Stalqer: A Location Sharing App for Real Friends

I have always felt my life was not interesting enough to broadcast every small update. That's a major reason why I was initially slow to embrace Twitter, and why, thus far, I have shunned application broadcasting services like BrightKite and the extremely popular at the moment Foursquare. But a new application, set to hit the Apple iTunes Store any day now, called Stalqer, has a permanent position on my iPhone, because instead of being focused on badges and contests, its aim is to connect real friends, and it can work in the background - enabling me to have it run passively as I go about my business.


Stalqer Shows Connections on a Map And I Can Message Them
Mick Johnson, creator of Stalqer, and I met a few weeks ago, and he said he felt the focus for designing such an app was not to start up contests about how often somebody could check in to a specific location, and he didn't want people to create yet another user account for his app. In fact, he felt services like FourSquare created the badges mentality to force people to "check in", as the application would not automatically do so.


My Stalqer News Feed and an Update from Mick
In contrast, Stalqer utilizes Facebook Connect to have you log in, and it can present you the last-known location of your friends on Facebook. If they are using Stalqer, these friends' locations will start to populate your News Feed and you can send them messages from within the application itself, assuming you have their e-mail addresses registered with Facebook. Stalqer also makes updating your location very simple, as you can tell it to update in the background, every time you check your e-mail. If you are in WiFi range or connected to 3G, Stalqer can update your location throughout the day, without your even having to open the app.


Background Preferences and Connections in Stalqer
Stalqer shares some similarities to Google Latitude as much as it does the more-hyped FourSquare, in that your friends' avatars display on a map. You can zoom out as much as you like, to see how your Facebook connections are strung across the globe. But it's those nearest to you that are of course the most interesting. If you peek at the screenshot in this post, you'll see fellow tech blogger Steve Gillmor at the nearby Starbucks, and Robert Scoble visiting the Cupertino Apple Campus - both close enough for a quick drive. Using Stalqer, I could send either a message and meet up.

Depending on your preferences, you can get updated via Push alerts on the iPhone if friends manually check in to a location, or if they get within a certain number of miles. And if you wanted to, Stalqer has a "Places" function, which selects from the nearest registered and known places for you to announce you have arrived. If a place doesn't exist, you can add it yourself.


Choose Registered Places In Stalqer Or Who Has Checked In
If you do utilize the "Places" functionality in Stalqer, you can see which other Facebook Friends are checked into the same place. For example, when Mick Johnson checked in to the Googleplex in Mountain View last week, I could click through and see who else was there. In fact, if I wanted, I could even check in there myself and announce I had arrived, even if that wasn't true. You decide whether that's a feature or a bug...

Don't get thrown off by the "Stalqer" name, as the app is no more invasive than many others we already use today. I wouldn't ask Stalqer to change the name. The biggest bug so far tends to be its speed. With 1,300 Facebook connections, it can be slow to get avatars and updates. I'll be very interested to see how the service holds up once it hits the iTunes Store.

Seesmic Desktop: First Major Twitter Client With Lists

With Twitter lists becoming the biggest release for the microblogging service in almost a year, the many Twitter clients out there who have significant user bases are rushing to support the new feature. On Friday, I quickly mentioned that TweetDeck has promised list support. While they continue to work on bring the feature to their client, today Seesmic Desktop has already delivered. And the columned desktop application is no doubt the best way I have seen, so far, to consume lists, both of those you have created, and any others you might be following.

The new Seesmic Desktop, which will be distributed by e-mail early this week to users registered at http://seesmic.com/team.html, and soon after, be made available through auto-update, automatically discovers lists on Twitter that you have subscribed to, and displays them as options in your sidebar, between Facebook pages and saved searches.


The New Seesmic Desktop (Click to Enlarge)
Those user lists that you are following are displayed with the username and then the name of the list. Those from other Twitter users are shown with a gray Twitter logo, while those you have made are in blue. But whether they are yours or not, they still display the same, in the familiar column format seen on Seesmic Desktop and Web, as well as TweetDeck. On my 15-inch MacBook Pro, I could comfortably fit three lists, while those of you with more impressive displays can no doubt fit many more.

The Twitter Lists feature works just as it does on Twitter Web, letting you add any Twitter user to any list you have. Also announced in today's news was that Seesmic Desktop has surpassed three million individual downloads. You can also expect that Seesmic Web, one favorite of mine, will support the lists feature very soon.

Why I Wouldn't Accept $25k To Stop Using Google Reader

Cross-Posted on my Ecademy Blog and Shared Here

Information is power - and the ability to take in more information more quickly than anybody else, all in one place, is an incredible power. The Web has been built to enable all of us to share and distribute information quickly, through new posts and links.

Tools like RSS (Real Simple Syndication) let us pass information from one site to another, letting you get updates in a single location - be it to your favorite blog posts, your favorite news and sport sites, or simply updates from friends' videos on YouTube and updates on Flickr. RSS Readers capture updates from all these RSS feeds in one application or on one Web site. In my opinion, the very best RSS reader is Google Reader. It has become such a mainstay of my online activity that I've determined its value to me is easily in the tens of thousands of dollars per year.

I thought I would let you know why I would be so crazy as to proclaim that if somebody offered me $25,000 to stop using Google Reader for a year, that I would refuse.

A little background:

1. I Have Relied on RSS to Send Me Updates For Years.

A 2006 post showed screenshots from my use of NetNewsWire to track updates on sports, tech news and politics. At the time, I called it "A Demanding Mistress", because if I subscribed to a lot of high quantity feeds, I would be constantly receiving updates.

2. In late 2006, I switched to Google Reader as my RSS reader of choice.

In November of 2006, while the product was in Google Labs, I called it a formidable RSS option. Benefits to the new Web-based Reader were mainly:

• I could subscribe to the same feeds on multiple computers and avoid duplicates
• I could share my favorite items to a dedicated link blog

3. In early 2007, I suggested 10 ways Google Reader could improve.

I loved the service, but thought I would provide feedback in a public way. Surprisingly, a member of the Google Reader engineering team responded in the comments:

"Funnily enough, the Reader team just had a big all-day brainstorming session about where to go next, and ideas similar to many of your suggestions were discussed."

This was a huge deal for me, as I had the first experience of talking to companies and getting a response.

4. Google Reader Continued to Add Functions Over the Last Two Years

In addition to reading and sharing, Google Reader added the ability to "like" entries, and to add comments to shared items that you were subscribed to. The service also introduced the ability to "bundle" your favorite feeds and point people to them to subscribe in bulk, as well as integrating better tools for discovery of feeds, and trends data, showing how often you read and what your favorite feeds are.

Over time, more than 1,000 people have subscribed to my shared items feed, and these people can have conversations with me. Sometimes, as I noted in this post, there are more comments on Google Reader than there are on the original blog posts itself. Despite Google Reader's protests to the contrary, it is becoming a social network.

5. Google Reader Feeds Everything I Do Downstream

Data comes in and data comes out. I now read more than 700 feeds, comprising between 900 and 1,000 items per day. I hand select about 25 to 30 of those items each day to share to the link blog. This link blog then populates downstream social networks, including FriendFeed, Socialmedian and Facebook. Additionally, I set up my feed so that it populates Twitter. You can see that dedicated account for my shared items here: http://www.twitter.com/lgshareditems.


See What I am Reading in Google Reader

See What I am Sharing in Google Reader

See My Friends' Statistics in Google Reader

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You can see Google Reader plays an incredible role for me in terms of information discovery and sharing. There is no single service that lets me get all this information so quickly, so completely and so centralized. Yet, naysayers argue that blogging is declining or that Twitter is becoming their place to find news, and it's simply not complete. Twitter consists of headlines and links, while Google Reader consists of content in its entirety. And with RSS being a standard, you can bring in RSS from other services, including Twitter, into your Google Reader, should you be so interested.

And if you don't want to read so many feeds, as I do, Google recently introduced a feature called "Magic", which brings those articles you are most likely to enjoy to the top of your feed. Maybe, assuming it is coded well for you, you can read a much smaller percentage of your stories and get all you need.

The more I thought about the recent debate on Google Reader, the more I realized that there can be no substitute. There are other RSS readers, to be sure. Some are very good. But to migrate away from Google Reader would lose my personal history and preferences. It would eliminate the social connections that have been cultivated for years. It would also very likely be much slower and lack the feature set that Reader does. I determined that if somebody approached me with a check for $25,000 US to give up using Reader for 12 months, I would decline. $25,000 is a lot of money, no doubt, but to lose access to this product would be debilitating to me. You can expect to also see new ways for me to leverage the work I have done within this Google Reader platform before the end of the year that will further explain the financial elements involved.

When I first made such a crazy statement, somebody in the Google Reader comments jokingly said, "I think it would be fascinating to read a business plan that involves paying Louis Gray $100,000 to stop using Google Reader." But they understand. You cannot replace the best, an engine that pushes everything forward.

Are there other services you use where you couldn't be paid to stop? Or what's your price?

-- Find more about me at www.louisgray.com

It Just Might Be the Droid You Are Looking For

If you are a long-time user of any product, be it a computer, a TV, a cell phone, or even power tools to help you with landscaping, you get comfortable and accustomed to those products' capabilities. As you become a product expert, you know what these products can do and cannot do, and unconsciously work your way around their limitations. Sometimes, you can try and highlight these limitations as not being relevant, or even say that their lack of a feature is to their benefit - when, in fact, that's not really true. That's how I felt earlier this week when I first came in contact with Motorola's Droid, the new iPhone competitor that has everybody's tongues wagging.

Whether it ends up taking share from Cupertino or not, it's no doubt a high quality device that you should be watching closely - just like all the other reviews you have no doubt seen online have said. While I have not been a big fan of their annoying ad campaign, it is the first Android-based phone that has caught my attention and had me looking just a little bit more of what the world is like outside an iPhone universe, when I remove my Apple-shaded sunglasses.

In December of last year, I said there were essentially two types of phones in the world: "iPhone and Not iPhone". The iPhone's vast array of applications, its touch-screen capabilities and unequalled Web browsing functionality essentially put BlackBerry and all other quasi-smartphones in the rear view mirror. Since then, Apple introduced the iPhone 3GS with video recording and speed improvements, but it is essentially the same device it was last year. What has changed is the world surrounding the iPhone. While Apple has been fighting with AT&T over getting acceptable coverage and things like Push or MMS going, Google's Android team has been pushing beyond their middling first-generation device and making something very competitive indeed.

One of the stones thrown at Apple's iPhone has been its lack of multitasking. (I mentioned this in my list from June: 10 Ways Apple's iPhone Leaves Me Wanting More) Earlier this week, Google announced free turn by turn GPS on their platform. My natural inclination was to not care, as I already have a standalone GPS unit, and I wouldn't want to force my iPhone into playing the role of GPS when it could be playing Sirius Radio. But this week, while driving with a Droid owner, not only were we hearing the turn by turn GPS on the Droid, but Pandora Radio was streaming via bluetooth audio to the car stereo.

It wasn't until shortly after that I put two and two together. While I was teasing about the GPS turn by turn being quiet, I was missing the point that the phone was multi-tasking, and on top of that, it had bluetooth audio out, which the iPhone does not. Because I have been a full-time iPhone user for more than a year, I had framed my understanding in terms of the iPhone, not in terms of what I really thought a phone could do.

At the risk of sounding like a big hypocrite given my pushing of the iPhone and its ecosystem for the last year, the Android platform is compelling - and even if it is a few tens of thousands of applications behind Cupertino in the application store, every iPhone developer I talk to is looking at Android in a way they have never truly considered the Palm. Android has e-mail and text messaging and Web browsing and contacts, just like the iPhone. It has the opportunity for simple games, just like the iPhone. I found myself playing a Boggle-like game on the Droid and it worked, as expected, of course.

But beyond the basics, the Droid is a very interesting hardware product. The Droid's camera puts the iPhone to shame - not only having more megapixels with better clarity, but auto-zooming on the object of note. It has an easily accessible full keyboard, which the iPhone obviously doesn't. It doesn't suffer from the oddities of the first Google offering, but is something you wouldn't be embarrassed to show off amidst your peers. The Verizon coverage certainly doesn't hurt either.

My use of the Droid this week was a major influence in my thinking of an Apple fan potentially "Going Google". If I assume that Android 2.0 is very good, and that Google is making major upgrades to their ecosystem at a faster rate than Apple is right now, then 3.0 and beyond will be extremely interesting. I don't think this will be the last phone that will catch our eye running Android over the next few months, and Apple's already said their holiday lineup is set in stone. So why not just take a look at the Droid and see if Google deserves your dollars?