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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In the coming weeks, the Events Guide will be turning into a jet-setting tour of the international tech scene. Next week is London with the Cloud Computing World Forum . Then comes Marseilles, France ( Lift France ), Melbourne, Australia ( Digital Sport Summit ) and Singapore ( Social Media World Forum Asia ). You can import individual events in the Events Guide into Google Calendar using the link beside each entry, or download the entire thing as an iCal file (which is importable into Google Calendar, Outlook, Windows Live Calendar, etc.) or even view it as a world map . Know of something cool taking place that should appear here? Let us know in the comments below or contact us . Sponsor 29 – 30 June 2010: London Cloud Computing World Forum The 2nd annual Cloud Computing World Forum is the perfect event to learn and discuss the development, integration, adoption and future of cloud computing and SaaS. Building on the success of the 2009 show, this two day conference and free-to-attend exhibition will provide a focused platform for the global cloud and SaaS industry. Show highlights include: Co-located with CloudCamp London Co-located with Green IT conference Free-to-attend exhibition with seminar and scenario theatre Free-to-attend evening awards presentation Hear from leading case studies on how they have integrated cloud computing and SaaS into their working practices Learn from the key players offering cloud and SaaS services Evening networking party for all attendees 5 – 7 July 2010: Marseilles, France Lift France ‘10 Lift France gathers pioneers from all over the world to explore how the technologies and concepts of the Web are changing the real world. Through a combination of workshops, inspiring talks, and innovative demos, Lift offers a chance to anticipate the major shifts ahead, and meet the people who drive them. Together we will explore 4 major topics: “Web Squared”, Making Sense of the World through Shared Data “Fab Labs”, Reinventing Manufacturing People Hacks”, Distributing Control and Knowledge “Privacy Revisited”, Protect and Project Speakers include Sam Pitroda, advisor to India’s PM on innovation; Alma Whitten, Google’s privacy lead; Haakon Karlsen, Fab Labs Foundation; Michael Cross, FreeOurData.org ; Amit Zoran, MIT Smart Cities Lab; Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, French minister for the Digital Economy; Geoff Mulgan, the Young Foundation. 6 July 2010: Online The Influencer Project ThoughtLead presents The Influencer Project : 60 speakers. 60 minutes. 60 different ways to increase your influence online. We’re pretty sure it’s the shortest marketing conference ever. You’ll learn from new media luminaries like Robert Scoble, Anne Holland, Tony Hsieh, David Meeman Scott, Gary Vaynerchuk, John Jantsch, Ann Handley, Brian Solis, Read Write Web’s own Marshall Kirkpatrick, and many more. Sponsored by HubSpot and available via webcast and phone, the conference takes places July 6, at 6 p.m. Eastern (GMT – 4:00). Registration is free, and comes with the MP3 recording and PDF transcript of the event. Plus, you’ll have the opportunity to become the 60th speaker with ThoughtLead’s “Influence in 140 Characters.” To learn more and register, click here . 7 July 2010: Melbourne, Australia Digital Sport Summit Digital Sport Summit is Australia’s premier sport and digital media event. Hear from social media pioneers who are changing the face of Australian sport. Learn how social media and mobile technology is taking fan engagement to a whole new level. Speakers on the day will cover a variety of topics including: iPhone application development for sport Convincing management of the case for social media How to monetize social media Fantasy sports Social media from an athlete’s perspective With speakers representing Essendon Football Club, Cricket Victoria, Herald Sun, Football Federation Australia and more. Digital Sport Summit will take place at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. 22 – 23 September 2010: Singapore Social Media World Forum Asia Social Media World Forum Asia is back for 2010. The event will be taking place at the larger venue – The Suntec Conference Centre – before the F1 Singapore night race. Two days of interactive and engaging conference featuring leading key figure keynotes, brand case studies, topical Q&A and debates, exhibition hall, workshops and networking. Speakers include: Blake Chandlee, VP & Commercial Director, EMEA, Facebook Nicki Kenyon, Vice President, Digital Marketing APMEA, MasterCard Reynold D’Silva, Global Brand Marketing Manager, Unilever Pooja Arora, Brand Manager, P&G Thomas Crampton, Asia-Pacific Director, 360 Digital Influence, Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide Lito S. German, Marketing Director, BMW Group Asia Ranjeet-Shandu Singh, Digital Project Manager, Ogilvy One Singapore Derek Yeo, Head of Marketing, Tiger Airways 5 October 2010: New York City FinovateFall FinovateFall will return to Manhattan on Tuesday, October 5 to showcase dozens of the biggest and most innovative new ideas in financial and banking technology from established leaders and hot young companies. The Fall event is the original and largest Finovate and features a single day packed with our special blend of short, fast-paced onstage demos (no slides are allowed) and intimate networking time with top executives from the innovative demoing companies. FinovateFall is a unique chance to see the future of finance and banking before your competition and find the edge you need in today’s market. Early bird registration rates are available. 29 – 30 March 2011: London Social Media World Forum Europe Social Media World Forum Europe : Two days of interactive & engaging conference featuring leading key figure keynotes, brand case studies, topical Q&A and debates, exhibition hall, workshops and networking. Social Media World Forum Europe is continuing to evolve and deliver an event which is second to none, ensuring our audience receive the maximum potential from attending our shows. New for 2011 we have introduced interactive panel discussions, live streamed debate sessions, collaborative learning, break-out group discussions, open Q&A portions in every session, open workshops, with group discussions and interactive zones within the exhibition hall. We have introduced the Online Marketing Toolbox Workshops, educating in all elements of the online marketing mix, such as SEO, Paid Search, Affiliate, Mobile & Apps. The perfect toolbox to complete your online marketing strategy. Download this entire events calendar in iCal format. Discuss

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You may know Dropbox . It’s the wildly popular file storage and syncing service that is driving the geek set gaga. You may also know Box.net. It’s the Web-based file storage and collaboration service. Now meet Oxygen Cloud . We’re not talking about a cloud for that cable network with a distinct feminine edge. Still, the logo is a cute pink. At least one fellow blogger at Enterprise 2.0 asked me if they were selling Oprah….in the cloud. He was serious. Sponsor Instead, Oxygen Cloud is a desktop file sharing service that combines storage and collaboration features in a cloud-based environment. It may sound odd to think of Oxygen as a cloud-based service on your desktop. But you can pretty much mix anything with the cloud these days. The desktop fits in a cloud environment as a symbol for the relationship between the Web and traditional work environments. Open the icon on your desktop or on any device and the cloud is right there. Dropbox has the feature. It’s a Nomadesk feature, too. Nomadesk considers itself to have a collaborative component so the combination Oxygen Cloud provides is not unprecedented. But there is a gap in the market. Data storage and collaboration are not often viewed n the same context. But they are forces that can be networked together by using the desktop as an abstraction to the concept of the cloud. Collaboration is still the hot topic. Any number of companies are working on developing services that provide sharing, co-editing, activity streams and associated features. Several popped up at Enterprise 2.0 On the contrary, we did not hear much discussion at Enterprise 2.0 about data storage and the amount of structured and unstructered data that is being produced. Oxygen believes it can solve both issues by bringing these forces together. The service won’t be available until later this summer so we will have to wait for it to go live before testing it out. But we did get the chance to sit down with Founder and CEO Peter Chang at Enterprise 2.0 last week. Chang says the Web is not really a place where the enterprise does its work. We’d care to differ a bit on that premise but we can agree that the ability to divest the Web storage from collaboration makes some sense. It may also have some value to serve as a way to mend the relationship between data storage and sharing. The Oxygen Cloud desktop environment permits people to share files in an end-to-end secure network. Files can be shared in a virtual environment that is connected to a public cloud. In that way, Oxygen Cloud acts as a super broker for Amazon or other cloud services. The data is securely stored. But the people can see the content in the same place. It’s a method of packaging that can solve a few problems. It helps mitigate the data storage question. And people can share document in what Oxygen maintains is a secure environment. Oxygen will also provide a do-it-yourself private cloud through a partnership with Data Robotics. Bandwidth is one of the issues with a service like Oxygen. It says a private cloud environment may resolve issues with Internet latency. Oxyen Cloud is subsidiary of LeapFILe , which provides secure file transfer services to the Fortune 500. It’s this pedigree that gives the service some additional strength. They are in a position to bridge that file storage experience. Oxgen Cloud combines collaboration so it is not a pure file storage service. In that respect it is a bit of a departure for LeapFile. We’ll see how things look once the beta goes live. Discuss

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Do you want to chat with friends who are watching the same TV shows you are or reading the same books? Do you want to check in to record and share a history of your offline entertainment activities? Many startups think you will and the number of apps for that is growing fast. The latest entry into the field is from GetGlue , a startup that offers a popular plugin for social Web browsing, that just announced its iPhone app for entertainment check-ins today. The service stands out in the field as one of the only offerings that features books and other activities, and it has an excellent recommendation feature that’s sure to be adopted by competitors in time. What are other startups doing in this market? Below we offer a feature comparison between GetGlue and competitors HotPotato , Kickfour , Tunerfish , Miso and Philo . Sponsor How The Apps Work Are you having fun watching a TV show, listing to a song, reading a book or just thinking about something? Entertainment check-in apps will let you find the title of what you’re engaged with, and then “check in” to record the experience, leave a comment, see what other people and your friends are doing at the time, and more. Most of these services offer badges, rewards and elite status designations, sometimes with editorial benefits. Additional promotional activities are sure to come from advertisers in time as well. It’s an emerging field, but one that’s beginning to feel crowded already. The TV industry is hoping these kinds of applications will help it strike back against audience attrition and provide a new channel for content producers to market their work. “From a business perspective,” says Comcast’s social technology group senior director of product, Mike Berkley, “it’s about providing awesome marketing channels for content providers. The analogy is that Foursquare (in theory) is a great marketing tool for local businesses… these TV check-in apps are a great tool for TV networks.” From a user’s perspective, there is potential for fundamental change in the way we do entertainment. “TV as a form factor does not natively invite interaction,” Berkley says, “but it is an ideal consumption experience for rich media. That’s why mobile and iPad are so important, as the input devices.” In several cases, entertainment check-in apps are going beyond TV, as well. Which App to Use? Here’s how six of the players in this market look, feature by feature, as far as we can tell so far. Beyond Checking In What’s the biggest problem with most of these apps? Not enough people use them yet, so it’s not terribly social. There are a few apparent exceptions. Miso has Google funding and is already well on its way towards popularity. World Cup games are actively discussed on Miso, in real time. The iPad app Miso announced yesterday is absolutely dreamy looking. HotPotato is the best designed, and at tech events can provide a common back channel. GetGlue already has a popular Web presence, so it’s far more active than some of the others. Still, they need something more. That’s where GetGlue is strongest: It offers personalized recommendations, including among new releases from the world of music, movies and books. That means it provides immediate value, even if no one else you know uses the app. GetGlue even includes a section for topics you’re thinking about, complete with viewable YouTube movies about those topics. Long term as well, check ins alone are unlikely to prove sufficiently captivating. “The critical thing,” says social mobile engineer and researcher Nitya Narasimhan , “will be the kinds of add-on features (beyond check-in) that can create stickiness. Right now, the focus seems to be just shared experiences but I think that features like the social discovery credits where you are credited for incentivizing someone else to watch the program – those are interesting.” That’s what the Comcast-built Tunerfish does, in fact. If someone else clicks on a link to a show that you’ve shared, you get credit for that in the system. What will all of this look like in the future? “It’s hard to say,” says Comcast’s Berkley, “because there is so much rapid change at the moment. The TV screen is about to explode. There will be tons of innovation coming to TV over the next 12 months – TV will be dramatically redefined.” Are you ready to get social, via mobile, with your offline activities? Discuss

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It takes a lot of data to make Shrek. The big guy has to run, eat, talk. How much data? We’re talking in the order of data centers to process the bits to bring the warm-hearted monster to its animated life. The making of an animated film is a look into the changing world of networking and its importance in the making of just about anything these days. Sponsor The big question in today’s networking world is how to reduce network complexity and reduce all the power it takes to manage data centers. That’s the issue Dreamworks faces. Today it was announced the studio has chosen Hewlett-Packard to revamp the networking infrastructure so it can efficiently produce films such as Shrek. Dreamworks is in the business of making animated films. The studio has to have the ability to make films efficiently. In many respects, the number of films that Dreamworks produces in a year is dependent on how well it can use its network to do the core processing of the animated characters it is producing. It’s a similar comparison to what we see with the real-time Web. The Internet is at the center of a dynamic supply chain that requires real-time information to be delivered to the right people in the supply chain as events occur. The challenges are similar in a studio where the network is at the center of the film production process. The evidence is in the credits of any animated film. The number of specialists required to make an animated film represents the bulk of the people employed to produce it. The network is critical for these people to do their work. It’s at the center of the film production process. The Dreamworks story is a window into the new networking reality. The studios face challenges with producing high-quality films quickly and efficiently. For mot enterprises the challenges are different. They are not processing animated characters. Instead the increasing challenge is the structured and unstructured data that has to be organized, stored and shared. Networks are at the center of that issue, too. Companies like HP are betting on the premise that the data center network requires a converged infrastructure to manage the complexities of the Web oriented enterprise. The battle is for the network. Discuss

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