How the Moves App Can Track Your Steps, Places and Commute

Ever since jumping feet first into the Fitbit fanclub last year, I've been quantifying just about every step, finding excuses to take a walk, parking further away, and generally being more active. I lost 30 pounds from my peak weight, and have found many people doing the same, as we battle on the weekly leaderboard for the most steps. If I don't have my Fitbit tracker on, my activities simply don't count. But on top of my daily Fitbit habit, for the last few months I've been tracking my comings and goings with the Moves app for Android, and have found it a strong companion that tells me information about where I've been, even if it lacks the social component that has Fitbit play such a big role in my need to be competitive.

Unlike Fitbit, which requires a dedicated device, be it a tracker or armband, to glean data from your walking, running or cycling, Moves leverages the built-in accelerometer and GPS data from your phone to pick up on your step count. So if you're someone who doesn't want to carry yet another device, and you just want to keep tabs on your own activity, Moves does exactly that.

      A Big Day On Moves Shows A Long Walk on the Steven's Creek Trail
Moves initially didn't get a lot of interest from me for three reasons, after colleague +Scott Knaster introduced me to the app. The first is that when using Fitbit and Moves in tandem, Moves almost always counts 10 to 20 percent fewer steps than does Fitbit, for the same ground covered. Having been a staunch believer in Fitbit's data, and always wanting the higher numbers, Moves lost. Second, Moves always requires you to have your phone on you, so if you run low on battery, your steps don't count. Fitbit's battery goes for days and that's never been an issue. Third, Moves is done in complete solitude. There's not yet any ability to follow people or share with them your activity - which is a keystone of Fitbit's intrigue.

You Know It's Bad When It Takes an Hour from Mountain View to Milpitas

With all that out of the way, Moves gets more interesting for what it does do. As I move from place to place, Moves makes a best effort to find destinations along my path. If I go to the office, Moves taps into Foursquare's map data to find the office building. If I am on a scenic trail, again, Moves taps into Foursquare. And Moves is smart enough to know, based on my speed, whether I am walking, running, cycling or driving - which is labeled as transport.

The latter bit, transport, now makes it easier to show my wife just when I left the office, or how long I was in the car, or can be shown to demonstrate just how ridiculous traffic is getting in South Bay with the tech economy doing so well.

Two weeks ago, Moves made its first move (see what I did there?) into making their data get out of your phone and possibly onto the Web (like Fitbit) and into new applications with their launch of accounts and connected apps. One can easily see a future with your historical data on the Web or sharing with friends by email or other connected services, including Moves Export, which promises to take the activities you're already doing and take them to RunKeeper or compare with Facebook friends, further bringing the two apps closer.

You can find Moves free on Google Play. If you're an iOS user, don't fret, Moves is on the App Store for 99 cents too. It may be double counting for me to track all my steps twice, but as you can see, there's a good reason. Even if you already use Fitbit, check out Moves. And if you don't, there's really little reason you shouldn't give it a shot.

Disclosure: It could be assumed Foursquare Maps compete with Google Maps, and yes, I work for Google. But then, I don't see how that makes this post biased more or less. I just like writing disclosures.

Ahead of SXSW, Yobongo Is Acquired-ongo

A year and a half ago, Caleb Elston left his cushy job at Justin.tv to try out a new role as startup founder and CEO, at Yobongo. His project tapped into a previously underserved market of people who wanted to chat with others nearby, regardless of existing social connections. Yobongo launched as an iOS app, and placed you in a public mobile chat room of sorts to talk to people in your area - not around specific topics, not requiring invites to a specific event, and not requiring you to know anyone - much like the public AOL chatrooms of old.

Yobongo was swept up in the mobile group chat mini-boom approaching SXSW in 2011, alongside Beluga, GroupMe and many others, most of whom have seen significant change in the year following, with Beluga's acquisition by Facebook and GroupMe's acquisition by Skype being two of the most memorable. Today, Yobongo joined the M&A crowd, sending a note to all users that they had been acquired by Palo Alto-based Mixbook, a photo book and calendaring company.

If it sounds like there's a mismatch from the initial product scope and new acquirer, then you guessed right, as the mission statement has changed. Elston's note says, "Today, we are excited to start a new chapter in helping people communicate. Together with Mixbook we will accelerate our efforts to help people communicate with their photos." So what you know about Yobongo has changed and they are on to something new. As a longtime watcher of Elston's products through their many iterations, starting with Toluu back in March of 2008, I wish him and the team the best at their new adventure as one door closes and another opens.

Google Hotpot Launches Social Place Reviews, Ratings

The transition of location based services from simple game-oriented exercises to valuable review repositories is well under way. From the promise six months ago by product manager Siobhan Quinn that Foursquare's value would be from friends' tips to Yelp and Facebook Places, people are sharing their thoughts and experiences about places they shop, eat and visit. Monday night, Google jumped into this fray with both feet with the simplest, most lightweight platform I have seen yet, called Hotpot. The extension to Google Places, embedded in an update to the Maps application for Android, can be accessed through the Web or mobile.

On the Web, Google hotpot starts with your home city, or places from your Web history, if that is enabled, and displays local businesses. You can rate each place with up to 5 stars, or can even present a medal if you absolutely think the place is the "best ever". When you provide a rating, the flashcard-like places flip front to back and offer a place for you to write a simple review. Then it's on to the next card. Don't want to review an establishment? Just click "not interested" and move on. I found it only took a couple minutes to rack up about a dozen reviews, probably as many as I've ever logged in Foursquare.

Rating Fry's On Hotpot via the Web

Rating Restaurants on Hotpot via the Web

While some folks are projecting a massive social service from Google to take on Facebook, Google has instead referred to adding social layers to its many products. Hotpot itself presents a social layer as well, letting you connect with friends to see places they have reviewed, and cutely, posting a leaderboard, with the most active individuals at the top. The option to add friends, instead of being a "everybody in the pool" synchronization with Gmail contacts or any other database, feels more like Google Buzz - with a screen offering you the option to connect to the people you e-mail most often.

The Google Hotpot Leaderboard Early On

Rating Sunnyvale Restaurants Via the Mobile Widget

When on an Android device, assuming you have loaded version 4.7 of the Google Maps app, you can add a widget to rate places for Hotpot on the fly. Dependent on your location, you can rate businesses, or do a quick search (for example, restaurants near Sunnyvale). Find what you like, and as with the Web site, you can post 1-5 stars, and add a comment.

For the most part, although I am sure it is not universal, it seems the majority of Foursquare users choose the app primarily to check in quickly, not to leave detailed reviews and guide to friends. This will probably remain the truth until game mechanics are introduced that push reviews. But for Hotpot, it's not about checking in that you were somewhere, but all about the reviews and providing recommendations to friends. It may have been a quiet little release pushed out from the Mountain View giant after 7:30 pm Monday night, but it could be a big deal. I have added the Rate Places widget to my Android home screen, and expect to be using it a lot.

Want to find my recommendations, just get connected through my e-mail address: louisgray@gmail.com.

The Third Wave of the Web Will Be Uniquely Personal

Two weeks ago, I wrote about the increasing attention crisis facing many of us as we work to find relevant and beneficial content from the many different sources that are challenging us for our time and energy. The gist? More content is being created in more places and "can't miss" content is increasing at the same rate, making many of us feel we are constantly in a state of missing things, forced to chew through the noise to find the best updates, but still falling short.

I believe we are on the cusp of a massive change and opportunity on the Web today - one that will no doubt be debated, but one that I am seeing morph in front of us, as the Web evolves, and initial problems are considered solved, while new ones crop up.

The First Wave: Information and Access

The first wave of the Web, and even precursors to the true Web, like Compuserve, Prodigy and AOL, was to deliver information, to connect information, to make it available, and eventually, searchable. The first wave saw the building up of an infrastructure of pages with links and images, audio and video, with structures based around links to show how pages and things were connected. This first wave of the Web was all about information posting, discovery, search and retrieval.

While it may initially have seemed the "winners" of this game would be those providing access to the Web, including ISPs like AOL and Earthlink, browser providers like Netscape, portals, such as Yahoo! and Excite or commerce engines like Amazon and eBay, the largest victor turned out to be Google, who made this massive information pile easily discoverable, monetized and fast to access. While many many other companies made money of information and various pieces of this wave, Google emerged on top of the first wave.

The Second Wave: Social

The second wave of the Web, which is still ongoing, is that of social. With an infrastructure in place to post information, transfer it from person to person and place to place, the friending experience of social connections was duplicated, from offline to online. Sites like Friendster and MySpace erected networks were you could connect person to person and see photos, get reminders on birthdays, and more. Plaxo connected your offline Rolodex. LinkedIn replicated your business network, and Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Foursquare have emerged to be powerhouses in terms of sharing your every move, by video, by photo, location check-in and status update.

Now, we connect to people and follow or friend one another the way we once searched for keywords and news listings. In this wave, Facebook looks like the clear winner, if there must be just one, setting the agenda for how friend relationships are measured, and counting registrations in the high hundreds of millions. YouTube is the default for sharing video, while Twitter has carved out a solid niche for short updates, and Foursquare is the location space innovator, but Facebook is the giant in the second wave, whose numbers dwarf all challengers.

The Third Wave: Personal

Now that the world's information is posted, linked, indexed and searchable, and friends are connecting, sharing, liking, and following, the quest is on to streamline the noise and give the Web another dimension - one not measured by the data, or who led you to the data, but you as an individual. The third wave of the Web, I believe, is going to be about personalization by individual based on that individual's preferences - explicitly stated or otherwise.

The declaration of the next wave of the Web being personal is not shared universally, of course. Some say the next wave is all about mobile. Others may say the next wave is all about location. But the right approach to 'personal' absolutely encompasses each of these things. With our smartphones and tablets being increasingly powerful, they are practically an extension of us, and we are relying on them to discover relevant things, content, places and products for us as individuals. Similarly, our location is an ingredient of who we are - for where we are impacts our decisions, and what tips are relevant, be it for news, for restaurants, lodging, dating or anything else. So "personal" as an individual is both local and mobile.



   my6sense: Personalized Streams for Me on my Mobile

Personal As In Me.

A lot of services say they are "personal", when in fact, most of what they do is actually social.

These services may leverage your social graph to provide personalized recommendations based on what friends or other people similar to you may like - much like television shows group people of similar demographics to guess what commercials are best suited for which episodes in which time slots. The hope may be that the more your friends like something, the more likely you are to click it or buy it. Peer pressure, you know. Meanwhile, other services say they are personal because you have specifically provided them with information about you and what you like, which goes partway to discovering your interests, but is incomplete, and possibly inaccurate, as you may want to indicate that you are something that you are not, or you may have overlooked some of your own interests in the name of rapid completion.

Beyond these initial attempts is a new wave of companies trying to crack the code of the real you. Of course, my6sense is one of those companies. Our goal is to deliver a personalized experience in all possible aspects of your life, finding the right information for you at the right time in the right context, based on you as an individual. But we are not alone. Take, for example, Hunch.com, which is talking about personalizing the Internet, and says they can build a taste profile for you, based on your own unique interests and tastes. Also, in October, Mike Arrington of TechCrunch previewed Gravity, founded by former MySpace executives. In that piece, which he headlined as "The Personalization War", he said "I saw my own Interest Graph based only on my Facebook and Twitter streams over the last several months and it’s scary-accurate."

Recommendations from Hunch.com for Me

Gravity says they will help "The right information find you. Hunch says it "Personalizes the Internet". You've heard me talk about my6sense for some time - discovering your "Digital intuition". Besides the crazy folks like us who are thinking about this constantly, there are other smart companies on the case. Start with personal recommendations from TiVo, Amazon and Netflix. Look at Google Reader Magic and Google's Priority Inbox for Gmail. Look also at LinkedIn's purchase of Mspoke for personal recommendations and Facebook's splitting of the Most Recent feed and that of the News Feed.

Get Inside My Head

The companies looking ahead to the next wave realize it is not enough to serve up the same content to everyone, as each of us is unique. We are not our friends any more than we are our neighbors or our colleagues or even our own spouses. Our interests are unique and we all want to find content tailored to our own interests. While some people are battling with the challenge of information overload and sheer noise, smart engineers are working to solve these problems - the incredible test of mimicking the human brain's ranking function, and learning what to show when, and what to make a lower priority.

The continuing rapid growth of information creation and sharing, combined with pervasive connectivity, increased capability of smartphones and other mobile devices and the growth of location is all pointing us into a direction where the services on the other end have more potential to know you than those of years past, and you have the ability to be inspired by the right information in the right place more than ever before. This is a wave, one that benefits from all these mega-changes in the Web, that small companies and big ones alike are seeing. Maybe there's another big winner in there, just like there was in the last two. Regardless, the direction is clear. Show me my Web for me.

Disclosure: I am the vice president of marketing for my6sense. Hunch and Gravity can be assumed competitors, while other companies mentioned can be considered potential partners, peers or competition, dependent on their own individual business situations.

Google's Marissa Mayer Promotion Signals Future of Search

With news breaking yesterday that Google vice president of search products, Marissa Mayer, was taking a new role at the company, focused on location and local services, debate has festered far and wide about what the move means for the company's direction, for her specifically, and, laughably, in some isolated cases, if it was in response to perceived failures in her current role relative to competitive moves from Microsoft's Bing. Without being a fly on the wall or being in the offices where these sorts of things are decided, all one needs to know is that Google hasn't earned its leading reputation by sitting still. Mayer, well respected by practically all who see her in action, is one of the company's leading talents, and is being pushed to what's next, not the battles that have already been decided.

Search is a mature market, and Google, for the better part of a decade, has been doing it better than anybody else. The company has leveraged its leading search position to also become a phenomenal business leader, driving billions of dollars of advertising through its pipes every month.

While others, like Search Engine Land, do a great job of watching the month to month market share jockeying between Google, Bing, Yahoo! and assorted others, displaying Google's share of the pie at around two-thirds of the total, the numbers don't look to be dramatically changing any time soon, even with new innovations each brand is rolling out.

About a month ago, I wrote a post titled "The Future of Search: Personal, Persistent and Implicit". While much of what Google does today with search is focused on one-time explicit searches, the market is moving toward persistent implicit searches, which can tap into your own preferences as an individual, including your purchasing behaviors, your reading preferences, your location, hobbies or business.

It is this determination of who you are and what you like that is driving Facebook's focus on their "Like feature", and this morning's announcement with Bing for social search. It is why Foursquare is such a hot commodity, able to turn down a reported $100 million offer from Yahoo! in deference to going it alone. And this is what Marissa is reportedly going to be doing.

Many armchair quarterbacks are looking at Google and seeing an older, more mature, company that struggles to acquire or retain talent in contrast to market upstarts like Facebook, Foursquare and Twitter. Key to that challenge of keeping the best talent? Keeping them focused on interesting products and quests - the type of quest like what Marissa sees before her, grappling with the different properties within Google that touch location and local and making something impressive, preparing the company for a future where the world of search will look incredibly different indeed.

For savvy press release readers, one does not see any negativity in Marissa's news, and to bring up words of demotion or competitive pressures are ridiculous. At the same time, she joined the company's operating committee, which is essentially as high as you can go without being on the board of directors. Meanwhile, Marissa has enough money to walk away if she ever wanted, and just about any company under the sun would be delighted to have her. So think again when you see nonsense about this being a push down the stairs in Mountain View. This is a strategic move, one that shows they aren't going to be sitting on their laurels at a time when others are making headlines.

We are beginning the third wave of the Internet. Google won the first wave - of information and retrieval. I will be writing a lot more on this soon. Promise. But keep your eyes on Marissa. I don't expect any Dodgeball level mistakes to come this time.

iPad Facebook App Friendly Adds Support for Places

With Facebook's iPad app still missing in action, the Friendly Facebook browser has not only maintained a top position in Apple's iTunes store (currently ranking #4 for best-selling iPad apps and #8 for top grossing iPad apps), but it is keeping pace with continued updates from the world's largest social network. As has been much discussed throughout the tech Web, Facebook's launch of Places brought them squarely in the world of location based services (LBS), with functionality mirroring Foursquare. Through some fast coding, Friendly already has introduced support for Places in their app - letting you check in to Places, add venues and tag friends, just like the Web version, and Facebook's official apps.

The latest iteration of Friendly, upon login, features three main tabs, including the Live Feed, Events and Places. Places supplants the original third tab, which was Requests. (See: Friendly: The Best Facebook Experience for iPad)

The Newest Friendly Build Features Places

Adding a New Place via Friendly

As you would expect, the Places tab offers for you to "See where your friends are and share where you are." To check in to the place, just click the location pushpin, commonly associated with Google Maps, and select an existing location, or create a new one yourself.

Posting the Check-in to Facebook via Friendly

The Resulting Check-in and Tag on Facebook Places

Upon adding a place, you can add a description, and tag other Facebook friends who may be at the same location - just like the Web site.

The implementation of Places within Friendly is very straight forward, and looks like pulls data from the mobile-optimized version of Facebook, at touch.facebook.com, which no doubt speeded the coding. You can grab the Friendly app from iTunes for $4.99.

Four Squared Signs You Are a Foursquare Addict

For the last two months, I've been openly discussing my experimentation with Foursquare, logging my location at all sorts of places throughout my travels, and - gasp - even discussing the fact I cheat, while noting others may not be cheating, but they sure are leaving a lot of stops out. While my conversation with product manager Siobhan Quinn helped to provide some relevance to this whole process, I am still playing along.

While I am enjoying myself with my nonsense checkin stream, there are some surefire ways to tell people are taking location apps far too seriously. Here are 16 ways (Four squared, get it?) that I know you've got a problem. If I missed any, please do let me know.

1. You know exactly how far away you have to be from a venue before you can check in, and also know how many different venues you can check into without leaving your house.
2. If your phone is out of batteries, you return home to charge it instead of doing errands because you want to check in to those places once you go.
3. You take the same routes to and from work so you can check in at various offices along the way, hoping to obtain mayorships without actually getting out of your car.
4. You heavily consider or discuss with friends the benefits of going to a place where you are already mayor to boost your stats against going somewhere new to increase the number of venues.
5. You set up or check in at venues for locations without buildings, such as "Highway 101" or actual people.
6. You not only know what a "Super Swarm" is, but you can name every single one that has occurred.
7. The Foursquare icon is in both your iPhone and iPad dock.
8. If you not only achieved the Overshare badge with 10 checkins in 12 hours, but you wonder why the bar was set so low.
9. You opened a gym membership and started working out just to get the Gym Rat badge. (Or complain when you don't get it)
10. You recognize locals in your area who are Mayors of multiple places, and aggressively start searching Google to learn their weaknesses.
11. If you actively have scouted all the nearby parks and are visiting them one by one, just to score the Babysitter badge.
12. You wonder why you can't "Check in" that somebody called you on the phone, or that you accomplished basic tasks at the office.
13. You refuse to meet with people unless they agree to check in at Foursquare with you.
14. You get annoyed when you go to friends' homes that don't have Foursquare venues.
15. You actively debate the merits of Foursquare over Gowalla and Brightkite to anyone who will listen.
16. You set your alarm for after 3 a.m. on a weekday just to roll over and grab your phone to check in and grab the School Night badge.

If you don't mind seeing my silliness, and want to show me you are a Foursquare addict, check-in here: http://foursquare.com/user/lgloco. The "loco" stands for crazy.

Podcast: On Foursquare, Check-ins & Facebook Privacy

Following up on yesterday's discussion with new Foursquare product manager Siobhan Quinn, North Carolina blogger Wayne Sutton (@waynesutton) and I took time this afternoon to talk about how we see businesses benefiting from location-based services, and Google's role in the market. Additionally, we took a few minutes to talk about Facebook's announced changes to their approach to privacy, updated today in an event chaired by CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

In short, I said that I while I have always considered my content on Facebook public and open, the company's changes have negatively impacted users and were made worse through their poor rollout and a lack of clear communication. You can hear our comments in full in the below embedded podcast, and catch Wayne's blog here.

SocialWayne.com Podcast #11 - All about Location with @LouisGray by waynesutton

Are You Filtering Your Checkins To Enhance Your Image?

A month or so ago, I told you how I'd finally jumped on the location check-in train, and mockingly asked if boring married people (like me) should be checking in on services like Foursquare and Gowalla. In the time since that post, I continue to be married, continue to be boring, and yes, I continue to check in. I believe that if one is truly going to commit themselves to a tool like this, they should do so in full. But from what I have seen, it looks like many people edit their comings and goings, in an effort to obscure the mundane, or possibly to make their average lives appear exemplary. And by going against the grain, I am becoming the unequalled Mayor of Mediocre.

As anticipated when I started my smirk-laden quest to prove the utility (or lack thereof) of location apps, I quickly gained mayorship of client offices up and down the Peninsula, and even in the East Bay. I picked up a crown at a supermarket in Woodside with only two stops and never looked back, and at one point, I achieved every man's dream - becoming mayor of a Burger King and Wendy's simultaneously. My mother must be so proud.

Yay me! Told You I Was Boring.

Because I decided I would use Foursquare to accurately show just where I go and what I do, I've racked up plenty of stops at the neighborhood Safeway, and even recently became the mayor of my kids' pediatrician's office (again after only two stops). Given the combination of relatively low use of such apps in the South Bay, and my own antisocial behavior, the overlap with other friend's activity has been inconsistent at best - and the lack of a challenge in overtaking these mundane places was due to what I believe is self-censoring on the part of many users, who don't really want to broadcast to the world what it is they are doing.

While I may have no hesitation in reporting I am at 7-Eleven, or pumping gas, or shopping for groceries, or asking the docs to look into my son's fever, and check in from the Drive Thru at McDonald's, many of those I am connected to are keeping their own check-in history to be more hipster friendly. One still sees the Friday night flurry as the singles chase each other from bar to bar, the self-important announcements of major travel from state to state, check-ins at "happening" venues and events, or at more classy restaurants than the grease pits I'm owning.

This sounds like fun. But is it representative?

But what's missing are the rest of the small updates. Post offices. Dry cleaners. Car rentals. Clothing stores. It looks like it's a lot more hip to check into an Apple Store than a Ross or a Mervyn's, or a Starbucks instead of a Jack in the Box.

Everyone Else's Life? More exciting?

The self-censorship and muting of life's reality adds cloak of dissonance to the entire process. While it's true I am still playing with checking in at random Apple buildings in Cupertino in an attempt to draw out Steve Jobs' henchmen, and thus have my own issues with "telling the truth", I wonder what those who are holding back on their check-ins are trying to hide. Do you think you're going to bore your friends with who you really are?

Good news for us. But it could have been bad.

One more thing - sharing your real life can have real life benefits. This week, when at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital for a 20-week ultrasound on our Fall addition to the family, I got an e-mail from a friend who had very real concern that maybe one of our kids had taken a turn for the worse. (See his writeup: Privacy vs Voyeurism) The world of virtual check-ins turned into a real one. If you become real, and share who you really are, you can get real-world connections with real people who really care, so stop hiding and stop filtering.

Should Boring Married People Check In On Location Apps?

I've been watching the buildup around location and check-ins with some level of interest over the last year or so, mixed with some thinly veiled skepticism. While my tendency at times has been to mock the entire practice of reporting one's location from stop to stop, gaining real-time updates on friends' locations, and competing for virtual badges intended to improve one's self-worth, I've for the most part kept quiet about the whole thing - lest I find myself forced to eat my words as I doubled back and used something I might have sworn I would never do.

For the most part, the excitement around Foursquare, Gowalla and other similar applications has centered on two elements - the fun, social side that spikes when a group of mostly single friends participates in something like an informal barcrawl in an urban center, such as San Francisco, or the potential for businesses to gain information about their most-frequent customers, returning with favors such as coupons or specials for loyal guests. The expectation is that with time, Foursquare and Gowalla (and their competitors) will gain so many users battling for badges and other privileges that this mass data will become actionable and useful. And for whatever reason, users will continue broadcasting their location, manually or automatically, largely due to game theory and sheer competitiveness.


My Scintillating Foursquare History and a New Mayorship!

For me, as I've watched this phenomenon, expecting to be dragged into it kicking and screaming, fingernails digging a rut in the ground, I've always wondered if this is the front of a battle that doesn't have a place for otherwise socially active people like me who happen to be married, don't drink, have kids, and generally don't do much exciting enough to check in at constantly. In February of 2009, speaking about Brightkite, I said I wasn't using these apps because I was simply too boring, not because of any privacy risk. At the time I joked about checking in to home, church or lunch, or even at a micro-level, checking in from the couch, the fridge, or the kids' room. And after some testing of Foursquare in the last month, that's not too far off from the truth.

As I've used Foursquare exclusively in the last few weeks, the discussion will largely be framed by my experience there, and your own experience with other apps may differ.

How pervasive is Foursquare?

If you read some headlines, you would think it was a phenomenon sweeping the nation, starting with the urban centers, and flowing outward. The company reported it was rapidly advancing toward a million unique users, having grown six figures alone at the recent South by Southwest conference, which I attended in Austin, Texas. But even here in the San Francisco Bay Area, I've routinely found businesses that are unlisted in the service, or have had close to zero activity, a year into the app's existence. I've added restaurants, department stores and office buildings. I even found myself named mayor of a grocery store in upscale Woodside, California after only two visits there in a three-day period.


Other Foursquare Users Run the Apple Store and Apple Campus

If the assumption is that Foursquare is growing and being used all over the place, it seemingly hasn't gotten all the way down the peninsula. If San Francisco venues are hard to claim and become Mayor for, it's pretty much a breeze around Woodside, Sunnyvale, Milpitas and Cupertino. And in practically every case where I checked in, I was the only person at that venue, with the exception being the Valley Fair Apple Store Saturday afternoon on iPad launch day.

I can only imagine that as you move further inland toward less populated areas, you could easily be the only person using the app, effectively doing battle with yourself alone.

How accurate is Foursquare?

I have read a lot of notes talking about how easy it is to cheat on Foursquare - as people used Web tools to check in across the country, or even scripts to make themselves atop the charts for notable venues worldwide. And if Foursquare were to accurately show where people were, you would see a lot more mundane or even seedy updates. It's a wonder people never check in at strip clubs, laundromats, or adult bookstores. The truth is that many people no doubt sanitize their checkins to present a good face of who they are to their contemporaries.

Meanwhile, checking in to places where you actually haven't set foot is very simple. Foursquare does a very good job guessing your location, and if there are venues in the area, you can pull down and select from the list where you want to check in. This works even if you're driving (so long as the CHP doesn't see you). So, for kicks, I've checked in at places like Hitachi Data Systems or Palm Computing without even slowing down at an intersection. And if you have a frequent route to and from the office, it's possible you can check in enough times at a place on the way to get Mayorship. I've already checked in at the Executive Briefing Center at Apple headquarters in Cupertino twice. I wonder if I keep turning on De Anza from South 280 if I can gain Mayorship without even being invited...


Only 7 Check-ins From 5 People Made Me The Mayor After 2.

Similarly, my home location, called "LG Land", where I am mayor (Duh), shows one other guy has checked in, who I know has never set foot in my home. It could be he was going quickly and thought it read "Golf Land", for the miniature golf course down the street, but there's no way for me to log into Foursquare and negate his checkin, just like Apple can't kick me out of the records of their EBC.

Also, there are many places where it makes sense not to check in at all - such as friends' residences. We took our kids Easter Egg hunting this afternoon at a couple's home. Rather than add them as a new venue, it made more sense to check in at the park next door to give an idea of where we were, without being 100 percent accurate. Better than nothing?

How Interesting Is Foursquare?

Taking into account the above notes on accuracy and the opportunity for cheating, my experience with Foursquare has been much as I had anticipated. I am unsurprisingly mayor not only of my home, but also of Paladin Advisors Group (a new venue) and client offices in the South Bay. I secured mayorship of Robert's in Woodside after two visits, and have checked in multiple times at church, Safeway, gas stations and some parks in the area.


My Foursquare Buds Are Just As Boring As Me

My feed, just like my actual travel history, is therefore pretty uninspiring. That's a major reason I set up a parallel Twitter account (@lgloco) for Foursquare, rather than muddy my regular feed with those updates. I've tried to avoid self-mockery with the mundane nature of my updates, but instead to give it a fair shake, checking in where I really am, no matter the critical need to broadcast it.

But I'm not the only one. To be honest, the vast majority of your updates aren't that brilliant either - with stops at Ikea, Best Buy and the barber shop being among those I've seen friends update in the last day or so. So where then is the appeal of instant knowledge? I can get why you might want to know if a business is "trending" in an area, or if you guys are at a hot club and I'm not, but may want to join you. But if you're getting your hair cut, I'm not suddenly going to show up and ask for a trim and I'm not going to try and get a bulk rate on make-it-yourself bunk beds at Ikea.

Trust me, there are times where I've thought of Foursquare having real utility. When delayed at the Denver airport on the way to SXSW last month, I wondered if others I knew were in the same airport stuck with me. And I scanned the list of seven folks at the Apple Store Saturday to see if there was anybody I knew. Of course, there wasn't. But these are rare exceptions.

If you want to announce you're at a party with three friends, you can just as easily put a note on Twitter with the user names of your three buds as checking in simultaneously. And keep in mind as a boring married guy with kids, I'd be more likely to check in with my twin toddlers at home than any place else.

So Is It Me Or Is It The App?

Despite the above, I'm not resentful of Foursquare and have found some of the mechanisms fairly entertaining. If I don't take myself too seriously, checking in at a Shell station or a Taco Bell or a client site isn't too much trouble and you know I'm always smirking when I do it. And being a numbers and charts guy, I do like scrolling through my stats on Foursquare to see the day I check in the most and averages. Any time you can take activity and turn it into stats or trends, you've got my attention.


Note More than Half My Checkins Are At New Places

But I am not gaining a ton from the real social aspects of the app. I watch Brian Remmel and Brian Solis go to and from FutureWorks. I watch Denton Gentry and his family check in off the grid presumably around the East Bay. I see random Googlers frequent their favorite restaurants. For the most part, they're as boring as me.

I'm not putting on a curmudgeon's crown and dismissing the app or the trend. It seems to be taking hold, at least for the digerati, and I've wholly embraced similar publicly revealing sites, including Blippy and all the various social networks. I am enjoying being as boring as humanly possible and telling you all about it - because it's more accurate than any facade I could give you. After all, we couldn't be nearly as productive online if we were away from the computer all the time. If I really were out there checking in to bar after bar overnight, it'd be a different story, and a different person outright.

Now, if you don't mind, I need to check in at home. If you think that's interesting, you can find me on Foursquare at http://foursquare.com/user/lgloco. The "loco" is intentional.

You Don't Need To Know Where This Rant Was Written

By Rob Diana of Regular Geek (Twitter/FriendFeed)

Location-based services are all the rage. Mobile computing allows people to work from anywhere. Now, with GMail's new location based signature labs feature, people will know where you were working. Wow! This is fantastic! Now, anyone I e-mail will know that I am working from home or even at the beach! If you can not read the sarcasm, then let me tell you that I just do not understand why we need this. Thankfully, I am not alone in this feeling.

Svetlana Gladkova of Profy worries because email one of the few places you can still hide from people.

"Of course you certainly don’t have to use this feature and since it is in Labs you should be pretty determined to share your location with anyone you send emails to in order to activate it. But experience shows that the ideas that are born at Google first will eventually turn into wildly popular and used applications that many people will rely on for whatever purposes they may and this will make it much more difficult to hide behind your e-mail address in the future."

Even ReadWriteWeb's coverage questions why people would want to use it.

"Why would you want to do this? Maybe you want to highlight your jetsetting lifestyle. Maybe you want to remind the recipient that you're in a different time zone. Or you might just want to use it as a mnemonic device for searching sent e-mail based on the location from where it was sent."

Google is obviously making a very big move into location-based services. They recently launched Latitude, their location sharing service. Their are other location sharing services as well. Brightkite and Loopt seem to be the most popular or at least the most hyped. The real question is why do people feel that sharing their location is helpful?

I can understand that people may want to know who is currently in their city or who lives in the same general location, but that information can typically be found through most social networks or the social event and travel sites like Upcoming and Dopplr.

So, why do we need to know who is near at every moment? Outside of the coolness factor, what problem do these services solve? I can understand that UPS may want to know where their trucks are, but that can be solved using basic GPS hardware and applications. What benefit do people really get by knowing where people in their network may be in their town? I just do not get it, but maybe I am just being too practical.

Image by onebutan-iphone
Read more by Rob Diana at RegularGeek.com.