Webware

AUSTIN, Texas--There's Loopt, Brightkite, Whrrl, FourSquare, Rummble, uLocate, Google Latitude, Yahoo Fire Eagle, and goodness knows which other ones we haven't heard of yet. The location-based mobile networking space has been front and center at this year's South by Southwest Interactive Festival as hundreds of tech enthusiasts from around the country have been eager to find their friends and learn what's happening.

Perhaps it's fitting that in one of the festival's last panels on Tuesday afternoon, a handful of executives and high-level developers from the location-awareness space got together for a discussion called "Using GPS and Location to Enhance Social Networking." The big question: Do all these disparate services have to get interoperable?

Moderator Tom Marchioro, the location-based services architect at GPS navigation company Garmin, brought up an analogy to text messaging and Web-based IM, two early social-media technolgoies that took very different routes.

After years of carrier restriction, text messages "came up with a standard, and last year there were 1.9 trillion text messages sent worldwide, and it's a total cash cow," Marchioro said. "Internet messaging, 10 to 15 years after it was invented...is a bunch of independent networks and there's no monetization model. So that would argue that if we're going to have a bunch of location-based social networks, they might want to interoperate."

One panelist, Bryan Jones of Mobile Blast, brought up the OSLO Accord, a project raised at this year's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, which hopes to bring an OpenID-like standard to location sharing.

Not all the panelists seemed to be on board.

"We would love to be able to work with the other social networks out there, (but) some of the challenge with that is that your social graphs tend to be very different across different social networks," said Martin May, founder of Brightkite.

John Adams, from Twitter's operations team and who hinted that the microblogging service "hopes to have more services that are location-based in the future," said that it could be technically difficult as well. "Different services have different methods for identifying, storing, and locating different privacy data," he said. "With Brightkite, they have a much higher level of granularity around your location data...and it's very different to translate that between both systems."

There's really not a clear answer. And the entrance of two huge tech players into the space--Google's Latitude and Yahoo's Fire Eagle--has given location-based networking some validation. It's also possible that one of them will be the company to come up with the standard that will help level the playing field and allow different services to coexist much like cell carriers in the text-messaging space. Or, perhaps location-based networking will better mirror microblogging: a few years ago, there were several competing services like Pownce and Jaiku in addition to Twitter that are now either defunct or effectively afterthoughts.

One more thing on a slightly unrelated note: Adams did touch upon the "How is Twitter going to make money?" question. "We are looking at commercial accounts. We see a lot of potential in adding that service that (lets) you know you're talking to Shaq or that you know you're talking to a certain celebrity, and to weed out impersonation," he said, "without imposing fees on existing free services."

Breaking: Twitter to start selling "I'm Famous For Real" badges! Money problem solved!

AUSTIN, Texas--A couple of days ago I wrote a story suggesting that the Twitter saturation level here at the South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) festival was so high that the service's value was being affected.

Now, after four full days here, I think that conclusion is worth a reality check: Twitter is out-and-out dominating SXSWi.

To be sure, the massive numbers of tweets that are being posted using the "#sxsw" tag is making it more difficult for those using Twitter to find specific information than was the case at SXSWi 2007 or SXSWi 2008. But the reality is, if you're part of the conference this year, it feels very much like you simply cannot do anything, go anywhere, talk to anyone, see any panel or have a meal without Twitter having played a role.

From the 32bit party Monday night to people's reactions to science-fiction author Bruce Sterling's annual SXSWi rant to alerts of free ice cream being handed out on the streets of Austin, the collective agenda is being directed in 140-character bursts, even if it takes a little more work to find out what you want to find out.

Add that to the fact that the iPhone has proven a magical and nearly ubiquitous device on which to conduct that 140-character orchestra, and you've got a seriously hard-to-topple-off-the-throne combination.

Of course, there are many other communications media at play here. Besides the introduction of FourSquare, the launch of iPhone interactivity for Facebook Connect and other social networking services like Britekite, Whrrl and Meebo, there's certainly been no shortage of e-mail, instant messaging, text messaging and, believe it or not, phone calls.

But through it all, Twitter is the backbone. It is the organizing principle of SXSWi. And while the SXSWi crowd would seem to be the vanguard of this level of all-encompassing Twitter devotion, it is clear that this is just the proving ground for what will be coming for many other parts of connected society.

After all, just a year ago, nearly all of the most-followed Twitter users were members of the digerati. Now, it's nearly all mainstream celebrities or personalities. Can Twitter handle this? I don't think anyone knows.

But what I'm seeing here at SXSWi is that the service, even without a developed revenue stream and even with a recent history of functional instability and even with so much traffic that it can simply be overwhelming, has become indispensable. Take Twitter away from the crowd here suddenly, and I think the conference would grind to a halt.

It would recover, and pretty quickly. This is an resourceful group of people. There are other options. No one should believe for a minute that the advent of Twitter or other social media neuters the digerati's ability to communicate with traditional analog tools. But if Twitter were suddenly gone, there would be one heck of a hiccup.

Last year, I wrote that despite many companies' desire to repeat the incredible debut Twitter had at SXSWi 2007, there was no denying that Twitter circa 2008 was the new Twitter.

And despite my misgivings about what is clearly a saturation problem, I have to conclude that here in Austin, in 2009, Twitter is once again the new Twitter.

Here's to FourSquare! Former Dodgeball loyalists gather poolside at SXSWi to celebrate the new app.

(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET)

AUSTIN, Texas--"I couldn't be any more psyched for how it's taken off," FourSquare founder Dennis Crowley said of his brand-new mobile social-networking application, which made its public debut here at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival. "It's been, like, 5,000 times better than I expected."

We were wearing bathing suits. A fellow hardcore FourSquare user, media consultant Rex Sorgatz, had used the service to announce a "bikini flash mob" at the rooftop pool of the Omni Hotel on Monday afternoon. When about 20 people had showed up, Sorgatz--in a cowboy hat, Texas-flag swim trunks, and his trademark hipster glasses--raised a drink and said, "Here's to FourSquare!"

I'm biased. We all were. The iPhone-centric FourSquare has been a project near and dear to our hearts in the New York tech scene, as many of us were loyal users of Dodgeball, the service that Crowley built as a graduate-school thesis and sold to Google in 2005. In January, Google announced that it would be shutting the service down amid budget cuts, and Crowley (along with co-developer Naveen Selvadurai) got cranking on its successor so that they could debut it in time for SXSWi. I was an alpha tester, as were most of those at the impromptu pool party.

If the number of FourSquare friend requests in my in-box are any indication, it's been a hit this week. While it hasn't been as buzzworthy as the then-new Twitter was at SXSWi '07, it's undoubtedly one of the things that people will be talking about when they return home from Austin later this week. And if it goes as Crowley and Selvadurai hope, they'll keep using it, too.

Like Dodgeball (and other location-based mobile applications like Whrrl, Brightkite, and Loopt), FourSquare lets you broadcast your location to your friends. Unlike Dodgeball, FourSquare uses GPS on the iPhone (an SMS code and a mobile Web site is available for other devices, but apps for Android, BlackBerry and the like are down the pipeline) and lets users rack up points and badges for awarding nightlife habits and accomplishments.

"Naveen and I had been kicking around these ideas for a while, since last summer, and then nothing was seriously built until, I guess, that night that we were all at Lock's (that'd be Curbed founder and prolific Dodgeball user Lockhart Steele) birthday party and the rumor started spreading that Dodgeball was getting shut down," Crowley said. "We started to talk (about how) we've really got to build this thing because it's going to be turned off."

FourSquare was built in a matter of weeks, because Crowley and Selvadurai wanted to be able to roll it out in time for SXSWi. "It is, admittedly a little bit sloppy, and it's buggy, and people call us out and say we launched too soon," Crowley said of the occasional slip-ups and outages for FourSquare, which went live in the iTunes App Store less than 24 hours before SXSWi kicked off.. "The goal was to launch here and have people take it back to wherever they live."

Now, they're literally building the application in the SXSWi petri dish, a massive gathering of digital-media's early adopters and innovators who are all eager to socialize and navigate the labyrinthine Austin party scene. Special "badges" have been created for SXSWi. On Monday morning, I earned my "Panel Nerd" badge for spending what FourSquare deems to be too much time at the Austin Convention Center. (Message to my editors: Take note of this!)

He said that while user interest has been through the roof, investors--FourSquare is currently self-funded and run out of Crowley's apartment as well as a number of East Village coffee shops--have been quieter. "I haven't really seen any investors here, to be honest," he said. I've been getting e-mails from a few people, but I haven't run into anyone in the halls or anything." He'll probably need that if FourSquare gets much bigger just to keep its servers afloat. But with penny-pinching the inevitable VC habit du jour, it could take some work.

Crowley also laughed off a Gawker report that Google's lawyers were about to start breathing down his neck over the similarities between Dodgeball and FourSquare--even though Google has launched its own location-aware platform, Latitude.

When Crowley and Selvadurai return to New York later this week, they'll have a lot to do. FourSquare users at SXSWi have been blunt, sending out Twitter messages pointing out bugs and asking when there will be better features to find their friends, like an address-book import function. They'll have to figure out some way to control users attempting to game the system, something that Crowley says has already popped up, and work on building a FourSquare presence in other cities. Right now there are 12, including Boston, Denver, and Minneapolis.

Plus, location-based mobile networking is a hot space. Competitors like Brightkite and Whrrl are better-established, bolstered by investor money, and have already worked in features like Facebook Connect integration. Crowley and Selvadurai have some catching up to do.

They'll also have to deal with what happens when they use FourSquare to "check in" to downtown pizzerias and I show up to steal their food. Just sayin'.

Location-based social network Whrrl has a new application for iPhone users called Whrrl 2.0. It lets you post photos and status updates that are tied to a geographical location. It includes integration with Facebook Connect and Twitter, meaning you can sign up and use the service with your Facebook credentials, and have your location updates and status updates from Whrrl cross-posted to both your social-networking profile and Twitter page.

Built-in privacy features let you pick how much of an update you want certain groups of people to see. For instance, when posting your location you can choose whether to give a certain group of people an approximation of where you are, or the exact location--complete with street number. You can also differentiate between the people you've added to your friends list, considering them as friends or "trusted friends," the latter of which can be given more information.

Instead of providing coordinates, or a little pin on a big map, the service will cross reference your locations with publicly listed buildings and locations which may save you a keystroke or two. It also remembers places you've been and will let you pick from a list of favorites.

The app packs all sorts of eye-candy goodness. Vibrantly color-laced menus pulse and pop up and over a large, user friendly map that you're able to zoom around on to see what other people are up to. It's not too over the top and gives it a very organic feeling. That said, the application is largely limited to your immediate surroundings. You can't search to see what people are doing in other cities without first befriending them, and the map only zooms out so far that attempting to cross to other parts of the country does not work. In other words a Loopt, this is not.

It is, however, possible to discover people in other cities from within the application although this requires digging through posted notes (usually the featured ones since you can't find these on the map) to find something interesting enough to warrant a friend request. In a dense urban setting this may prove useful, but I think the developers could go a long way in making the global stream of information easier to parse.

Existing Whrrl users with iPhones will love this application. Whrrl newbies, however, may be a little unsure how to start exploring what others are up to.

Whrrl's iPhone app lets you update your status to Facebook and Twitter, take photos, and see what other people are up to nearby. Click to embiggen.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Zannel, a media-rich microblogging service that launched in late 2007, has a new and free iPhone application that puts many of its features on to the popular portable device.

Called CityWatch, the app takes a similar approach to Loopt and Whrrl in allowing you to see and interact with what's going on in your general proximity. It does this by taking each item that's been posted to Zannel and overlaying it onto a map using its geo tag. This also includes items from other networks, like Twitter, Flickr, and eventually any other service that has an open API.

What's neat in Zannel's case is that this activity becomes exploratory and interactive, as you're able to both post and browse through new content in your city or anywhere else in the world. You can also reply to comments in threaded form, just like you can by using the social network on your computer. Eventually users will also be able to sort through all Zannel's content not just by location, but by topic across the entire network.

In my initial run with the application I actually got a little freaked out since the first photo to pop up in my neighborhood was one I had snapped just a few hours before and uploaded to Flickr. I hadn't even plugged in my Flickr credentials, which you can do, along with Twitter to cross-post the Zannel equivalent of "tweets" and vice-versa.

My only qualm with the otherwise very enjoyable application is that it relies a little bit too much on Safari when it comes to making changes in its settings menu. If you want to authorize Twitter or Flickr, you're kicked off the application and into the browser. The same goes for changing notification settings, which if you're signing up for the first time, are automatically set to opt-you in to a text message and e-mail every time another Zannel member: decides to follow you, publishes a comment, sends you a friend request, or replies to one of your messages. All this can be turned off, but it's annoying that it's turned on by default and must be managed outside of the application.

CityWatch by Zannel (App Store link)

CityWatch offers two views for geotagged content, both in list form and on a map so you can see where posts and photos come from.

(Credit: CNET Networks / Josh Lowensohn)

(Credit: Facebook)

Along with its nifty new iPhone application, Facebook on Monday night unveiled a new home page. No, not the moderately infamous "redesign" of its member pages--this is a new look for the page that you see when you navigate to Facebook.com without being logged in. It's what you'll see if you're not yet a member.

There's a pretty new blue gradient background, sure, and it makes the whole page look a little bit less stuffy. But more importantly, there's a map of the world with little Facebook "head" icons scattered about the globe connected by hash mark lines.

The term "social utility," one of founder Mark Zuckerberg's preferred phrases, is gone from the home page, replaced by the more Zen-like description of the social network: "Facebook helps you connect and share with the people in your life."

The map is significant. Facebook wants to be a global power, arguably in a way that not even Google is--look at the difficulty that Page, Brin, & co. have had dealing with regional rivals like China's Baidu. At the South by Southwest Interactive Festival in March, Zuckerberg talked about how young people in war-torn regions of the Middle East were using Facebook to communicate and broaden their horizons.

More than half of Facebook's 100-million-plus users are outside the United States now, which means that the social network may be well on its way toward achieving global domination over its regional rivals.

On a more speculative note, the fact that this new, map-adorned home page was released in conjunction with a new iPhone application is interesting. The iPhone 3G is GPS-enabled, and some have speculated that real-time location sharing of some sort may be on the way for Facebook.

There are a handful of start-ups that already have location-aware services, and consumers have been reluctant to adopt them; Loopt, Whrrl, and Brightkite haven't exploded the way some expected they would after they released iPhone 3G applications.

If Facebook made a move in the space, though, things could be different. Because, goodness knows, millions of Facebook users don't seem to have any qualms about sharing everything else about themselves on the Web.

Location-based social network Whrrl has forged a rather odd partnership with content provider HBO to place various fictional characters from the show Entourage as real users on its network.

Events from the television show will end up as annotated items on Whrrl's user-generated map. You can subscribe to whichever of the characters you want, and each of their items go into your central friends feed along with regular users who are providing "real" ratings and locational bookmarks. As the series progresses, locations seen on the show will continue to be placed on the map.

This is a novel move in a time when content is getting its own community-made fan characters. Some of the first signs of this were on Facebook with fake user accounts, then later fan pages administrated by fans once Facebook began to clamp down. Most recently, the trend has ended up on Twitter with characters from AMC's Mad Men and Marvel comics getting taken down by the parent companies who own that intellectual property.

You can find the various characters from the show on this page. If this ends up being a hit, expect it to leech out into other social networks and shows.

Whrrl now lets you follow characters from the TV show 'Entourage'. The characters will continue to update with events from the show as the season progresses.

(Credit: CBS Interactive)

With more GPS-enabled handsets on the way--iPhone 3G, I'm looking at you--there are few Web 2.0 niches that are more hyped-up than location-based services.

The latest evidence: Nokia announced Monday that it plans to acquire Plazes, a start-up still in private beta.

Financial terms of the deal, which is expected to close in the third quarter of 2008, were not disclosed. Plazes, which is based in Zurich, Switzerland, but works primarily out of Berlin, will become part of Nokia's Software and Services division. Plazes' technology will likely be worked into future mobile apps.

It's good news for Plazes, which has 13 employees. The track-your-friends-on-a-map application was in a tight market that kept growing tighter, with no clear winner emerging.

"When we started in 2005 the potential of that space might have been obvious, but it was an uphill battle nevertheless, with so many concepts gone sour before," a posting Monday on the Plazes blog explained.

Indeed, the first breakout start-up in the space, Dodgeball, was quickly acquired by Google. And instead of gaining mass-market success, it faded away.

Since then, start-ups like Loopt (which had some prominent stage time at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference this month), Whrrl, and Brightkite--many of which do more or less exactly the same thing--have popped up and gained minor to moderate buzz. By getting acquired, Plazes has pulled itself out of the fray and, in effect, has ensured that it won't go under like some of its location-aware start-up brethren surely will.

"If all goes well, in the near future Plazes will be made available to millions of Nokia customers both online and on millions of mobile devices," the Plazes blog post read. It will still be available as a standalone service, and its iPhone application is still on track.

Location-based social networking might be a clogged market, but it's still hot: Pelago, the parent company of mobile service Whrrl, is set to announce that the company has pulled in a $15 million Series B financing round. It'll be used for "strategic technology investments," as well as partnerships, which are crucial for mobile services that have to deal with cell carriers. Whrrl also hopes to expand across North America and into overseas markets.

The new cash comes from lead investor Deutsche Telekom's T-Mobile Venture Fund, with contributions from Reliance Technology Ventures and DAG Ventures. Previous investors from Pelago's $7.4 million Series A round also added to the $15 million: Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Trilogy Equity Partners, and Bezos Expeditions.

There are a handful of location-based mobile services--Loopt, Brightkite, Rummble, Where.com, Yahoo's Fire Eagle--attempting to capture a slice of the market, and none have broken out since early leader Dodgeball was acquired by Google and proceeded to fade away.

So is the $15 million warranted? Maybe. Whrrl slightly differentiates itself from its competitors by using a graphical interface to show Yelp-like recommendations from friends. On one hand, it may be free from "stalking" criticisms that other track-your-friends services are subject to; on the other, Whrrl could be toast if a site like Yelp launches a similar mobile service.