A users-eye view of location and activity in the stream

Location is Big

But 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 something entirely different.) 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 will be able to use location and purchase history to see hot spots.) 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)?

…and it’s heating up.

I could tell you that no one knows what’s going to happen at SXSW Interactive 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. There’s bound to be a billion startups and more pitching than spring training, but 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. 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:

Action streams may help us share across services.

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 Streams 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 and watch the heat build. 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 Adrian’s brief when you have 2 minutes. Until it’s an agreed standard, or gets adoption, we need something now.

As Twitter web goes, so go the apps.

Twitter has been constantly adding features to their web interface since the service launched. When Twitter.com implements a feature, you can bet that it will be showing up in clients soon (@replies, retweets, lists) but some features remain API-only. Back in August 2009, they first demoed the location API, and it was rapidly adopted by Twitter clients almost across the board. Until Twitter.com adopts location however, the third-party apps are shooting in the dark. A post by one of Twitter’s developers, picked up and run through the rumor mill by MG may hint at what may be coming down the pike (maybe in May?), but until there’s solid word from Twitter or a confirmed source spills, we’re stuck with lone startups and developers doing the best they can to connect us and bring us together in new and exciting ways. I’m not too worried about it. They seem to be doing a pretty good job so far.