Social Inspiration: Prime time for location, actions and beyond…
Author’s Note: I began this post at midnight after waking with what seemed like hundreds of ideas swimming in my head. This is what spilled out. It is raw. It is not “bloggy” It may still have errors even after I’ve revised it a few times. I’m not going to edit it any more though. It will stay as raw and n00b and desperate as when it was first posted. For the boiled down, web-friendly, chunked-out version, see http://bit.ly/location-activity-stream (http://joelgibby.net/2010/03/02/a-users-eye-view-of-location-and-activity-in-the-stream/) This post is more just for posterity.
Inspiration is trending right now. Events like SXSW and the Refresh series are sparking ideas and connections at a blistering pace, leaving the rest of the world shouting “Hey, wait for us! That looks cool! iPhone only? Oh nice, a mobile web app! So I can get to it on my Droid phone?”
Yes, I wrote “Droid phone” – From personal experience, folks don’t understand that Android is a Mobile OS and not a Verizon Brand. That’s another story though. Ask me about Scarborough Research sometime.
With location the thermite ready to ignite SXSW this year, people are literally Buzzing ™ with excitement over what could be the event of the realtime web decade. And yes, I used thermite as a metaphor, for good reason:
While location is keeping developers up for days on end, hacking APIs, forging conduits for activity streams, hammering out their own duct work for realtime data, it’s only a small part of the larger social landscape. Take a step back and think about what sites like Foursquare and Facebook are asking everyone: Who are you? Where are you? What are you doing? Who are your friends? What do you like? What do you DISLIKE? (I’m looking at you, Facebook.) Where are you going? What will you be doing? Who do you want to do it with? (You can take that to mean event invitations or social and location-based personals, big in Japan, not so much stateside yet.) Do you want to see what else is around you? How about a menu? Do you need to do some shopping here today? Here are our specials. Want to pre-order something? Want to see what others thought was worth buying? (Square, you genius devils, you!) No cash? No problem! This location accepts Square payments! Your friend’s birthday is today and he’s two streets over at the pub with the great New York style pizza for $1.25 and $2.50 pints ’til closing (Captain Ankeney’s in SW Portland). Want to send him a discounted brightkite / foursquare birthday pint and a slice? (recipient may claim gift up to 5 days after purchase, must present phone to cashier for redemption)? Like Penny Lane said: “It’s all happening.”
I could tell you that no one knows what’s going to happen at SXSW this year, but I’d be lying. There will be game-changers erupting from the swarthy loins of sweet, sweet, Austin TX in a little over a week. While there’s bound to be a billion startups and more pitching than spring training, these are products, services and artists that were not born, trained nor tweeted for the first time yesterday. Take for example Brightkite: a global location-based social hub ready for action, with the users to prove it. MG Siegler’s timely article over @TechCrunch has a great rundown of @brightkite that takes all the excitement of the aforementioned thermite bomb (trust me, thermite is exciting; just don’t stare at the white core or you’ll go blind, kid) and compresses it into a 762-word WMD. If this blog post (mine, not MG’s) ever gets legs, I owe it all to him. The pure excitement of everything that is coming together right now is overwhelming, and it just keeps heating up. Rather than try to segue cleanly into this next bit I’ll just let you have it:
Adrian Chan is a social interaction designer helping to seed discussions that extend all of these topics into business scenarios that are likely to change the way business is done locally. Remember my scenarios at the top of the article? (think Square) Check out his brief on Action Streams, an evolution of the Activity Stream format . These standalone services are awesome and super-dope. They represent huge steps forward in what is possible even on their own. Start gluing them together however, and well, Daft Punk just showed up and is now playing at your house. Stay with me here: Right now, the Action Streams format is a “blue sky” envisioning of the possible requirements, implications and lots more than I can go into detail on, just click through and read it when you have 2 minutes. Until it’s an agreed standard, or gets adoption, here’s what I came up with (was awoken from bed at 12:00AM as the calendar flipped from Feb to Mar, with the full moon shining into my bedroom. Yeah, I know. Weird.) Check it out:
I’ll update my twitter status if I’m feeling command-line-ish today; maybe tomorrow I use Brightkite mobile web or the native Android Gowalla or Foursquare apps (still in need of lots of work, the both of ya)someday, with the following status:
Eating a Big Ass Burger. !@BrunchBox
It contains all the elements needed for basic social location: Who I am (my twitter username), Where I am (new “bang-at” tag (you heard it here first, folks) puts me at BrunchBox on SW 5th and Stark in downtown Portland OR), and because BrunchBox has a named twitter account and their location is set, API apps can see both named places (think Foursquare and Gowalla) and geotagged coordinates (think Flickr or Picasa). With the right amount of API glue, I can even see which of my friends (on whatever service has open APIs for friend location) are nearby using both the named location, and/or the coordinates. These open APIs will allow anyone with a bit of programming experience and inspiration to mashup and remix these services in new, possibly awesome ways. Sure, it will take a bit of math to calculate search radius and .. oh what’s that you say? There’s already APIs from Google or just about any other map provider to do that? Oh, OK, cool. I will also wager that Twitter will be making some huge location announcements very soon.
And that’s just using Twitter. There’s a sea (well more like a lake right now, but it’s a big lake, mind you) of apps, services, developers and local folks like you that are focused on more than just location. It’s going to be huge, trust me, but there’s definitely more to it than you might think.
PS: I’m broke and want to go to SXSW. If any industry (tech/journalism/K12 Education) folks want to take a bet on a dark horse that could pay off big, I need airfare, housing and an SXSW Interactive Badge. Hollaz.
#now-at #location #bang-at #exclamation #foursquare #gowalla #activity #stream #action #brightkite #socialstream #social #news #funded #hollaz #facebook #techcrunch #MGSiegler #parislemon #SXSW #AustinTX #Austin #web3 #retweet #rtmon (retweet monday foolz) More tags coming soon when I get a break from fixing our VoIP system. Techie please!
Joel Gibby lives near Portland Oregon and writes about a wide range of technology topics including social media, educational technology, web development, security and networking.
