I happen to be particularly interested in the area of local and location based search and data, but since I had already talked a lot about companies dealing with data like PlaceIQ, Retailigence, Locu and HyperPublic, I instead ended up talking about an offering called Sonic Notify which was created by a NYC digital “ideas agency” called DenseBrain.

To grossly simplify it, Sonic Notify is a system that transmits a sound that can be received by a mobile phone, which can then trigger some sort of event on the mobile device that is within range and contains the Sonic Notify software.  There is no consumer Sonic Notify product out there, instead it’s a capability that the company hopes will be embraced by marketers to power their own initiatives.

The idea stemmed out of conversations that the company was having with a client Proctor and Gamble, and talking about services like ShopKick and how it would be interesting to look at technology to be able to communicate and connect with customers down at the aisle level or product level, as opposed to the store level.

There are two main components to the system, the side that can broadcast out the sonic signal (which is  inaudible to people) and the software on the phone which can pick out the signal and trigger the action.

Sending the signal seems pretty straight forward, it seems that standard speakers for PA systems, TVs, computers etc can all do the job.  The company has also investigated very small and disposable mobile audio beacons that can broadcast out the audio signal for vey short range situations such as from within name tags and badges for conference attendees.

Receiving and processing the signal seems to be where much of the Sonic Notify IP comes in. Phones which contain the application, need to decipher the signal amongst all the noise, and then once the signal is verified, instruct the phone as to what to do next… trigger a push notification, open a browser, send an email or text, etc.

The application can act in both an active and a passive mode, meaning you can set it up where a user would need to open up an app before the phone would begin listening for the SonicNotify signal (active, like how ShopKick currently works), or where the phone would just listen for the signal behind the scenes (passive).  I asked the company how operating in passive mode effected the battery life of a mobile phone and they said that they had come up with some work arounds to only switch a phone into active mode when it sensed it was within range of a certain wider (wi-fi) network known to be nearby to the beacons, with one approach using a SSID broadcaster as an easy alternative to setting up a fully connected new network.

In much the same way that scanning a QR code can trigger a variety of actons, Sonic Notify, does the same thing, except without  a user having to do anything (in passive mode) except enter within range of a speaker broadcasting the Sonic Notify signal… which can have a range of only a few feet or can cover a large area like a sports stadium.

Once the phone successfully “hears” the signal is when the interesting stuff begins.   The potential seems immense. Some obvious application for someone like P&G include presenting coupons for Tide to customers standing in front of the cleaning products aisle.  The company is also looking closely at the area of social interaction, or providing a super simple way to share contact information with people you meet at a industry trade show,

Now we’ve seen passive place based triggers before, folks like Xtify and Placecast among others leverage Alcatel Lucent geo fencing tech to do similar things, but they’re more designed for covering wide areas to pull folks into a nearby retailer.  SonicNotify on the other hand seems like a nice complement to those technologies for situations where you’re working with a smaller environment.

ShopKick offers a similar solution but relies on the user remembering to open the app when they go to stores, using the usual badges and point schemes to try to get folks to remember to use it. SonicNotify seems to offer a more flexible platform.

I particularly like the potential at the retail store level.  I for one wouldn’t mind getting a push notification as I enter a retailer asking if I’d like help, and giving me the option to explore sales and specials happening in the store, or researching items I am there to purchase.  I am after all entering into the store, and expect to receive service…  and if I am not interested I can simply ignore it and it will go away.  It seems to me that you could use SonicNotify to simply push the option of in store customer service out to customers as they walk into the store via their phones… you can see how a retailer may want to layer on interesting services like bookmarking ala Matchbook (“hey did you enjoy our restaurant, save us to your phone and share us with your friends”) or a white labeled check in loyalty service (“let us know each time you come and we’ll give you rewards”) or even allowing folks to look into product availability inventory (Retailigence) and get reviews and details on items available within the store.

Using hybrid positioning systems that reach indoor should in theory make an in-store customer service type “portal” do-able, but just maybe delivering a local experience really requires a local systems, if for no other reason then to be sure the customer feels like they’re getting a message as a direct and readily apparent result of the door they just walked through or the items they’re standing in front of.

It’s hard to say which way things will go, there is certainly a huge advantage of not having to set up technology at individual stores, but it may just work better that way. I certainly give Sonic Notify credit for trying a new angle.

Last week someone told me about a new one called Matchbook, that launched a couple of months back that probably went under the radar of most people, heck there are now 425k apps in the Apple App store, so how you do get ON the radar of anyone these days is another issue altogether!

The reason Matchbook stood out for me is because it is solving what seems to be such an obvious problem, and is something I had thought many times needed to be built… but was always stumped by how you actually get people to use and re use it and how’d you’d make any money from having built it. But I am really glad these guys built it and I hope to become a regular user.

So here is what Matchbook is all about: Simply put, it allows you to store and tag places you find out about so you can remember them later, or more easily share “your” places with friends. That’s really it, sweet and simple.

For example, let’s say you walk by a shoe boutique that you think your wife will really love, or a restaurant that you think your parents will enjoy when they come to town next month… one click of the mobile app later you can scroll through a list of local retailers, select the store and then click bookmark. If you want you can tag it something like ‘parents’ to help you keep your new discoveries organized.

Or let’s say you’re online, reading through the NY Times.com Dining section and read about a new restaurant that looks interesting, install the matchbook bookmarklet on your browser and with a click of the button you can pretty easily search and find the restaurant from the article and save it to your Matchbook account, all without leaving the NYtimes.com webpage. Or let’s say that they guy next to you on the train to Westchester is going on and on about how great a bar in Brooklyn is, there is even the old school way of just firing up the app and searching places in your area using free form text search… simply click and save, and the next time you’re in Brooklyn looking for places to go you can fire up and consult your bookmarks.

As with so many start up apps in the location based world these days there is an enormous amount of focus on finding bars and eating out… and there’s no exception here, with the pre populated ‘tags’ focused on things like Drinks, Food and Vibe categories. So for example, for Campbell Apartment which is a classic and classy, old school lounge in Grand Central Station, I tagged <DressedUp>, <Chic> and <Cocktails>. Even though for my own purposes I really wanted to label it <out of towners> because it’s one of those places I’d like to zap over to the frequent visitors from out of town to go for a drink since its old school New York, with 20’s style cocktails and it’s in Grand Central station which most people are happy to check out even if they’re determined not to do “the tourist things”.

While I generally like Matchbook and where it’s going, I kinda wish it was more of a place oriented organization utility and less of yet another ‘going out’ tool for urbanites.  As much as I want to laude them for excluding things like check-ins or game mechanics, for the average consumer I do wonder how it moves from become a “once in a while” app, to well one that’s not limited to being used just every once in a while, or when you’re traveling.

While focusing on bars and restaurants is one way to go, I can see a ton of applications in all sorts of other use cases including selecting on demand meeting places, a broker sharing a list of houses with a client or an event planner keeping tabs of venues and their past client events there.  The ability to share all places that use a common user generated tag within your account seems like a great feature that they’re probably working on already. The possibilities seem nearly endless.

Commercially, one way I’d be interested to see it expand, would be to get custom alerts (push notifications?) when a tagged place is nearby… and why not include brands here. I grew up in central Florida, eating at the original Sonny’s Real Pit BBQ, which has since grown into successful chain of 150 restaurants across nine states in the South… and much to my wife’s dismay I will gladly drive many miles out of my way for a Big Deal if there is one around. But unless Sonny’s launches their own “BBQ Beacon” app, which isn’t too likely, it seems like an awesome opportunity to create a branded Sonny’s tag that I can save to my account and receive alerts when I pass within range of one of their restaurants! I know folks that have similar passions for places like Costco and Starbucks.

A tiered, freemium model also seems like a no brainer… a free app for the casual dinner and going out users, but for someone like the event planner who wants more sophisticated features, surely they’d be happy to pay.

I plan to keep plugging away with Matchbook, and hopefully they continue to gain some traction and keep developing features and the scope of the product, so the next time I am driving through Baton Rouge Louisiana I get a friendly reminder that I can indeed get my Big Deal with Pork, Beans and Sweet Tea while I am there.

A quick search on Google and I noticed that they had a partnerships with Qualcomm, as an early user of an open source project called AllJoyn, which seems to power some of the wifi and Bluetooth side of the technology behind Lokast.  What the hell does Alljoyn do, well I can’t tell you in any great detail for sure, since I opted not to spend 2 hours reading through all the documentation and SDKs, but per their FAQs it’s “peer-to-peer technology that enables ad hoc, proximity-based, device-to-device communication without the use of an intermediary server…  that will enhance the user experience by simplifying how devices interact with one another.” And “AllJoyn was developed to solve many of the problems that exist in enabling peer-to-peer communication such as simple discovery, pairing, message routing, security, transport independence etc.”

So the takeaway from my non techie little brain is: 1. it’s location specific, 2. it’s an easy way to connect between devices, and 3. you can share stuff.

So while the use case that they seem to be pushing for AllJoyn is around gaming, and Lokast is taking it in the social direction. I think the big retailers like a Best Buy or Home Depot should have a look, not necessarily to allow me to connect to the other customers in the store at the time, but to use it as a way to provide better service to me and connect me with the store just for the time I am in there.  I am thinking of it less as true random, out in the wild peer to peer network, but more as a one super peer “authority” device (the store)  that will always be present in a store creating the foundation for a quick and easy ad hoc communication system  between a store and its patrons.

How would I like to be “connected” to the store while I am there?  Well some stuff is simple, like notifying the store that I want someone to come help me, or leaving feedback like the fact that salesman Bob really knows his cameras.  If there is some promotion happening in the store like 20% off DVDs, it would be good to know that as I make a bee line for the computer section on the opposite side of the store.

Then you could really start to get fancy, by say loading up a ton of product information and demos, so when customers want to do a little in store research of a product they’re considering buying they can get at it quickly and easily, without having to resort to a search of the entire web of data on the subject via Google.  Customers could sample clips of songs or movies in the DVDs section before buying, or peruse curated content of peer reviews of dishwashers or toys before buying. Not to mention that all the in store mobile search query data would be a massive goldmine for ad retargeting ala someone like Magnetic, Akamai/Acerno or Channel Intelligence.

I think if any of these in store retail plays like the area that Shopkick is going after will ever be successful, they’ll need to forget about the silly point schemes and game mechanics and trying to develop a one size fits all mobile app solution from their HQ in California.  I think the more successful route would be to build a simple platform that allows each retailers to take control, and build from the ground up, specifically around the needs of their store and communicating directly there locally with their customers.  Not to say that a lot of the content, like product reviews, couldn’t be one size fits all, but the implementation and people running the system need to be there locally in the store.

It seems to me something like AllJoyn could be pretty easily modified to do all this.

And most people seem happy enough that the plumbing behind Google does a pretty good job of spinning all the relevant information from everywhere on the web around like a centrifuge, drawing the good stuff that we want to the top where we can easily get to it. 

But the Google centrifuge can only work its magic on the stuff that is present in the tube. And while there is a huge amount and diversity of information out there on the web to be spun, what tends to get put out there is created by folks in the general category of ‘authors’. Web “authors” can of course be anyone from professional authors who create long, elegant and thoughtful prose for a living,  to corporate copywriters describing a box of cereal, to you and me “authoring” content  about all the crazy sh*t we did last night.   There are no arbiters of good or bad… simply tons and tons of contextual text, tags and links to be spun.

But when it comes to mobile search, as the folks that run research in this area will tell you, the stuff that we are often looking for is, well different. We’re less likely to be researching the African tree frog or stalking information about our ex gym teacher… we save that for the full 1024×768 glory of our desktop PCs.  Much of the time when conducting a mobile search we’re in search of something more specific and something directly around us in the world that we want to find or know more about.

But the problem is that since the beginning of the web, it’s been viewed as this virtual and separate world, while very much connected to the real world by its authors and what is being written about, but with very little efforts to make specific connections in real world space and time… at it’s best it’s an incredible depository of content but at it’s worse a historical dumping ground of nearly anything and everything that can be written or recorded on video.  An impressive collection of trillions of pages of inter connected content, but still generally just authored pages of web content. 

Two big areas where we’ve tried to connect back all those virtual historical pages of data directly back to specific things in the real world have been through people and places. With Facebook the current leader as the center point for information tied back to real specific people… and Facebook, Yelp, Google, Localeze and others all aggressively trying to build a similar stature as the centerpoint for information tied to places, but with no clear leader there yet.

A few months back I came across another company focused on yet another area of connecting the virtual world to physical… not with people or places, but with things. In this case things to buy in stores.

Retailigence is a San Francisco based start up that is looking to dig deep into the bowels of retail businesses, well into their inventory systems specifically, to do a better job of letting the virtual world know more about what products are available and at what color and price and most importantly where.  The company is not looking to launch the next great location aware shopping application, but instead wants to power a new era of capabilities that connect customers to the products they’re looking for by providing the core underlying data to other Internet companies through an API.  As a recent TechCrunch article points out, they’re kind of a Localeze for local product rather than place level information.

The obvious customers for their data would be folks like Milo who are specifically in the online local product search business. The not so obvious customer would be folks like Nordstrom’s  who recently opened up access to their inventory systems which gave their own internal sales staff better visibility into where product may be anywhere throughout the virtual ecommerce warehouse or in stores across the country. According to Jamie Nordstrom, the President of Nordstrom Direct, same store sales saw a 8% lift, and “inventory publishing has a significant impact”.  There is a great NY Times article with all the details worth checking out.

Just yesterday, Retailigence won the judges pick for best in show at the 2010 Under The Radar conference and during the Q&A with the judges (video below), one judge makes reference to how mainstream “high funnel” marketers could use this data in their advertising… for example Best Buy could turn a somewhat generic national online banner ad or even a magazine ad into one that features (online) or is easily linkable (magazine) to the local price and availability of that big screen Samsung LCD you’ve had your eye on. The opportunities in the traditional and digital ad and marketing ecosystem seem quite interesting.

We certainly aren’t there yet, but it seems to be getting closer to the point where a reference or search on the web with high local intent doesn’t return the entire Internet full of HTML information related to a topic, but instead recognizes our location and context and attempts to discriminate for the better about what we really want.

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.

There are two basic underlying practices as part of the guidelines:

1. Users must receive notice about how location information will be used, protected and shared… although the form of notice is not dictated

2. LBS providers must show that users gave consent to divulge location before initiating the location based service and users must have the right to revoke consent at anytime… although the way in which consent is recorded or retracted is not dictated

Some other details of interest, and what one may potentially read between the lines: • CTIA encourages the industry to develop “new technology to empower users to exercise control”… in other words lets not just bury some words in the terms & conditions somewhere to cover our butts, someone please come up with a cool system to give consumer controls over their location data that they’ll actually use… maybe a fireeagle-ish thing?

• A wireless carrier is a LBS provider when it directly provides users with a service, not when it provides location information to an application developer who then turns around and offers a location based service. In other words the guy directly offering the service is the one bearing the LBS provider responsibilities, not the originator of the location data, so lets provide protection (and remove some risk) to the carrier providing location data, thus encouraging it.

• When location information is not linked to a specific device or person, but only used in the form of aggregated or anonymous data, notice must still be given, but the consent requirement seems to go away… ie you still need to tell people what you’re up to, but since it’s not about any individual, getting individuals consent would be over-kill.

• LBS providers must inform users of how long location data will be retained and should only retain location data as long as business needs require and should afterwards be destroyed or converted to aggregate or anonymous data. This seems to be a tricky one, in many cases it would seem to be in the business best interest to retain as much information as it can for as long as it can… so I don’t see many folks being anxious to destroy this information if there may be a valuable business purpose down the road that they haven’t come up with yet.

 • “Consent may be implicit such as when users request a service that obviously relies on the location of their device”… ie all that stuff about consent doesn’t really apply if you’re running an app called “Whats nearby me now?” where it’s obvious that it needs to know your location to perform.

The whole things reminds me quite a bit of what the web community has done with regards to browser cookies and PII online, so there seems to be a lot of precedence here. As you might expect there is nothing revolutionary in the guidelines and it is more or less common sense and doesn’t disrupt much of the way the location based services I’ve seen operate already.

It may have been my imagination, but while reading it I felt as though the CTIA was really hoping that someone would develop an innovation that would allow users to actively manage their location sharing while realizing that in reality it’s likely to go the route of check boxes on multi page terms and conditions documents that no one reads.

 Just to keep this simple, let’s say that there are 15 million brick and mortar retailers in the U.S. (rough estimate) and that Google has 1.5 million advertisers currently as customers. Even if all the existing Google advertisers were brick and mortar advertisers and in the U.S. only they’d still only have 10% penetration of available advertisers. Now in reality over half of Google’s revenue is international and you can bet that a huge chunk of those advertisers are pure e-tailer with no physical store in sight.

There is only so much searching happening on the web and only a small percent of advertisers engaging with Google to try to reach those searchers, so if you’re Google what do you do to speed things along? Well you try to provide more stuff to search for, make it super easy to search for it, and try to engage the 90%+ of advertisers that don’t current engage with you.

So lets look at some of the newly announced efforts made over the past few days, particularly around location and expanding beyond the virtual world to the physical one.

The Gold Star Approach for Small Businesses: If you’re really good Google will give you a sticker!

A few months back, google created placepages for every place on Earth. If one of those places happens to be a business, Google obviously hopes that the business takes an interest in its placepage and engages with them to improve it and make it better. This week Google launched a Google “favorite places” sticker program that encourages local brick and mortar business owners to claim their local business center listing and to add information to their PlacePages.

Google has annouced that it will initially select 100k of the most sought out and researched businesses on Google (~1% of the 28 Million U.S. businesses) and send them window sticker which passerby’s can scan with a special reader on their phone in order to read and submit reviews as well as receive special coupons.

I am not so sure this one will be a big driver… is a Google favorite places sticker likely to do much for retailers? I am not so sure… I suspect that only the geekiest of the geeks will be standing on the sidewalk whipping out a cellphone to snap a picture of that QR code and stand there flipping through reviews. By the time you’re standing by the front window of an establishment, I suspect your five senses and a guage of how tired your legs are or how bad traffic is will guide your decision. I am just not sure that standing directly outside the store is the time when folks are going to do 10 minutes of web research on their decision on whether to enter or not.

Just give consumers the information they want and figure the rest out later.

The mobile local discovery market is quickly filling up with applications that allow you to do either free form searches or to navigate through a directory to discover what is around you. But searching and navigating is work, especially on many small and clunky mobile devices. So Google also announced a new feature which will appear on the Google mobile hopepage where you can do away with all that messy searching and navigating and simply ask to see everything nearby me now.

 This is a great feature, sometimes people just don’t know what they want, so why force them to make decisions via search of directories? In the real world there is plenty of serendiptious discovery happening as you walk or drive down the street… why should the experience on your mobile device be any different.

Give people more, more, more stuff to search for… like real time local store inventory information

 Knowing that there is a nearby WalMart is nice. But knowing that the nearby WalMart has your favorite flavor of Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream in stock for $2.99 a pint is nicer. Allowing searchers to go deeper than general store level details with their search is a no brainer. You don’t buy a WalMart… you buy the stuff in WalMart. But this is not anything new, there are a lot of folks that have gone down this path, the key will be how many inventory systems Google can get into and how well it can infer what I want. Google has shown that it can kick ass in the world of cachable, contextual web pages, text and hyperlinks, but the jury is still out in terms of organizing and sorting through large volumes of non contextual, stand alone raw data sitting by itself in an inventory system somewhere.

I suspect it will be a while before product level mobile searches are commonplace, either that or life for the local WalMart marketing manager is about to get a hell of a lot more complicated!

Give people new easy ways to search: If you can see it you can search it.

 Is typing or speaking just too much work? Well Google Goggles, was just announced for Andoid phones, and uses the phones camera to do the work for you. Simply snap a photo of something and Google will try to figure out what it is and return relevant information about it. For small businesses, you don’t even need to take a picture, just hold up the phone camera to capture imagery of the outside of the business, and Google provides a link to that retailers Placepage.

This by far the most gee whiz announcement from a technological perspective, and like the favorite places sticker program seems very much designed to generate excitement among the small brick and mortar retailer community to get them engaged with their Google PlacePages and with Google in general. It certainly seems like nifty technology and if it ever comes available for the iPhone I’d certainly give it a whirl. But as with the sticker program, I wonder how much use Google Goggles will see in the real world. So far most of the visual and augmented reality I’ve seen so far is pretty limited in their practical applications, or at least don’t provide much advantage over the readily available alternatives. But without being able to play with it hands on, its hard to say how impactful it will be, but let’s just say I am a bit skeptical.

All the panelists were great and included the CEOs of NearbyNow and Placecast as well as agency and research firm representation. It was a good general backgrounder on the state of things in location based advertising and a couple of the comments by Derek Leedy from Mediasmith resonated in particular with regard to what was unique about the ability to use “location” as a criteria for delivering advertising. Derek made some observation about how the location element adds an important new element to what marketers can infer, based on ones physical surroundings, and how it allows advertisers to reach customers when they’re potentially more action oriented and in a different consideration mode than when they’re on the web… emphasizing the benefits of the real time nature and the added relevance it brings.

It reminded me in many ways of how online search advertising is different than online display advertsing… with search being more action oriented and a generally different frame of mind… and we all know how that worked out.

Scott Dunlop of NearbyNow also had some telling stats to quantify some of the lift they’ve seen from better location relevance and I was generally surprised to hear of some of the success they were seeing. The last time I used NearbyNow I found myself time afer time back at an e-commerce web site rather than a real nearby store… I decided to give NearbyNow another run, but I’ll save that for another post.

I dug around to get the latest and greatest, and it looks like in the good old fashioned web world search is about 45% of ad revenue today with premium display close to a 1/3. So Kelsey’s predictions for the mobile world certainly seem to magnify the trend we’ve seen so far on the web with search having an even bigger role and display, a decidedly smaller role. To some degree this makes a lot of sense, since the small footprint of the mobile handset doesn’t leave a lot of room for all that lovely creative ad work, the sight sound and motion and all, and search is simple, quick and to the point which is well suited to the phone.

An even more interesting part, was not just the AMOUNT of search revenue, but the TYPE of searches expected… citing data from Google that mobile searches are 2-3x more often to be local in nature than searches done via a desktop, The Kelsey Group calls for over 1/3 of mobile searches to be “local” in nature in five years, and for over half of that whopping $2.27B in search revenue to be generated from “local” search queries.

Kinda makes you wonder what kind of local stuff all those folks will be searching for on their phones and who will be the benficiaries of that cool $1B+ in local oriented search ad spending.

After playing with the geo location features on my mobile twitter client Tweetie and also playing with the location oriented Twinkle application by Tapulous, which all use various types of technology to determine your location and the filter out tweets from folks outside a certain radius… going back to the old school way of registering yourself on a good old fashioned website
with your twitter name and your city or zip code just felt well, very old school…

So I had to dig around and find out why such an old school thing like a local twitter registration site would even exist, let alone seem to be proliferating.

From the best I can tell, there seem to be two potential drivers… one is that I was suprised to learn that nearly 2/3 of twitter users are using the service directly through the web or via a desktop application. Maybe it’s because of how I was introduced to Twitter, but I always thought it more as a mobile thing… you know with the 140 character limit thing and all… well evidently it’s not. So that alone explains alot, most people don’t have the technological approach to a geo-filter available and they just want to find local people to twitter with… fair enough.

But the other cool aspect of a list of local twitter users is for accomplishing the opposite of what the location aware technology does for ya… location aware tech allows you to see those immediately around you and their tweets, but the old fashioned registration site in theory could let you drop in on virtual tweeps and their tweets in a specific area somewhere else.

Now the inner Colbert in me may joke that focusing in and reading the tweet stream of the general public in Shanghai if you live in New York, seems pretty damn useless, and in many cases it probably is. But in some cases it could be valuable, for example if you’re heading to a new city and are looking for recommendations on where to get a good steak, who better than to ask than the local twittersphere in the city where you’re headed. Or if you want to keep tabs on what the buzz is in your old college town, you can drop in on the local tweet stream there… in theory having a local group to zoom in on could have huge possibilities in allowing journalists to zoom in to follow the local action related to a breaking news event in a particular area.

On a related note there is a great article on Local Search News about how Twitter should register and create accounts for local businesses to help better identify them in the twittersphere. Not so we can follow the local Italian restaurant to read a constant stream of tweets about how good their last batch of lasagna is, but to allow for a common currency for referring to specific places and establishments as twitter nation so often does. It makes a lot of sense to me.