Social networking apps go location-aware
- Wednesday, December 31, 2008, 16:44
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In September 2008, jaws dropped at the TechCrunch 50 conference.
The reason was the Sekai Camera, an iPhone application that takes the view from the phone’s camera and augments it with data overlays including user-generated content.
Could this be the future of social apps?
Er, probably not. The demo was eye-popping, but details are frustratingly thin on the ground.
Developer Tonchidot won’t say what technology it uses, although it does say image recognition isn’t part of the system, and its promise of integrating information from other Sekai Camera users, Tonchidot itself and other web services is rather vague.
If it’s real it could be the mobile internet’s killer app; but then again, it could end up being the mobile equivalent of Duke Nukem Forever.
What’s interesting isn’t the app itself, though. It’s that instead of dismissing it, people wanted to know the nuts and bolts of how it works. We might not be overlaying social data on the real world just yet, but we’re not far off it.
Location, location
Location-aware social apps have been around for a while, but the iPhone hype has given them a new lease of life. The iTunes App Store is stuffed with them. nrme is a kind of location-aware Twitter.
iCloseBy connects you to people sharing the same wireless network. Now! GeoNetworking is designed to post information or requests for others to pick up. Loopt is a kind of Facebook that knows where everybody is. The list goes on, and there’s a similarly long one for Google’s Android.
The renewed interest in location awareness is partly due to the increasing popularity of GPS-enabled mobile phones such as the iPhone, and high-end Nokia and Blackberry offerings. However, GPS isn’t a prerequisite for location-based applications to work. Google’s My Location service offers near-GPS accuracy for phones without GPS chips, and inevitably they’ve stuck it in Gears for developers to play with.
One of the most interesting location-aware applications is Whrrl. It’s best described as a social mapping service (Mashable describes it as “Yelp plus Twitter”), enabling you to find places or events based on your contacts’ locations, recommendations or interests. Currently in beta, it’s available for 17 US cities and works on PCs and smartphones.
What makes Whrrl different from many location-based services is that it has a smart business model. CEO Jeff Holden believes “foot-streaming” – that is, recording location data to deliver Amazon-style ‘people who did this also do that’ recommendations to the physical world – could revolutionise advertising. Holden wants to target the small businesses that normally advertise in the Yellow Pages or the local paper by helping them target competitors’ customers, and its location data will show whether the promotions actually worked.
Impressive? Investors certainly think so. Whrrl has attracted heavyweight financial backing and it was also the first service to be backed by the iFund, an Apple-sponsored fund to boost iPhone development. However, like any new social app, Whrrl suffers from the “only fax machine in the world” problem: if you’ve got the only one, who’s going to send you faxes? What use is a new social network if everybody is on a different one?
Eagle eyed
One of the most elegant solutions to this problem, for location-based applications at least, is Yahoo!’s Fire Eagle. By sending your location data to Fire Eagle, you can then cascade it to any Fire Eagleenabled service – so it’s as easy to update 20 services as it is to update one. Crucially, you can tailor your information on a per-app basis – so a “what’s near me?” app would get your precise location, while your friends on a social network might only know what region or country you’re in.
That’s not Yahoo!’s only idea. Its forthcoming oneConnect, currently available as a preview for the iPhone, is a data aggregator that takes in your Yahoo! address book, your phone’s address book and your social network contacts and puts them in a single application, bringing you status updates from whichever services your contacts happen to use.
It works in reverse, too, so you can update your status within oneConnect and cascade it across MySpace, Twitter, Facebook and your chosen Messenger applications. At the time of writing it supports Bebo, Flickr, MySpace, Dopplr, Friendster, Twitter, Facebook, Last.fm and YouTube.
Of course, Yahoo! isn’t the only firm playing around with data portability. Microsoft and Google both have their own contact APIs, and Facebook and MySpace have enabled sites to access some profile data. However, as Joseph Smarr and Chris Messina of Portable Contacts point out, “Each of these APIs is unique and proprietary.”
Portable Contacts offers an alternative, a “common, open spec that everyone can benefit from” that takes advantage of existing standards such as vCard, OpenSocial, OpenID, OAuth and so on. As Marc Canter explains: “This standard doesn’t have a logo and barely has a website. But it has working code and interoperability between Yahoo, Google, Plaxo, SixApart, MySpace and others. From day one, watch for huge benefits to end-users, bringing data portability to real life.”
According to TechCrunch, AOL is redesigning its homepage to include “user-created bookmark links on the top left, links to third-party email services Yahoo! Mail, Gmail and Hotmail, and links to outside social networks Facebook and MySpace”. This is a very big deal: as ReadWriteWeb’s Marshall Kirkpatrick points out, “With 60 million unique visitors monthly, AOL.com still gets three times as many visitors as Digg.”
Yahoo! is going in the same direction. In September, it told the Associated Press that its forthcoming revamp will go widget crazy, enabling users to add content from the likes of Netflix, Amazon and iTunes. Even Microsoft is getting in on the act, with its Live Mesh platform designed to synchronise data from multiple sources across computers, phones and web browsers.
According to a memo from chief software architect Ray Ozzie, “The web is first and foremost a mesh of people … all applications will grow to recognise and utilise the inherent group-forming aspects of their connection to the web, in ways that will become fundamental to our experiences.”
Walled-garden social networks can be fun, but the open approach is much more exciting. The combination of data portability, location awareness and the ongoing quest by developers to mash everything up with everything else is enormous. For example, friends’ book reviews, holiday reviews or restaurant reviews aren’t much use on Facebook, but if you could see them on Amazon, on TripAdvisor or when you’re 20 feet from the premises, they suddenly become much more useful. And that’s where we’re headed.
The first wave of social apps was all about bringing people to use specific platforms. The second wave is about bringing the platforms to the people.
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First published in .net magazine, Issue 183
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