed before some of what I outlined can come to fruition. I will also introduce some of my ideas for application development. First comes privacy wherein an application that we could build would gather relevant data such as age, location, education level, etc., but would hide identifying information by assigning a code number for those wishing to contribute to social science research. Second, ethically acceptable research policy beings with the establishment of a clear and fair agreement between the investigator/agency and research participant that clarifies the responsibility of both. Professional researchers and agencies may request a release before research is conducted. We could make an application for all sorts of legal and research releases for use on social media, could we not? Third, random sampling is a requirement for many experimental designs. How can we do this on Twitter? Perhaps this can be achieved by the creation of an application that can do random samples or shuffling of willing participants. Fourth, not everyone who may want to purchase promoted Tweets knows how to design an effective 140-character promotion, so how can we assist? Again, create an application or an easy editor/style guide that enriches what Twitter might already have. A Final Note As Twitter rolls out its platform for Promoted Tweets, I encourage my peers and social media scholars to get to know what they look like and begin to imagine new ways this could be harnessed for social change as well as for promotional value. I invite further discussion about these are ideas, and I’m hoping that together through innovation we can make Twitter a socially and scientifically accepted tool with which people can do valid and welcomed research. Photo by georgie_c . Discuss

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The Dark Figure Of Social Media: What Can Twitter Teach Criminologists?

Facebook’s Likable Little Comments Could Be a Big Deal

cgseo — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 19:30:37 +0000

Facebook just announced a new feature that probably should have been obvious for a long time: the ability to “like” comments that people post on Newsfeed items. Users were always able to signal text-free approval of shared items, but now they will be able to offer quick support for subsequent parts of the conversations they see as well. This isn’t threaded comments and it’s not an unlike button – there are many other things that Facebook could do for commenting – but it’s a smart little move that users will find easy to understand and that could lead to some interesting new capabilities for developers. Sponsor Imagine the addition of “people whose comments you liked” as a metric by which to measure future content for prioritization or other analysis. There’s no indication that this stream of liked comments will be available to developers today (no update has been posted yet to the developers blog) but it seems safe to assume that liking peoples’ comments in a thread will at least influence the determination of who is displayed in a user’s all-important News Feed of high-priority contacts. Any time a social interaction can be instrumented – turned into data and made measurable – that opens up new opportunities for cross referencing it with other data points, for illuminating more connections between people. Imagine being able to see who from your high school gets the most comments liked, or to see a stream of books liked by people whose comments you liked more than once. There are many possibilities. The fact that this data point is so easy for users to contribute to and understand makes it all the more a win. Facebook’s support for the Activity Streams protocol for social activity data, including the proposed standardized way to mark up ” likes ,” bodes well for the larger ecosystem that would analyze these activities across other websites. Facebook says that few developers are using its Activity Streams feed today, but that it hopes that will change with the introduction of a JSON version. The new Likes on comments will roll out over the next few days and will be subject to the same privacy settings as Likes on shared items. Discuss

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Facebook’s Likable Little Comments Could Be a Big Deal

Innovation: Should Your Startup Invent or Imitate?

cgseo — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 04:00:46 +0000

When the business review site Yelp added badges and royalty titles to its check-in features earlier this month, it seemed clear that it was doing so

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Innovation: Should Your Startup Invent or Imitate?