• first of all if you don’t already read The Next Web and their coverage of location, you really should…  they did a lot of posts on Facebook Places, full of great insights. I thought the one titled “Why I deleted foursquare for good” was particularly good.  That and pretty much all of Greg Sterling’s Screenwerks blog are great sources of info
• I also saw the re tweet ‘news’ that FourSquare had its busiest day ever in terms of new user signups for Foursquare yesterday. I think this just further supports the thought from my post yesterday that when starting a new company AND a new category simultaneously, that the threat of customers never having heard of you is as big, if not a bigger threat than competitors. Facebook users hear buzz on new location features… go to figure out what its all about… see lots of talk about FourSquare… decide to go check that out too.
• after having played with Facebook Places a little bit yesterday, I am even more convinced that it will be huge. It may take a while for it to truly go mainstream, and I am sure there will be some tweaks along the way, but it’s quite easy to envision Facebook users happily posting where they are en mass in a few months the same way that so many people on Facebook currently use it to say post photos.
• within moments of getting it running yesterday I saw a place update from old high school friends I haven’t spoken with in decades… nothing close to being techy types. One in particular updated that he was “working” at Location XYZ, one click and a zoom later I could see that he was “working” at a cancer center in XYZ city in Alabama… two great pieces of information that I would have never known about this guy otherwise. Now I am not in that area of the country very often nor do I know anyone that has cancer, but its valuable information to have about my friend and who knows when it may come in handy.

I have noticed that my attitude toward when to check in with Facebook is a bit more thought out. When I first started on Foursquare, I found myself checking in a lot more… bagel shop, checkin, gym, check in, playground with kids, check in. The gaming part and brief thrill of mayorship and badges made it fun for a bit. But now with both, I am finding that I only check in when I am somewhere new or noteworthy (relatively speaking of course… no plans to crash the White House State Dinner anytime soon) or if I think others I know may be around.

Now that I know I am pushing check ins out to over 200 people, the vast majority of whom I know and like, well I don’t want to subject them to the fact that I am at the gym or the bagel shop, I really can’t imagine anyone cares. But for some reason I did it with Foursquare for a while. It’s not just about the number of people who I’d spam, but also with Foursquare it felt like it was more about a connection with the place… while with Facebook, it’s more about a connection with my social network.

Perhaps that’s still an angle here to be explored for someone in this space… I won’t check in at my gym or at the bagel shop on Facebook, but I’d still be willing to check in there if there was something that made it worth my effort, it doesn’t need to necessarily be free stuff or discounts but I am not sure a virtual mayorship is going to do it for most.

I am sure the details of what IT is will be reported all over the web, so I won’t go into all those details here… but I watched the video of the conference announcing it and major kudos to ex Socialight’er Michael Sharon (product mgr for Places) for what seems to be a nice well thought through execution… someone like Michael obviously “gets it” more than anyone, and I think that the feature will be a huge hit.

As a pretty passive user of Facebook, the thing I enjoy about it the most is the ability to easily keep tabs on friends… real friends that would often otherwise have been lost and mostly forgotten.  Finding the latest pictures posted by childhood friends or hearing what people back home are up to, even if just occasionally, make it worthwhile to keep checking back in.  And I think that the places feature will only enhance that.  Is so and so still going out five nights a week, does anyone still go to so and so bar, does the old crew still hang out together? The stuff we did and the places we went were a big part of those relationships and Facebook Places has great potential to make those connections even stronger by adding places into the mix.

For the folks that use Facebook as a digital extension to their real time socializing, there is no doubt that tethering all of that to something that exists in the real world, a place, will be hugely popular. You can already see the potential:
• “OMG, did you see that Jennifer was out at 2a with Bob at the Waffle House?!”
• “Yo Greg, I see Sam is there with you, tell him he still owes me ten bucks! I am coming by in 30 minutes to collect!”
• ”I am bored, let me see where my friends are so we can meet up.”
• ”Look at how many times I’ve been to Joe’s Bar and Grill, they should make me mayor or something.”

While I’ve been a regular user of FourSquare, Gowalla and MyTown for a while, my biggest complaint with those services would have to be that there are so few people using them, and therefore the reason to use them and the benefit I got in return was often limited.

Facebook on the other hand may have the opposite problem, even as a pretty passive and conservative Facebook’er I’ve still accumulated 212 friends over the years,  the vast majority of whom I would actually like to serendipitously meet up and have a drink with…. BUT if they live in California, Georgia or Florida and I am in NYC, there is only a very small handful of those 212 that I really want to see all their check-ins. For the others I’d certainly like to know if they’re nearby, but don’t really care if they went around the corner to their neighborhood bar in San Jose… sure I might like to look that up later if I am ever in San Jose… but to post every check in to my friend feed could very well turn it into meaningless noise, like my twitter feed, that I have to fight through to extract the relevant stuff.   

I am not so sure that this means immediate termination for folks like Foursquare and Gowalla either.  Will it likely alter their sky-is-the-limit trajectory, yes I think so, but when starting what is both a new business AND a new sector, it seems to me that the threat of ambivalence or general lack of awareness among the mass public is at least as threatening as competitors.  And while Facebook is undoubtedly a formidable potential competitor for those guys, they also announced both read and write APIs and went as far as to have the Gowalla and FourSquare guys there for yesterday’s big announcement as partners.  Having Facebook push out Facebook Places in a prominent way to its ½ billion users should go a long way to overcoming the general ignorance of what social location has to offer.

There has been a lot of talk in the press about Foursquare becoming THE location platform of the future, but I think you have to seriously re evaluate that idea with the launch of Facebook Places. Facebook is already well down the path of being the most powerful social platform, and they are obviously taking their entry into location very seriously, so it seems hard to believe that a social location gaming start up, even one with as much hype behind it as FourSquare has, will be able to elevate themselves to platform status in light of these events.

Since I, like a lot of people don’t yet have Facebook Places up and running, despite the announcement that it was available immediately yesterday, this is all speculation and hearsay based on hearing how its supposed to work. But I look forward to trying it out…  it certainly seems like one of the closest things to a game changer that’s been announced in a while.

Causeworld
First a quick word on CauseWorld.  As far as I can tell it pretty much works like this… you load up the app on your mobile phone, check in at retailers and scan bar codes on products and earn karma points. You can then donate those points to one of the available charitable causes, and of course post your ‘achievement’ to your social network… a seemingly prerequisite these days.

It seems that at some point the number of karma points each charity has received dictates what share of the corporate donations pool they will receive.   The whole thing feels a wee bit disingenuous, consumers who check in aren’t donating anything, rather they’re casting a vote for where some big corporation donates their money. 

There is a big quote on their site from Michael Arrington at TechCrunch saying that the service encourages big corporations to give more… it’s a bit unclear why or how that is, but presumably if big corporations feel like they’re getting consumer interaction with their products, and consumer behavior data in return, it’s conceivable that it’s a better ROI on your charitable contribution than just slipping the Red Cross a check under the table and entering the appropriate amount on your tax filing each year. 

The big winners seem to be CauseWorld itself and donors. According to an article in CIO magazineCause World takes 20% for its services, and big corporations get more for their donation buck. Meanwhile presumably that 20% cut from Causeworld comes out of the charity’s pockets. For big charities this may not be the best, but the service could potentially be a big plus for lesser known charities that now benefit from the power of consumers promoting their interests in certain causes, maybe a great way to get noticed if your charitable cause flies a bit under the radar… and 80% of a donation is better than 0% any day.  The consumer meanwhile is basically trading off the time and energy to do the work and giving out information about their behavior in return for the right to steer big corporate giving and the ability to easily promote charities of personal interest and also to promote their own personal ‘achievement’.  

If nothing else, it’s an interesting combination of value creation for the various folks in this industry and demonstrates the value that different people (corporations and consumers) place on giving and receiving digitally captured information related to real world behaviors.  Consumers seem pretty happy to give it away, with little more than a little social creds and feel good in return… and corporations, well are happy to get the consumer interaction (and information), even if it means that 20% less of their money actually makes it into the hands of charitable causes.

ShopKick
Ok, so now that you get the idea behind Causeworld, Shopkickisn’t all that different… consumer still both walk into stores and scan items and get credit (called kickbucks) for  doing so, but the reasons why and the technology is a little different.

First, the motivation for downloading and turning on the app when you enter a store, and for scanning items etc is to earn points and to receive special offers. Special offers are things like 10% off anything in the store, or maybe a special item on sale.  Consumers can also earn points along the way for doing things like entering a store or navigating to a particular section of the store… points are later convertible into various things like Facebook Credits or gift cards, or with enough points you can just outright buy an item like the Twilight DVD… with 4,400 kickbucks.

And while you can still sit in your house and check into places in your neighborhood and scan items in your fridge, you only get a few measly points for doing so.  However the real intent here is that you’re in store and the unique ShopKick technology really tries to reward that.  Participating stores install little speakers around the store that transmit an inaudible signal that is recognized when the Shopkick app is running on an iPhone or android device… physical proximity to those speakers, and the ability for the device to hear the signal is what determines when the big points are awarded.

The whole business premise here seems to be around allowing retailers to better understand who is in their stores, before they buy something, and to help retailers service and reward these customers… and also to get consumers to pick up and interact with product all while providing a better shopping experience for consumers.  Since the speaker technology ensures that a consumer is actually present, there is the added benefit of knowing that real foot traffic occurred within the store. So if Best Buy wants to get more people into say the camera section they could run a promotion in the app upon entering the store that pushes customers to that section, and then measure the results… theoretically something ShopKick could get paid for helping make happen on a “cost per” basis. 

The general concepts here are good ones in theory:  measuring presence at point of sale, get consumers to pick up and interact with real products at point of sales, offering specials based on preferences and when you enter the store, not at check out, and rewarding frequent shopper.  And it seems to be getting enough traction that Best Buy is experimenting with the technology with plans to roll it out in 187 stores in San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Jose, Chicago and  New York City, as of today.

But in reality from what I’ve seen so far, some of the theory isn’t really making its way into reality.  I used the application a couple of times today to check in at Macy’s and at an American Eagle Outfitter and here is the good and the bad:

The Good
- The little speaker technology that gives you points WHEN YOU ENTER worked flawlessly at both stores here in Manhattan along 34th street… earning me 110 points for the two check ins. Woo Hoo indeed! I took 100 of the points and converted them into 4 Facebook credits and I hope one day to figure out what those do.

The Not So Good 
- I fake checked in at a few more places (including a place that closed a few months ago) and got three more points, and tried scanning some products around the house but as I may have mentioned I hate scanning products and after trying for 3-4 minutes and finally getting a pack of Swiffer wipes to register I got an error message saying it was the wrong product. Beats me why, they were definitely Swiffers… maybe they secretly knew I was really in my laundry room instead of at the Duane Reade across the street… and that was just a nice way to deny me my kickbucks.

- The key goal of ShopKick is supposed to be to make my shopping experience better, but I am not sure it really did that. Checking into Macy’s ShopKick showed me a handful of ‘offers’… and two looked vaguely of interest… a pair of Nike Monarch shoes for $49.99 and some Ralph Lauren Polo shirts for $19.99 (the cheapo ones). The problem was that they didn’t have the shoes in stock, and there was nothing special about the price of either… in fact the shirts happened to be on sale for $14.99 anyway, so I felt like I was better off just looking around the store for big red “sale” signs.  The app wasn’t helpful at all in helping me find the featured item in the massive department store either.

- The experience at American Eagle Outfitters was a little bit better, when I walked in a sales associated immediately told me that all jeans were on sale and he was backed up by about three dozen signs around the shop all saying the same thing… and voila there on the first screen of ShopKick appeared to be a similar deal… which ambiguously enough said ‘Every Single Jean on Sale”.  But flipping through the other offers, ShopKick did me one better by offering me 15% off any purchase, so that may have been a better deal than just any Joe would have received off the street, I guess it depends on what I was buying.

The Bad
- It seems that in order to get your kickbucks points for being in the store, you need to fire up the application before you enter and leave it on as you pass through the main entrances (see TechCrunch “do not avert your eyes from the phone” zombies video to get the idea) so your phone can ‘hear’ the ‘shopkick signal’. I tested this in Macy’s by heading on upstairs away from the entrance and firing up the app and it didn’t work… I didn’t get my check in points.  Huge problem there… maybe easily fixable with a lot more hardware but currently not a good experience.   At Macy’s specifically they also missed some secondary entrances to the building, but that’s more of a minor glitch in the grand scheme of things.

-  In Shopkick points land it takes 4,400 kickbucks to get a $17 Twilight DVD. So from what I saw I’d have to do about 4,400 fake check ins, 176 product scans or walk into a Best Buy 58 times ( for 58 different days since it seems to not let you get points 2x in one day).  Also the number of products you can scan for points varies by store but the ones I saw ranged from 2 to 9 products, so assuming you can scan five products per store on average you’d need to go to stores 35 times (either different stores or different days to the same store) and scan five items to get enough for the DVD.

So the offers on Shopkick so far don’t seem all that special, and the points system doesn’t create a whole lot of motivation except maybe for those people who really shop a lot and really like to play mobile games to win stuff while they’re doing it… but frankly I think those are often different types of people, or at least limited.  From my own experience I certainly wouldn’t use it for the gameplay elements that it offers like becoming fans of places or earning badges, or even to accrue kickbucks.  I may potentially fire it up while in the store to see if there is a special offer for something I am looking for…  but to think that there is some massively new improvement on the phenomenon of checking-in here seem to be more hype than reality from what I can tell.  And thinking of all the specialized hardware that would need to be installed in the tens of millions of retailers across the U.S. kinda makes you wonder if all those fake checkins are really such a bad thing afterall.

Despite claims of hundreds of thousands if not millions of users across these apps, the vast majority of my friends aren’t using it so it can get a little boring.

Recently I’ve found myself playing more and more with MyTown, last night as I waited for my wife outside Mermaid Inn, a neighborhood restaurant, I had time to check in on all three, but ended up spending 15 minutes collecting rent and upgrading a bunch of business I own on MyTown… frankly I am not sure how much longer I’ll be doing that either but it’s not a bad way to pass 15-20 minutes. And I did take advantage of the special offer that was running on Foursqaare for a free side dish at Mermaid Inn, the restaurant we were headed to anyway… a little surprise free side order of onion rings popping up in your day is never a bad thing. So maybe I’ll stick with it all a bit longer.

On a random technical side note, I did notice that the MyTown geo location feature is noticable more off than folks like Gowalla and Foursquare. Standing on Amsterdam avenue in front of three restaurants Mermaid Inn, B Cafe and Rancho Cafe I noticed that B Cafe was MIA while the other two were right there near the top of the list on MyTown with their little green indicator lights on. After a search I found the restaurant B Cafe, and they had the correct street address, yet still MyTown thought I was nowhere near the place… and it’s not the first time I’ve had to use search to find nearby places on MyTown… definitely some kinks to get worked out there.

I’ve found myself recently thinking alot about all these folks from places like Gowalla, Foursquare, myTown, Loopt.. not to mention the bigger guys like Patch, Google, and Yelp trying to sell in digital advertising to local retailers and some of the challenges they must face. 

On Greg Sterling’s blog Screenwerk he posted a video from a company called WebVisible that speaks directly to this challenge, where many local retailers talk about the various ways they think customer find their businesses (walk-ins and yellow pages types stuff) and then consumers talk about how they really find businesses in this modern age (“the Google” and the Internet). Check out the video below… the bit near the end about one flower shop setting up a page on HappyFace (er Facebook?) is kinda telling. Good luck to the FourSquare sales guys calling on that lady!

Now in the olden days when you just bought a printed foldable map this didn’t really matter much, but nowadays in the modern inter networked world of digital maps and folks creating a dizzying array of new services helping connect people with locations, it matters more.  Now within a single stand alone application like say a TomTom navigation device there is probably not much thought put into what you name a place, but in the web2.0 world where interoperability and information sharing reign, everyone needs to know what location everyone else is talking about when someone is talking about the business at 4151 North Central Expressway.

So rather than just getting everyone to try to agree on a standard, which could take years and years and would probably be a lot like herding cats, Placecast has announced today that it has developed a technological solution to the whole problem and they’re opening it up for free use.

The product is called the Placecast Match API…. and it’s described as “a Rosetta Stone for location data”. For those that need a refresh on their ancient Egpytian artifacts, this basically just means that they will provide a way to translate between the different “languages” that different services use to describe locations for the purposes of enabling interoperability between those services.

There is a great article on Tech Crunch that demonstrates how this problem manifested itself in the hot area of mobile social networking and the battle of the check-ins where folks may want to check in somewhere on a number of different services without having to fire up each service independently and do it manually. Given the viral and social nature of services like Foursquare and Gowalla, I guess it’s not surprising that this is where we’d first see the need for better interoperability between services.

One area where this is particularly interesting is around the area of location based advertising. One of the things that needs to happen to help ramp up growth in this area is more scale in order to make hyper local and location oriented advertising finally get on the radar screen of folks that control advertising dollars. It’s not that there are not a lot of consumers using these types of services today, there are… but usage is spread around among a lot of player.  Consumers may look up directions via Google Maps, Yahoo Maps or Mapquest, others may rely on their Garmin or TomTom devices, while urbanites without cars may just be checking in with FourSquare, Goawalla or Loopt or using one of a hundreds of local discovery services like UrbanSpoon, Yelp, Where, Geodellic, etc.

The amount of traffic to any one hyper local area on any one of these systems is likely not significant enough to create a media buy, but centrally tether them all together with a common reference point and pretty soon you have what begins to look like the beginnings of a network… a point of interest advertising network. 

Putting banners in apps and on wap pages is one approach to the location based advertising opportunity, but there certainly seems to be just as much opportunity if not more around “listings ads” connecting mobile users with the businesses they’re looking for from mobile search and discovery services and then capturing, sharing and aggregating the related check ins at scale across the ecosystem.

I am not saying that this is the Placecast end game, but something like the Match API and other similar offerings by competitors certainly seem like it could help spawn competitors to what folks like CitySearch are doing with CityGrid around the creation of ad networks tied to places.

What will be interesting  is to see how publisher view participating in such a system and the more thorough socialization of content from their system… when the depth, richness and accuracy of that content may be a significant source of unique competitive advantage.

Another up and comer in this area, with a new twist, that is beginning to get some press is a company called Hot Potato.  Here is where they fit in:

What they do: They create an online social network around the dimensions of “here” and “happening now”.  Facebook has people at its center of gravity and Yelp has places (mostly businesses) as theirs. Folks like Foursquare and Gowalla have seen the value of connecting the two with gameplay around the places where people go. 

Hot Potato is similar, but with a focus not as much on the places themselves as on the live events happening either directly in a real nearby place or one 1,000 miles away. Think of it as a mobile or virtual social layer on top of eventful or meetup.com where folks check in to events to socialize.

How it works:  As with Facebook, Yelp, Foursquare and Gowalla, having your friends involved is a key component of the service.  So the first step is to invite all your friends with handy friend imports from Facebook, Twitter and Gmail supported. Once your friends are connected you can kind out what events they’re attending or create your own events and invite others to join you.  Like with Foursquare, people check in to an event in progress and can share comments and pictures with other attendees… events can be open to anyone or made private for only a select group to participate.

I can see this type of tool being particularly good for a business conference where everyone is there to network and share information and to socialize. I tried to set an event up for the Where2.0 conference happening in San Jose this week…  seems that no one found it and a new one was created instead… although even that one had just 16 folks check in and only on posting that I could see.

The Hot Potato service is just getting off the ground, and seems to be in its very early stages at this point, with many kinks to be worked out. The website seems to be down a lot, and I left a question with customer service five days ago about how to set up an event, and have yet to hear back.

For attending real world events at physical places it will be interesting to see if Hot Potato can find enough ways to differentiate itself with features targeting the needs of live event goers maybe around tickets and what to do afterwards. Currently there is not a lot more you can do with Hot Potato than what someone might find checking in somewhere like at Madison Square Garden for an event or at ‘Snowpocalypse’ on Foursquare… with their more loose interpretation of ‘place’.

The service is currently heavily used for ‘virtual events’ around social television watching, like March Madness or the latest episode of ABC’s Lost… making what for many is likely not a very social activity of sitting in front of the tv at home, a bit more virtually social at least. Although it feels like the live and in person events need a different set of capabilities than the virtual event attendance like watching a tv episode, so I suspect that at some point soon, Hot Potato may need to split and decide which market they’re after and how to really differentiate themselves.

Its an interesting enough twist however to continue to keep an eye on.

Well after giving it a bit more thought, I’ve come to the conclusion that the industry needs a more broad “presence at place of sale” (PAPOS?) metric that could capture all the events where a person actually walks into a brick and mortar retailer and that action is recorded by any available means.

The PAPOS could then be looped back into the marketing ecosystem serving as the click or conversion rate for all advertising, both on and offline, targeted at driving brick and mortar foot traffic. When consumers actively check in somewhere that is fantastic, but I think it’s a bit unrealistic to expect this to become a ubiquitous consumer behavior, and it’s certainly not the only way to know when someone is in a retail store. Besides the 100% active way of checking in, there is of course the 100% passive way where your phone location is just recorded in carrier location logs, and many, many things in between like credit card and loyalty card swipes at retail and of course the wi fi and GPS positioning directly in the phone which enables all those great mobile discovery and navigation apps.

I suspect that the active and explicit way of registering PAPOS through check ins will be pretty limited and much will be inferred or recorded through other methods, you’d figure some company will just find a way to throw up 14 million geo fences around all of the retailers of America and fire back geo pixel trackers each time a mobile device enters a place of interest!

A more systematic way of recording PAPOS would go a long way in opening up the world of mobile and local digital advertising… which currently suffers from a serious disconnect when measuring ad effectiveness when they’re looking to drive offline foot traffic… tracking click to call is ok, but how often do you find yourself calling your local McDonalds? “Uh Excuse me, do you have chicken nuggets in stock today, I just want to be sure before I drove on over?”  HA!