sebastian troen

With all the recent success of LBS (Location Based Services) companies, like Foursquare, 2010 is quickly turning into the year of ‘the check-in’. That’s the term used for the voluntary location broadcast by users on these services. So if I’m sitting in a coffee shop and want to let my network know (or part of it), I check in at that coffee shop and voila, now my location is broadcast in the feeds of those that are subscribed to me.

Very cool!

Except there isn’t one LBS that does this. Like mushrooms after a rainstorm, they’re popping up everywhere: Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt, and now even Twitter and Facebook are getting in on the game. With the exception of the last one, none of them have the network reach to be an all-encompassing solution. By which, I mean, if I use Foursquare but some of my friends use Gowalla, the system doesn’t work. And even in the case of Facebook where it’s likely that 98% of my contacts are registered (except for those two friends of mine that still believe modern society died with the advent of the push-button telephone), there’s the issue of me broadcasting my location to the wrong people. Ooops, didn’t want my coworkers knowing that I’m on a sunny patio drinking a beer on my ’sick’ day.

Coming out of SXSW this year, numerous people commented on ‘check-in’ fatigue: trying to keep all your networks abreast of your location was too damn tiring! And there’s at least one company, Check.in, working on a universal…ummm, check-inner.

But the thought of trying to organize my network of friends, business contacts, Twitter contacts and random hangers-on into groups that I feel comfortable broadcasting my location to, well it gives me a headache.

Instead, why not take a page from Caterina Fake’s newest venture, Hunch.com, and develop an algorithm that learns, based on your location, time of day, day of week, and relationship to contact, whether or not to automatically broadcast my location using whichever service I’m plugged into. That’s a scary word, isn’t it? Automatically! The idea of automatically sharing our location has been a barrier to LBS growth for more than a decade. The security implications are enormous.

But what I’m envisioning is an engine that learns, based on your behaviour and the aggregate behaviour of others (a la Hunch: if most single 34 year old males tend not to broadcast their location on Friday nights to their mom and coworkers, we can probably assume that’s a given – unless it’s manually overridden by that single male 34 year old at that specific location). What my system would have is a simple learning mechanism that would learn from you whether or not it should broadcast your location to certain people.

So you enter a restaurant and the system politely asks you if you’d like to share you location at all. If you say no or don’t respond, no location will be shared. If you say yes, it’ll ask you through a set of simple steps whether those contacts that previously had access to your location can get it again, and then prompt you with a few other suggestions, based on who the algorithm thinks you might want to broadcast to. At any time you can of course manually share your location via the traditional check-in.

Through this learning process, the system will gradually learn your preferences to the point where it can automatically broadcast your location (with your permission, or by prompting you for approval) to previously approved contacts.

The benefits of this system versus the current manual check-in process are: less time spent on checking in, more people will try using location based services (particularly on Facebook) given this big hurdle is removed and potentially more people in your network receiving access to your location (most of us have connections that we forget to include in invitations or location broadcasts because we haven’t seen them in awhile and so they’re not top of mind, but you would love to see them if you had the chance).

So although I’m a huge fan of LBS and am really excited to see it grow throughout 2010, I can’t wait for someone to solve this tedious check-in problem using simple, smart technology.

Over the past few weeks Twitter has pushed itself into the mainstream. In the span of a few days I came across references to it on the Daily Show, over scotch with friends (mmm, scotch!) and even on CNN. It’s clearly breaking through to the mainstream now and I’m getting lots of questions from friends and colleagues about this “Twitter thing” and whether or not they should be on it. Here’s my quick overview on what it is and why you should be on it (or not):

Microblogging: What the hell is “micro” blogging… I barely know what blogging is, why do I need a smaller version of it? Microblogging is a miniature version of that early Oughts (yeah, I said it) phenomen, the blog (which stands for “web log”). Blogs sprung up by the thousands and millions over the past decade and there are truly amazing blogs out there that are worth their weight in gold. But just like not all of us are not interesting or eloquent enough to write magazine or newspaper articles, most of us don’t have enough interesting things to say to write a blog and today most bloggers will admit to being incredibly negligent about posting (including me). But we all have thoughts, ideas, rants, raves, etc. all day long and microblogging allows an outlet for that thought. It started with the status line on your MSN Messenger, then proceeded to the Facebook “Sebastian is…” status, then without the “is” and eventually to Twitter messages called “Tweets”, simple, short, not-always-eloquent thoughts and ideas, limited to 140 characters.

140: Why limit a Tweet to 140 characters? Because Twitter was originally intended to be mobile and SMS was the (still is actually) prevalent mobile texting platform. Today, with iPhones and Androids and Berries flying about, the SMS medium is less important to the digital elite, but the benefit of having a limited text entry field is that you’re forced to be concise with your idea or thought. No room for extended rants… that’s what the old fashioned blogs are for

Facebook vs Twitter: Ok, I finally joined Facebook. I get it. I can see my friends’ photos and poke them whenever I feel like it. So why the hell do I need Twitter? First of all, you don’t need Twitter. Wheras Facebook has developed into an online representation of your real life social graph, and everyone has that, not everyone needs their own channel to voice their thoughts and ideas to the (online) world. Where your Facebook friends are people you (probably) actually know in real life, many (if not most) of your Twitter followers are bound to be people who have shared interests and decided to follow you in the hopes that your insights or ideas may be of interest to them.

Using Twitter: It’s really quite simple to use Twitter. After setting up an account, you simple type in whatever you want to share with your followers. It could be a joke, a link to a video or an online article. Hit “update” and bam, you’ve “tweeted”. But be careful, it can get addictive. Now comes the fun part, following other people. Start by searching for friends who are tweeting. Or your favourite authors, musicians, interest groups, news outlets, etc. Once you’re on their Twitter page, click the “Follow” button and their Tweets will appear in your Twitter stream.

Keep It Real, Yo: What’s important to remember is that just like Facebook represents the real you in an online social environment, so does Twitter, so make sure you act appropriately, respect others and contribute to the community. Even though you may not know most of the people that are following you, they are all possible friends, colleagues or acquaintances, so remember to represent yourself as you would if you were in the same room with them.

Who Should Use Twitter: Where Twitter is going is still up in the air, but a lot can be inferred from who’s using it currently. Anyone with an online voice, from news outlets like the NY Times to politicians to technology and marketing strategy consultants. If you’re the kind of person that frequently updates their status message on Facebook with links to videos, articles or just posts thoughts that you want to share, Twitter could be a good tool for you. If you don’t buy in to this whole online thing and believe in real world interactions, that’s fair enough, feel free to skip Twitter. It won’t kill you. I promise. Most compaies are getting on the Twitter bandwagon because it’s an easy, cheap, non-intrusive way to strike up a dialogue with their customers and partners and allows them to develop a thought leader position in their space.

So Many Cool Apps: One of the main reasons for Twitter’s explosive growth over the past year is that they’ve allowed any developer to plug into Twitter. This has led to a proliferation of Twitter-related apps, from monitoring what people are talking about to mapping it based on user’s real world locations to integrating Twitter into other applications like Firefox or Apple OSX, these (mostly) free apps have extended the usability of Twitter well beyond the ideas that the Twitter company could have imagined possible. The first one I’d recommend is adding the Twitter application to your Facebook account so you can post to Twitter and have it automatically update your Facebook page. A second one for Mac users is Twidget, an OSX widget that lets you view and update your Twitter account from your Mac Dashboard.

I’m going to stop there, but I hope this was informative to those of you thinking about Twitter and wondering if it’s for you. I can honestly tell you that once you start Tweeting, it’s hard to stop. You’ve been warned

DAYTUM is a new tool, in beta, that allows you to start “collecting and communicating your daily data”. Because we’re not interested in what large groups of people are doing or thinking anymore, it’s all about breaking it down… way down.

Wanna measure how often you have left-overs for lunch, instead of a burger? How about comparing how often you take the bus versus walking versus flying a magic carpet to your destination?

Daytum can help with all these things. It works by providing a simple interface for you to update simple statistics. Or you can update while on the go using Twitter and some straightforward commands. Unfortunately I was not able to access the beta, so I can’t comment on how well it works, but it’s an novel concept and I can see this becoming popular with the Twitterati… not only do they want to tweet about their thoughts, with Daytum they can let the world know detailed stats on the day to day.

Of course this would eventually lead to amazing amounts of data on users… 80% of people that drink tea prefer this brand of beer, 45% of people that watch this movie, eat leftoveres in the mornings, etc.

Daytum, hurry up and give me my damn beta account. Please

www.daytum.com