Last night, I went on a trash tour and dumpster dive sponsored by the NYC Freegan Meetup.

What an unforgettable experience.

I did it because 1) I’m curious and 2) I think there’s a lot to be learned from people who are taking such a seemingly extreme position and pushing sustainability to new levels.

For those who haven’t been exposed to this term, freegans are people who don’t like waste and are making a conscious attempt to live outside capitalist culture.  Freegans are most often associated with dumpster diving which involves looking through the trash for food and other items. They also are known for building bikes out of used parts and sewing their own clothes.   They are everything the Housewives of NJ are not.

On the cultural change tip, Freegans have been instrumental in raising public awareness about how much food gets thrown out by supermarkets and restaurants each night.   And,  it’s a lot. An enormous amount. Go on a trash tour and see first hand.   But, freegans are quick to point out they aren’t just “about garbage.” Freegans are also big on foraging and gardening. For example, I learned last night that it’s mulberry season in NYC and there are bushes throughout Riverside Park just waiting to be picked. Who knew?

Freegans also become something of a fixture at NYU on “moving out day” when students leave for the summer and leave behind all sorts of valuable and reusable items.

And I want to go on the record : The freegans I met last night were incredibly gracious and eager to share their knowledge/time.

Very refreshing.

I felt like I was with a band of Christians during the Roman Empire or a roving tribe walking through ruins of culture that only their eyes could see.  For someone like myself who spends time shopping and thinking about shopping and thinking about ways brands can help consumers shop better, it was a very jolting experience.

The takeaway:

There’s an opportunity here for consumer brands and others to learn from the Freegans. Freegans are operating, living and agitating for change at an extreme edge. But is what they are advocating so extreme? I don’t think so. In ways ways, they represent common sense.

They are a wake up call.  A shout heard throughout the shopping mall. A kick in the pants to all sanctimonious recyclers (myself included) to take a closer look at how we consume.

Some specific ideas for brands to consider:

On a conceptual level, pay close attention to what the Freegans are doing and saying. It’s no trend-tracking secret that the edge of culture can shed light on where the center is going—or should be going. If you want to be a green leader and innovator, Freegans are worth learning from and incorporating some of their thinking into green policy-making.

Send entire and corporate teams departments on trash tours. It’s so enlightening and inspiring. It will definitely catalyze a lot of discussion.

Invite a freegan into consumer focus groups for another perspective. I doubt they’d be open to participating but it would be useful to understand their POV on capitalism and out of control consumer culture.

Take a freegan to work day. Probably won’t happen, but it should.

Find ways to support freegans and others who might benefit from old or extra supplies.  This applies to anyone from supermarkets to stationary stores. (An old friend from college recently suggested that food stores set up a separate bin or shelving space for goods that were being thrown out, but could be consumed. She also mentioned that a Farmer’s Market in Santa Barbara had a bin set up for slightly bruised fruit and vegetables. She has a rabbit and would pull items from the bin for her rabbit. )

If you run bike brand, sponsor Freegan “build a bike” workshops. They offer these for free and help people build bikes from used parts.

If you run a sewing machine company, give the Freegans unused or old equipment. The same goes for fabric companies.  Freegans are promoting sewing.

Support community swap events. Give away old merchandise.

Plant a garden on your corporate headquarters grounds and encourage gardening.

Just some fast ideas.

More later.

Registration is still open if anyone is interested in attending!

He writes:

More teens check MySpace than Twitter first thing.

For many teens, the first place they check in the morning is MySpace — four times the number that start their day on Twitter.

But isn’t MySpace dead? No, it’s just that MySpace is no longer top of mind — at least not on the coasts, where marketers and market researchers tend to be concentrated. According to Mikolaj Jan Piskorski, associate professor at Harvard Business School, MySpace hotbeds are in states like Alabama, Arkansas, West Virginia and Oklahoma. Even California, but in Fresno.

Teens’ preferred social networks are a function of the school they attend. You’re more likely to find MySpace schools in rural areas. While Facebook spread in urban areas, where students are more likely to interact across schools, it has been slower in rural areas, where schools are more isolated.

This presents challenges for national and regional marketers alike. Social networks are fragmented. We need to understand which social networks are most prominent in which areas. Figuring this out can give you a leg-up in certain markets while saving money.

The important point for us here is not about Twitter being less dominant, but about MySpace still having relevance.

We’re inspired here at SnapDragon to look into this–especially since Natalie, our SnapDragon colleague, has been asking all her friends to share their “first in the morning” tech habits.  And we clearly need to remind ourselves not to forget MySpace in the work we do.

MySpace also needs to do some branding work.  It’s clearly falling off the marketing radar and discussion.

It seems like they have an opportunity here to get some attention and new traction.

At the end of my first week as a Twitter user, I have found that posing questions to users is more difficult than I initially suspected. Everyone is broadcasting products, highlighting news stories, promoting something, replying and re-tweeting celebrities, and getting users (even your friends) to answer a few questions about their thoughts and opinions is more daunting than expected.

Nevertheless, my lesson after Week 1 is the more active and engaged I am with other users, the more likely other users will take part in my polls. So, if you follow me, I will follow you.

My first question to users is “Thinking about my usual website rotation this morning and wondering which site you all visit most often?”

For me, it’s always: NYTimes.com for a quick look at the headlines and the Style Section on Thursdays and Sundays, Gawker.com for anything by Richard Lawson, Facebook.com to keep track of family and friends and gauge how comparatively boring and or exciting my life is at any time, and finally, NYMag.com for the television recaps and the Daily Intel. When I’m feeling especially adventurous, I’ll read Anthony Bourdain’s blog on the TravelChannel.com.

What about you?

Follow me @ NataliesPals and tell me about your morning website rotation. The poll is ongoing and I will publish the results next week.

Roundup for Week #1:

13 Tweets              75  Following         23  Followers     1 Question Posed            3 Responses

Natalie is a recent grad of Hamilton where she majored Religious Studies and Studio Art. She was also head of the wine club which we love. At SnapDragon, she’s been overseeing various influencer analysis and outreach efforts.

One of Natalie’s first experiments is using Twitter for polling. She’s been signing up her friends, most of whom are twenty-something college grads.  She’s going to use different Twitter tools to ask them various questions and, over the course of the summer, she will be posting the results. The questions will focus on a wide range of subjects from attitudes about jobs and relationships to what’s next among her friends.

If you’d like to participate in what she has named At Natalie’s Pals, please connect with her via Twitter.  Natalie’s Twitter is @Nataliespals .

They’d also started to sketch the outlines of a new and exciting feature called annotations that would allow developers to attach arbitrary metadata to Tweets. It’s sort of like the addition of location data. Latitude and longitude can be associated with any Tweet as metadata—it’s part of the payload but doesn’t use up any of the precious 140 characters and it’s only visible through a client application that pulls it out and displays it.

In fact, there’s all sorts of metadata already included in each Tweet, much more than the actual 140 characters of primary “data”:

There’s information about the author (account identifier, avatar image, if it’s a verified account, etc.) whether it’s a reply to something, whether it’s a retweet, when it was posted, where it was posted from…those little snippets are already given a whole lot of context.

That diagram is labeled April 18th, and it’s already quite out of date. Last week it was announced on the Twitter API Google Group that Tweets would start including metadata about embedded mentions, hashtags, and URLs so that developers wouldn’t have to parse the text of a tweet to find them. Without looking at the text of Tweet a computer can pull links or references as well as know the who, where, when, and just about everything else involved.

Twitter has put every piece of information they already have into machine-readable data and attached it to every Tweet. So the only thing left is to start letting people put in more types of information. That’s what annotations are and they’re probably pretty important.

I posted at some length a while back about the idea that, “checkin-esque” (in the foursquare sense of the word) “structured data status updating” was a key new model for social media. Not to cede to much control of language to Twitter’s API team, but “annotated status updating” might be a better way to put it.

Raffi Krikorian from Twitter recently gave a presentation about the new annotations feature, and I think it’s worth watching for anyone interested in how all these social tools are going to evolve:

He gives some really good examples of how annotations might be used. Notably, one is about a standardized way to describe television shows. Miso, one of my examples from the previous post about structured data status updating, is a whole service organized around sharing well-organized TV watching information. Now the exact same thing can be done through Twitter. It’s actually not a bad deal for Miso, who could morph their application into a Twitter client that bundled Miso data with each outgoing Tweet and displayed it for any incoming Tweets that included it—let Twitter handle the infrastructure (try not to think about the Fail Whale).

Another example from the presentation I like a lot is automatically including song track information in Tweets. The client application would pull information from iTunes (or another application) about what a user was listening to and include that as metadata in outbound messages. Another user could set their client to recognize that type of data and play any song annotated to incoming Tweets from a particular user. All of a sudden you have a radio station, or a sort.

But it’s not too long before the obvious problem shows up: How many client applications are you going to need in order take advantage of all this? And how would you pick?

This is by far my favorite part of the whole affair. At around minute 8:00 of the above video, Krikorian explains that the Twitter developer portal will provide information about “most used”,”trending”, and “most adopted” types of annotations (use refers to the number of Tweets including that type or markup, adoption to the number of applications using it). This way, the developer community can collaboratively work out how best to annotate Tweets for certain data types and everyone can know which are the hottest data types that should be processed by any hip iPhone application.

To be clear, this does mean that someone will be able to claim the mantel of “parses the most trendingest annotation namespaces of any Twitter application” for their project. And that will be the application that lets uses do the TV watching checkin thing and the streaming music selection thing and the instant purchase of embedded product thing, and the a whole bunch of other things that no one has thought of yet. There will be an incentive to include the most annotation types and there will be a hyper-transparent (basically leader boad–driven) market of sorts for working out which are the best ones. Twitter is crowd-sourcing the project of making its little social service into a universal information exchange pipeline.

Why should that role fall to Twitter? Well, at around minute 19:00 of the video that gets addressed. An audience member asks why Twitter is doing all this data markup stuff when semantic web people have been on this for years with standards like RDF and microformats.

Krikorian explains that at Twitter they “really like” all those efforts and were “inspired by that”. They believe the annotations feature “use[s] that research and mindshare” but that the existing tools didn’t fit their use case and fell short on two key points. Interestingly, they are the two types of data that have been with Twitter from the beginning are are arguable constitutive of the service: when and who.

Twitter timestamps all data, no matter what. That function isn’t open to developers to play around with, information is indexed rigidly chronologically. We know how old any Tweet is.

The source of the Tweet is always included. As Krikorian notes, now that Twitter is switching to exclusively OAuth for application authentication, that means we know exactly where a Tweet came from.

So that is what Twitter is doing: Trying to build the most reliable and well-contextualized transmission system on the Web. Or at least, that’s what the API team seems to be up to.

• Announced an advertising platform, answering the age-old (an age is about 3 or 4 years in this context) of how the company hopes to make money in the long-run
• Acquired Tweetie—probably the most successful Twitter iPhone client and one of the most most popular iPhone applications generally—with plans to relaunch it (for free) as the official “Twitter of iPhone”
• Launched their new @anywhere feature, which allows Web sites to integrate Twitter functionality so that visitors can interact with Twitter without leaving that site (a bit like Facebook connect, sort of)
• Redesigned their homepage (again), introducing a new focus on “top tweets”
• Been recognized as a critical historical record of our times by the Library of Congress, to which Twitter will be donating the entire archive of public Tweets (on a six month delay, so they’re already worthless for trend-spotting)

It might not quite be a Google-level rate of new feature releases, but it’s a lot. The homepage and Library of Congress things aren’t really big developments, but they contribute to a sense that something is up. The other three, however, are pretty big. Selling ads, maintaining and distributing software, allowing elaborate integration with other sites—these are big decisions. It would be pretty shocking for them not to be made in concert and as part of a broader strategy.

So what is Twitter doing?

Well, at the moment they’re wrapping up Chirp, Twitter’s first official developer conference. One of the things apparently revealed at Chirp is a new feature that Twitter is currently “working on” called “Annotations“. From Marcel Molina, of the Twitter API team at the Twitter API Google Group:

One of the things we talked about at Chirp is the new Annotations feature we’re working on. In short, it allows you to annotate a tweet with structured metadata. We’re still working on Annotations, but I wanted to share with a wider audience beyond those I was able to talk to in person at Chirp about how we’re thinking of doing Annotations.

First off let’s be clearer about what an annotation is. An annotation is a namespace, key, value triple. A tweet can have one or more annotations. Namespaces can have one or more key/value pairs.

I cannot emphasize enough how much less boring this is than it sounds from that description.

It’s also a lot simpler than it might sound. A namespace is just a category of information, a key is the name for a particular piece of information, and a value is that bit of information in a particular case. Think of a form you might fill out: The namespaces are the headers that label different sections (”personal information”, “contact information”, “billing address”, etc.), the keys are the individual items in each section (”first name”, “last name”, “email address”, etc.), and the values are the, well, values you enter for each item.

Tweets already have a few keys and values. From: [user who sent it], time: [time it was sent], content: [those 140 characters]. Those are sort of the big ones, but there are more. The application used to send it, whether it is an official retweet (as opposed to an unofficial/”old school” copy/paste one preceded by an “RT”), and recently optional location information.

Now developers can make Tweets carry more information. Any sort of information. Like what you ask? From the same post quoted above:

Ok, great. What should I use annotations for though?

We don’t know! That’s the cool thing. Annotations are a blank slate that
lend themselves to myriad divergent use cases. We want to provide open-ended
utility for all the developers to innovate on top of. Some of us have
initial ideas of cool potential uses cases that I’m sure we’ll start to
share just to seed the conversation as we get closer to launch. Developers
will experiment with annotations. Certain ideas and approaches will catch
on. Certain annotations will become standards democratically because
everyone agrees. Some might have diverging opinions. It’s something that we
hope will grow organically and be driven by sociological and cultural
forces.

This is sort of elegant. Twitter’s success owes a lot to the vibrant developer community they have facilitates. Twitter really set the standard for providing a comprehensive, well-documented API for a social Web service. That’s why I was initially taken aback by the announcement of the Tweetie acquisition. It seemed absolutely antithetical to everything that made Twitter what it is—I’d always used the diverse, competitive, and profitable market for Twitter client applications as an example of a company fostering a developer ecosystem. Suddenly it looked like a significant part of it would be squashed by the presence of an “official” client for one of the most popular devices.

But now there’s a whole lot more to do with Twitter than making a slightly different client application or another wacky visualization or mashup out of the public Tweet timeline.

Incidentally I happen to have gone on at some length almost this exact capability in my last post here:

Sharing information about location (or anything else) isn’t what’s new or interesting. What’s new and interesting is sharing that information in a well-structured fashion that facilitates new applications and experiences.[...]

[T]he goal is to combine the ease of sharing relevant social information through a simple status updating tool with the power of doing so in a structured way that can be usefully processed by computers for new applications.

This is what Twitter is making possible—sending new sorts of useful information along with your Tweets. One of the examples I used in the post quote above is a recently-launched service called Miso:

Miso is an extremely Foursquare-like application, it even has its own set of badges, for checking in to share what TV show or movie one is watching rather than where one happens to be in the world. Badges reflect number of shows or films watching in a particular genre, completing a particular series, watching enough things about vampires, etc. There are many.

A little message can be included upon checkin (”checkin” is their own word choice), so it’s like sending a Tweet about what one happens to be watching. Except this way the watcher can see who else is watching the same thing, or what their friends are or have recently watched. And like Foursquare there’s an option to send one’s Miso update to Twitter and Facebook, meaning there’s no loss to using Miso in applicable cases.

With annotations an appropriate client application can send a Tweet that includes the same sort of structured data Miso generates. That means that Miso could run entirely on Twitter. The Miso server would just analyze the data from Miso users’ Tweets and then respond to requests from client applications with information about who is watching what. A Miso annotation capable Twitter client could also parse any Miso annotations on incoming Tweets, so it could display information about shows currently being watched next to messages from any user including that data in their outbound message.

Foursquare could do the same thing. Twitter can include location information but the important thing about foursquare is the identification of particular venues (rather than latitude and longitude). Using annotations one could create an application that “annotated” outbound Tweets with a chosen nearby foursquare venue (identified by pinging the foursquare server for a list of the closest ones). That Tweet would constitute the checkin to foursquare, which is possible because the data payload is a hidden bit of well-structured key/value action tagged onto the human-readable primary Tweet content. It could also still be interpreted by a client application capable of doing so and displayed when available.

At this point it’s probably worth pointing out that Tweetie last made the tech blog headlines just over a month ago when it released Tweetie 2 with native foursquare support. The scenario I described above is not very far at all from being a reality.

There’s more to say about this, mostly in the form of speculation about possible ways to use this capability. And that’s exactly what Twitter wants people to be thinking and talking about. The end of Molina’s post:

We’re really excited about Annotations. Annotations mark one of our first of
many departures from keeping in lock step with features on the web site. To
truly be a platform, we want to expose high-leverage general purpose utility
for the developer community to innovate on top of. Annotations is just the
first of several high-leverage-general-purpose-utlity features we’re hoping
to get to after Annotations.

Think big. Blow our minds.

“What is Twitter” has never had a really great answer. It looks like if they have their way, the answer will be something like “a universal and extensible platform for realtime communication and social interaction on the Web”.

So that’s what they’re up to (or at least part of it).

In short, these are all services that allow their users to submit information about where they are and share that information with their contacts. Many features extend out from that: reviews of local establishments by other uses, recommended nearby activities, friends who might be in the same area, even forms of group game playing.

The big standout here is Foursquare, which launched just about a year ago, right before the 2009 South by Southwest (SWSX) Interactive conference. They’ve been growing at an almost Twitter-like pace recently, earning them comparisons with Twitter, including that the 2010 SXSW could be a breakout moment for Foursquare the same way many people think of 2007’s conference as for Twitter.

Gowalla is the alternative most often cited as Foursquare’s best competition—when both companies released an update for their mobile apps just before SWSX some started calling that week “the battle of location based apps“.

Brightkite is also often part of the discussion. There’s also Loopt, Whrrl, MyTown, and a few others that seem a bit like also-rans at the moment but may yet surprise. Google has Latitude, Yahoo has Fire Eagle, and the review site Yelp has launched location-based features too (though Foursquare feels Yelp’s version is a little too similar to their own).

Though the past year has seen an explosion of activity in this area, it’s not new. The first service on the scene was one called Dodgeball that was founded way back in 2000, got acquired by Google in 2005, and was turned off in 2009 to be cannibalized into Google’s Latitude. Dodgeball’s founders left in 2007, with one writing that their experience at Google “was incredibly frustrating for us”, and proceeded to create Foursquare (perhaps explaining the name a bit).

These services are all interesting and there’s a lot of potential in this area, but so far the number of users has been fairly low and that population has been fragmented across different services. Foursquare is getting the bulk of the attention because it’s starting to build momentum (I, for instance, finally have started an account).

But it’s not the specifically location-focused tools that have made the biggest geosocial news recently. Two services that make Foursquare and friends look like ants are joining fray: Facebook and Twitter. The somewhat dodgy details on Facebook’s potential new location sharing features come from the New York Times’ Bits blog. Twitter announced their new capabilities on their own blog. Location-awareness isn’t entirely new for Twitter (one of Twitter’s early partners in geotagging was in fact Foursquare), so it’s the reporting about Facebook that’s making the biggest waves.

And not without some justification. Facebook will probably end 2010 with at least half a billion people. In comparison, Foursquare is still under half a million. Even more importantly, Facebook’s appeal is both broad (users cut across demographic categories and areas of interest) and deep (some spend several hours a day on the service and reportedly half visit the site every day). That means Facebook has the opportunity to expose location-based features to a wide variety of users and that many of them are already heavily invested in that particular site. That’s a much stronger position than having to be sought out by users and requiring them to register and start using a whole new service. These are some of the arguments made in a post on TechCrunch from a while back titled “Watch Out Foursquare, Facebook is Poised To Dominate Geo”, which includes the subhead “Why Facebook Already Won”:

Unfortunately, most people don’t know all that many people on Foursquare yet — my current Friends List on Foursquare is dominated by folks who live and breathe tech, without a single person from my ‘regular’ social circle on the service. Twitter has always suffered from the same problem, and even a year of stellar growth and constant press attention hasn’t yet given Twitter an on ramp into mainstream use.

“Regular” people don’t use Foursquare (or, apparently, Twitter), they use Facebook. So, because Facebook already “owns the social graph” (i.e. “knows who your friends are”) Foursquare and others can’t rely on location as a core feature:

If Facebook does nail geo, that doesn’t necessarily mean Foursquare is doomed. It just means that Foursquare needs to build a product whose core value extends beyond showing where your friends are…Facebook is going to own the social graph, but there’s plenty that can still be done beyond that…They’ll just need to figure out how to use location as a starting point, rather than a core feature.

The argument put forward in this post reflects more widely held incorrect assumptions about both the direction of the social Web generally and the geosocial category specifically:

1. That user inertia and the presence of a big competitor (like Facebook) mean new sorts of social networking tools can’t attract enough users to cross over into the mainstream
2. That the “core feature” (and not starting point for other capabilities) of applications like Foursquare is location sharing with friends, and that’s too limiting and potentially too foreign a notion for them to thrive

Both of these merit being dispelled . Doing so will require getting into more detail about what these geosocial applications actually do as well as how they work. That perspective will also help highlight that the important take-away from the current flurry of activity in this area is about much more than just location.
Though there’s some debate on this point, Foursquare does seem to be pulling away from the pack. That’s why it, and not any of its competitors listed above, was the target of that TechCrunch post and why the New York Times (the actual publication, not even just a blog!) just recently enthusiastically used it as the example to explain location sharing generally. I’ll be doing the same, though the basics of the idea are roughly the same in other cases too.

The process essentially goes like this: A user goes to a place and uses their mobile device to “checkin”. Based on the user’s location as determined by their device’s GPS or cell tower triangulation, the user is presented with a list of venues in their vicinity to select one from as the one they intend to checkin at. This information can be shared with others and the user can choose to receive information relevant to the place they are from the application.

Narrowing in on the Foursquare example specifically, the information that service provides includes “to-do” items (recommended activities) and notes left by other users. There’s also an ongoing game element to Foursquare. The most frequent user to check in at a particular venue is made its “mayor”. This fact is advertised to other users and Foursquare is promoting the idea that businesses give special consideration to mayors as a way to attract customers. Additionally, there are a series of “badges” to earn based on one’s checkins. There are basic ones like 50 total, 4 in a day, 4 days in a row, 3 at the same place in one week, 30 in a month, etc. There are also some more creative ones: 10 movie theaters, 10 art galleries, 10 playgrounds, even 3 places with a photobooth. Both this year and last Foursquare has offered SWSX-specific badges (as specific as attending particular parties) and has created them for other events, organizations, and brands.

All this mayor-crowning and badge-awarding might strike one as somewhat silly and nothing more than a sort of side feature. Well, as far as the silliness goes it’s always important to keep in mind that the FarmVille Facebook game has somewhere around 80 million users. And as far as the centrality of the game components to the service, there are a few things that I believe are significant:

1. It’s a game, and people like to play games—this might be a bit obvious, but it bears emphasis. In fact, there’s a great deal to say about how new social technology (like social interaction generally) incorporates both explicit and implicit forms of play. But that issue stretches far beyond the relatively narrow topic of trends in geosocial networking. For the purposes of this discussion, it will have to be enough to note that given the properly contextualized opportunity to win something—even if it’s just a virtual merit badge for documenting one’s comings and goings on a mobile phone—people can be convinced to want to win it, and even enjoy wanting to win it.
2. It establishes a causal, playful sensibility—If all Foursquare did was tell other people where one is, as opposed to providing the enjoyable wanting experience of a game, it would feel like a utility. There wouldn’t be anything to appreciate about it or give it character. As it is, Foursquare does have a personality of sorts. It’s one that seems to strive to be inclusive and, well, fun. Foursquare’s description of itself on its blog gives a good sense of this attitude: “Your favorite, er, mobile + social + friend finder + social city guide + nightlife game thing.”
3. It shields users for the accusation/feeling of narcissism—This is sort of a specific case of the above. If all Foursquare did was inform one’s friends of his or her every more, it would feel an awful lot like the caricatured version of Twitter in which everyone exchanges several updates about what they eat for breakfast and feels that it’s all quite important. Instead. there’s a goal-oriented aspect to it, even if it’s in the background or comes to matter less over time. Foursquare is a game people can play together, not just another indulgent form of oversharing. Or at least it’s easy enough for one to choose to see it that way.
4. It generates exposure—Foursquare offers users the ability to post updates to Twitter and Facebook. It’s easy to control whether each checkin is sent to those services, or is even made visible to contacts on Foursquare. There’s also an option to have Foursquare send a message out on Twitter and Facebook whenever a badge is unlocked or a mayorship is earned. Once more, a sort of specific case of the previous point: Telling the whole world where one goes each day seems a bit much. Including one’s progress in a game in one’s activity stream is an established practice. This alerts users’ friends that someone they know is on Foursquare, prompting them to consider joining themselves, or at least pushing the needle in terms of awareness and wider adoption.
5. It provides an opportunity for easy and obvious customization and localization—Some of the badges are either location-specific or have specific versions for different cities. Mayorships are also obviously tied to particular locations, ones likely to be recognizable to one’s online social contacts who live in the same place. This helps make Foursquare seem closer and more familiar than it would if it were the same everywhere and thus overly generic.
6. It positions the platform as an affirmative presence, not just a neutral information relay—By being non-generic and establishing itself as having a sort of personality associated with the gaming content, Foursquare has made clear from the start that it isn’t just a switchboard for personal location information or a directory of places to visit. There is a unique and substantive sort of engagement to be had with other users and with the platform itself. That means that when Foursquare makes a deal to include badges for a brand or promotion that it’s not betraying its role as a neutral background facilitating communication. Facebook and Twitter both struggle with the fact that they established an expectation that they be a sort of blank slate for interaction. If Twitter of Facebook sold special powers to corporate users that were not delimited advertisements but somehow incorporated into the workings of the site itself I think there would be significant discontent. The situation is not quite the same for Foursquare.
7. It’s a way to make money—Even if you find the previous point about perceived role to be something of a stretch, there’s no doubt that the game arrangement provides a novel way to involve advertisers/sponsors and encourage smaller businesses to participate in the in-kind exchange of publicity of offering a Foursquare-based promotion like a special offer for the Mayor. Foursquare has already partnered with Zagat, Bravo, Valentine’s Day (the film), Harvard University, and The Brooklyn Museum. A deal with MTV was just announced for “pegging the locations of a number of reality celebs” on Foursquare. Hundreds of venues have have embraced their status as a Foursquare location and are using it to offer promotions. (And keep in mind, this doesn’t have to be the best idea for advertisers in order for Foursquare to profit from it.)

It would be very difficult for either Facebook or Twitter to make their native location functionality (critically, not a third-party application build on top of it) into something like Foursquare’s. Moreover, Foursquare as an idea represented by the components above (which I think covers enough to be innovative in attracting users and making money) can make sense absent offering positioning and location-sharing itself. I could use Facebook to keep my location updated and have that information sent to Foursquare, or the other way around. Not only does this suggest that the location sharing aspect isn’t the “core feature” of an application like Foursquare, but shows why Foursquare only stands to gain from Facebook going geosocial.

The initial report from earlier this month gave precious little insight into what Facebook has planned, but nonetheless seemed to confirm what I tend to expect:

The new location feature will have two aspects, according to the people familiar with Facebook’s plans. One will be a service offered directly by Facebook that will allow users to share their location information with friends.

The other will be a set of software tools, known as A.P.I.’s [sic], that outside developers can use to offer their own location-based services to Facebook users.[...]

One of the people familiar with the project said that the company was not trying to beat the smaller location-based social networks, such as Loopt, Foursquare and Gowalla.

Instead, Facebook wants to go head-to-head with Google in the fight for small-business advertising [Bits/NYT.com]

And what looks to be true for Facebook’s location features is already true for the other aspect of the service alleged to doom the likes of Foursquare: the social graph.

“Social graph” is a useful concept that has become a bit clouded, or perhaps was never made clear enough in the first place. Basically it refers to the map of one’s social connections to other people. The name comes from a branch of mathematics called graph theory, which is appropriately focused on arrangements of pair-wise (one-to-one) connections between points.

In Facebook’s case, all those friendship connections produce one pretty big arrangement of pair-wise connections. And it is indeed an incredible resource that Facebook has access to, but so does everyone else, through Facebook’s API and the Facebook Connect feature of the Facebook application platform.

Foursquare leverages the amazing repository of social graph information that Facebook has built by offering new users the option to link their Facebook account to their Foursquare account to see if any of their Facebook friends have signed up on Foursquare as well. The same can be done with Twitter, and it’s this account linking that enables Foursquare to update a user’s accounts on the other services.

“Find other friends on this service” isn’t new, but the point is that the more that “Facebook owns the social graph” (i.e., the more social connections it maps), the easier it will be for new Foursquare users to discover people they know on the service, making them a little bit more likely to give it a real try and perhaps end up sticking with it.

But in the location-sharing context users very well may not want to connect with or even be discovered by all of their Facebook contacts. As Facebook comes to map more and more connections—not just friends but family and coworkers—it may become more valuable in certain respects but in others it becomes overly broad in scope. And besides, keeping up with the Foursquare exploits of friends in other cities makes less sense than only connecting with local contacts. There are plenty of reasons for one’s circle of Foursquare contacts to be more circumscribed than their list of Facebook friends. To be sure, any future location sharing feature on Facebook will probably (one hopes) have fairly granular privacy settings. But Facebook has become notorious for weighting the scales in favor of making information public (and its CEO has asserted that privacy is dead).

So in the context of the predicted conflict between Foursquare and geosocial Facebook (which has allegedly “already won”), Facebook’s supposed big advantage, ubiquity, is just as likely a disadvantage in that Foursquare and similar services lend themselves to contact networks that are much smaller and specifically defined than one’s fuller social graph as mapped out on Facebook. And, to the extent that Facebook “owns” the social graph, the benefits of that aren’t exclusive and are already being leveraged with success by Foursquare.

The things that differentiate Foursquare form other services—like all those quirky game features—can easily exist on top of a Facebook-based geosocial framework but are very difficult to imagine being reproduced by Facebook itself as a hard-wired component of that platform. Foursquare certainly needs to watch out for what Facebook is doing in terms of geosocial features (and what Twitter and everyone else involved is doing too), but not because it points to Foursquare’s imminent demise. Rather, the rapidly evolving ecosystem of interlinked social services in this category means everyone has to be on their toes.

For example, the folks behind britekite are working on check.in, which aims to be “one checkin to rule them all” after suffering personally from “severe check-in fatigue”, having to separately checkin to multiple services (the image on the “coming soon” site includes britekite, Foursquare, and Gowalla). This raises some questions. Will more than one service send updates to Twitter and Facebook? If not, how will one decide which to give that responsibility to? Will users selectively checkin to some services sometimes and others at other times? Will different services acquire tangibly distinct and only partially overlapping user bases? How will definitions of places or venues be translated for multiple services which may organize locations differently?

While check.in attempts to address the critical mass problem in geosocial networking, other projects are exacerbating it. ShoutEm offers to help you “Roll your own Mobile and Location Based Social Network”. It makes Ning and similar user-generated non-location aware networks look positively naught-eight. Similarly, Socialight, a self-described “read-write API for the world” (empahsis theirs) provides a simple way for developers to build new location-based social applications. Will the the relative ease of creating “the next Foursquare” further fragment the field of geosocial networks? Will check.in cover whatever significant additional services these tools facilitate (if any)? Or will ShoutEm and Socialight be ignored in favor of developing on a location-aware version of the Facebook platform?

Let’s reimagine this line of questioning from the perspective of potential users. “How will I checkin?” “Will I have to checkin to multiple services?” “Who will see when and where I checkin, and how will I control that?” All good questions and all having to do with this suddenly fraught business of a “checkin”.

Now, here’s where we get to the bit about implications beyond location.

It make a great deal of sense that Foursquare offers to send updates about one’s location to Twitter and the Facebook news feed because those are prime examples of “status updating”. That category is a relatively recent one to emerge. At the end of 2009 I wrote about status updating as small, informal, more realtime-oriented, often mobile-based communication disseminated across social networking tools as opposed to “digital publishing”, referring to more weighty content distributed on the public Web for general consumption. Of note then was the fact that according to Pew research, one fifth of Internet users answered yes to “Do you ever…use Twitter or another service to share updates about yourself or to see updates about others?”, double the number from a year ago.

Foursquare and similar services are for sharing updates about oneself and seeing updates from others. So is Twitter (and Facebook, but in terms of status updating Twitter has always led the way). At first, the updates on Twitter and were just some text—famously only those 140 characters. These updates were organized by who they came from and when they were sent. Then more structured data started creeping in, @message and #hashtags became used universally to communicate specific types of information in a standardized way (@ is used to address or refer to a user, # is used to designate a topic). More niche conventions have been pushed, like $ followed by a ticker symbol to designate a discussion of a company from an investment perspective.

All that helps makes Tweets meaningful for machines. A computer can programmatically determine certain things about one’s status as updated to Twitter without “understanding” human language. It might be limited to who and what one is updating about, but that’s something.

Twitter has embedded more data into Tweets as time has gone on, such as information about whether a message is a “retweet” or has been retweeted. Of course, the excitement now is that more location information is going to be embedded too, making that information available for manipulation and analysis by computer applications. Presumably this is what’s going to be added to Facebook news feed items as well.

A Foursquare checkin (or one on any other similar service) is a status update with the emphasis overwhelmingly put on the location metadata component that is soon to be an aspect of the most popular existing status updating platforms, which Foursquare happens to already integrate with to the extent possible. The fact that the location data is structured based on a shared system for correlating points in space with human-significant venues makes it possible for the application to make determinations about who has been where how many times, enabling the badges and mayors. This, along with other features such as tips and finding friends, makes it such that an otherwise contentless status update from Foursquare (i.e., just one’s location as metadata) makes sense and is meaningful where as at the moment I don’t believe a Twitter of Facebook message without any text is even allowed. But that only further emphasizes the point that the Foursquare game could be interfaced with through other sufficiently sophisticated social tools and also gives geosocial networking sufficient content for location information to be substantive in itself.

But location isn’t the only sort of information that could be programmatically associated with a status update. Miso is an extremely Foursquare-like application, it even has its own set of badges, for checking in to share what TV show or movie one is watching rather than where one happens to be in the world. Badges reflect number of shows or films watching in a particular genre, completing a particular series, watching enough things about vampires, etc. There are many.

A little message can be included upon checkin (”checkin” is their own word choice), so it’s like sending a Tweet about what one happens to be watching. Except this way the watcher can see who else is watching the same thing, or what their friends are or have recently watched. And like Foursquare there’s an option to send one’s Miso update to Twitter and Facebook, meaning there’s no loss to using Miso in applicable cases. There’s even an option to update Foursquare as well, with location information and all!

Then there’s stickybits, which also allows linking to Foursquare but is focused on scanning barcodes with one’s phone and attaching (”sticking”) text or other media (”bits”) to them. To be honest I’m a bit fuzzy on how the location aspect plays into the barcode scanning but the point remains: more layers of structured data on top of each status update/checkin.

And speaking of layers, there’s already an application bridging Foursquare and Layar, one of the most popular open platforms for augmented reality development. There have already been some great deployments of augmented reality technology on mobile devices, but as structured location information becomes more effectively linked with social information entire new possibilities start opening up. I could even see a live overlay of where people had checked into Miso as watching my favorite show if I really wanted to.

It’s important to put it that way: it’s where people had checked in. Who knows where they are or what they’re doing now? There’s no requirement to checkin everywhere one goes just like there’s no requirement to Tweet about every action one takes. Nothing about these applications inherently invades privacy or forces oversharing.

This perspective would seem not to be shared by the creators of Please Rob Me, a sort of stunt Web site that critiqued location sharing for letting it be known that one wasn’t at home to defend one’s belongings from theft (the “project” has since concluded, coverage from the time it was more active here). However, Foursquare’s response to this episode quite elegantly emphasizes my point:

The question of “Will foursquare get my house robbed?” is really a bigger question about the pros and cons of location sharing in general. The site that kicked off this whole conversation was using Twitter’s Search API to pull in foursquare checkins that had been sent to Twitter and was then re-wording those tweets to advertise the fact that a user wasn’t at home.

The truth is you could make something like this without using foursquare at all. Just try searching Twitter for the words “headed to”…

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%22headed+to%22

… and you’ll start to scratch the surface on all the location data a lot of us push into the internets, perhaps even without thinking about it.
Anyway, we definitely “get” the larger issue here – location is sensitive data and people should be careful about with whom and when they share it. And at foursquare, we do everything we can to make sure that our users know with what people and social sites they are sharing their location with. [...]

That being said, figured I’d share one of my favorite comments from this Gawker post poking fun at the whole “foursquare as robbery accomplice” angle:

You might as well argue that you should never tell anyone that you have a job, because then people will know you are at work from 9-5 every day, and can use the white pages to find your home and rob you! Or that you should never, ever update your Facebook status to let people know you’re on vacation. Or that you shouldn’t blog that you’re at work, or at a restaurant, or in another city, or anywhere other than home. Or that you should never upload mobile pix to Flickr when you’re out at night. Or for that matter, you should never, ever, ever tell anyone that you’re anyplace on the phone, because you know who may be listening in? Robbers! Robbers who want to steal your precious, precious, precious shit! (by mat-honan)

(Probably not necessary to quote all that, but I feel Foursquare’s choice of quote is worth including.) Location can be shared on Twitter without Foursquare. Location can even be shared on the Web without Twitter. And somehow people even knew where to find each other before that.

The only thing new here is that all this information about where people are, what they’re doing, what they think, what they’re watching, and more is getting more structured and arriving in greater volume and at greater speeds.

Earlier this month Twitter announced that it was turning on “the firehose” for a group of new partner companies—that is, giving them API access to the realtime stream of new Tweets. That’s around 50 million each day. Google and Bing already had access to all those Tweets so they could be indexed for search. Google is moving on towards indexing all new Tweets in realtime. It’s one thing to get those 35,000-some messages each second sorted and queued up for analysis and then plugged into a database, Google is talking about making new content on Twitter searchable the instant it’s put there. More and more of those Tweets are going to start coming with location metadata, and maybe other sorts of structured information embedded in their content (@, #, $, perhaps standardized identifiers from other applications, etc.). That’s a lot of usable information.

Superfeedr, a company I’ve written about before in the context of the realtime (as in, to the second) Web, has started including location in data feeds. In that previous post about Superfeedr I wrote:

Think about all this really realtime stuff along with the location-based social services like Foursquare and the rapidly improving world of augmented reality, and you can start to see the outlines of what the next generation of the social Web might look like. It’s one where a mobile interface with the realtime Web is sufficiently advanced that one doesn’t need to be deliberately accessing the social Web to be a well-timed participant in it, and as a result the Web more easily folds together with ongoing “offline” day-to-day activity.

That was two months ago. Almost all of the posts I’ve linked to about developments on this front are from the intervening several weeks. I don’t think I was totally off my game back in January (a fellow from Superfeedr even left a very nice comment), so everything would suggest that what I described as outlines are getting filled in pretty quickly.

Even more dated than that post of mine is that innocent TechCrunch post I used as a straw-person. Recall its two assumptions that I wanted to address:

1. That user inertia and the presence of a big competitor (like Facebook) mean new sorts of social networking tools can’t attract enough users to cross over into the mainstream
2. That the “core feature” (and not starting point for other capabilities) of applications like Foursquare is location sharing with friends, and that’s too limiting and potentially too foreign a notion for them to thrive

I hope they already look more unreasonable than they did back before the jump. But a last thing on the first point: Consider that Twitter’s tipping point SWSX saw the total Tweets reach the dazzling height of 60,000 per day from its previous average of 20,000. By contrast, Foursquare is pushing 350,0000 and racked up 100,000 new users over a ten day period ending last week. Foursquare’s improvement over Twitter’s take-off performance suggests that friction around the adoption of new forms of status updating is decreasing.

And just to reiterate on the second point: Sharing information about location (or anything else) isn’t what’s new or interesting. What’s new and interesting is sharing that information in a well-structured fashion that facilitates new applications and experiences.

I don’t know how Miso and stickybits are doing. I realize that they’re certainly not putting up the big numbers just yet. But “location sharing” in the second point could be replaced with “television/movie watching sharing” or “barcode content tagging sharing”. I’m not saying that either thing is poised for vast success in the short-term, but to simply assume that they’re not ignores everything that could be done on top of the basic infrastructure they employ—everything Foursquare has done on top of basic location sharing, for instance.

More realistic than either of those two examples might be an ever so slight twist on Foursquare’s “where are you?” promt. Plancast is, according to one of its founders, “Foursquare for the future.” It asks “where will you be?” What strikes me as rather funny about this example is that we’ve actually had structured data formats for events for quite some time. But the iCal/Outlook/Google Calendar world of appointments doesn’t fit with the checkin-esque model because it’s designed to be primarily closed. At the very least, there’s no shared space out there that everyone can throw (er, cast) their upcoming plan into. Not insignificantly, I think this becomes intuitively clear as soon as one sees the big buttons for signing in with Facebook or Twitter. And just as Foursquare could live alongside Facebook location features, Plancast already is introducing integration with the Facebook events system.

Aside from precisely not being crowded out by overlap with a big competitor and not being quite reducible to its core technical function, what does Plancast have in common with Foursquare? That the goal is to combine the ease of sharing relevant social information through a simple status updating tool with the power of doing so in a structured way that can be usefully processed by computers for new applications.

Neither “structured data status updating” nor “checkin-esque” are particularly strong coinages, but I think either will turn out to be a better descriptor of the category of services that includes the likes of Foursquare than “geosocial networking.”

That’s what it got using my personal Gmail account. Amazon Wishlist, Flickr, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pandora are all links to the public profile pages of those accounts. When I went to screenshot this I thought about blurring out my potentially embarrassing Amazon Wishlist (I don’t even recall what’s on there) or personal Twitter account (not updated since July). But none of that—none of anything Flowtown collects and presents—is private. Most of it is out there and anyone with some time could sit down with Google and find most of it (and more). At the very least, as long as this person has my email address, they can just sign up for Flowtown themselves.

But there is a lot more to Flowtown than highlighting the need for personal reputation management. It has serious business applications. If a company has a mailing list of tens of thousands of customers they can pull all of those customers’ Twitter accounts and start following them and sending them coupons. Those messages are probably more likely to be seen than mass email that gets caught in a spam filter.

There are also more interesting opportunities, like pulling all those Tweets and looking for common topics to find out what a company’s audience is (on balance) into these days. That information could also be used to target particular Tweets at particular users based on demonstrated interest. The music for a commercial could be decided based on information scraped from Pandora about what most customers are listening to through that service. There are lots of ways to extract useful information from what was just a lit of email addresses.

Those sorts of things are all possible because data can be bulk imported and exported. But that only facilitates the more novel examples above—there’d be plenty more work to do. Flowtown’s power is in its automation, not some sort of magical social Web x-ray vision that allows it to see things about people that others never could. Still, it sort of seems like it’s an invasion of privacy, or like it should be one.

I think that’s because privacy and social media have an odd relationship. While people are still concerned about invasions of privacy in their online lives, the entire social Web as we know it owes its existence in no small part to the fact that people care a lot less about privacy than they used to.

Sites like Facebook and LinkedIn are networks of real people—accounts ideally correspond with and describe individuals out there in the “real world”. People even use their real names and upload real photographs of themselves and tell other people (roughly) where they really live!

By 1996’s standards, this would all be very unnerving. Back in the glory days of America Online, people used screen names selected deliberately to mask their identity. It would be dangerous to do otherwise, the thinking went. And plenty of people would advise against using that new “www.amazon.com” because only a fool would give out their credit card information on the Internet.

Neither Facebook nor LinkedIn nor many of the other sites Flowtown pulls from would make any sense in a world where there wasn’t a one-to-one correspondence between individuals and online identities. That’s not the case across the board of course. One can Twitter or Tumbl anonymously just fine, or even maintain personal accounts and anonymous ones on the same network.

But those anonymous identities would still be connected to an email address. In fact, you could create a whole fictional person around a free email account that Flowtown would generate a social profile for as elaborately as it would anyone else.

To that point, while it’s not exactly the same as making up a new person, but here’s what Flowtown gives me when put in my SnapDragon email address (rather than my personal Gmail):

So it’s not really my social profile (or anyone else’s), it’s the social profile of that email address. That puts an interesting spin on the data one could extract from Flowtown. For instance, I ran my email address book through the system’s free account and here’s the aggregate data about social network usage that was returned:

Now, some of the email address I put in are people’s work ones and some are personal ones (for several people I have both). As is clear from the example of me, not all email addresses are equally representative of the people they correspond to in terms of how they connect up to the social Web. So how accurate is that chart? And how helpful is it if it only covers certain services—I’m sure Delicious is more widely used than StumbleUpon, but it’s not included in the reports one way way or another.

Well, that’s why profiling one’s contacts isn’t the best (or at all intended) use of Flowtown. As their impressively close two-way integration with MailChimp suggests, the idea is to leverage lists of email addresses generated for email marketing in order to do targeted social media marketing. The issue there isn’t an invasion of privacy but rather the potential for spam across new platforms, not less privacy just more noise.

But one way or another the noise will get filtered out. If a platform can’t provide that capability it will suffer in terms of users anyway. So the challenge will really be to use tools like Flowtown to craft sufficiently targeted outreach campaigns that they stop being noise and become valued communication. Having the ability to efficiently translate an email address (one tiny bit of information) into a social profile (a bigger piece of information) should certainly make that an easier task.

Just a few weeks ago I posted here about the implications of the real-time Web, writing that in conjunction with mobile devices and location aware technology, it would likely result in world where “the Web more easily folds together with ongoing ‘offline’ day-to-day activity.” Today Google has gone ahead and illustrated what I was trying to get at.

This afternoon they announced a new service called Google Buzz. As of this writing it doesn’t seem to be available just yet (to me at least), but there’s a video included with the announcement blog post that gives a pretty good idea of what it’s all about:

That fellow in the video who snaps a photo of a butterfly out in “the real world” and uses the magic of Buzz to instantly distribute it? That’s what I mean by folding together online and offline activities. Sure, there are ways to share photos using social tools now, but only one of them is universal: Email. Buzz is an attempt to update email for the real-time, location-aware, social Web. It’s about getting that butterfly to everyone you feel needs to see it without effort, and without bothering too many people who don’t want to see it.

So in short Google Buzz helps you connect and share with the people in your life. You know, the exact way Facebook describes itself on its landing page. That is in fact a useful comparison for describing what Buzz is. Facebook’s “news feed” is probably one of the most similar (and familiar) tools already out there. As far as more obscure, historical examples go, FriendFeed (which Facebook bought) also had a similar notion of aggregating all the social Web activity a user was concerned about following in a single place.

What sets Buzz apart is that it’s evolving out of the Gmail inbox, not just in terms of user interface, but more importantly in terms of user identity and, even more importantly in terms of a user’s contacts. FriendFeed took a significant time investment to get working because one had to enter a lot of information about what one wanted to follow and/or cajole one’s contacts to join and enter all their information. Facebook (at least from this user’s perspective) suffers from the opposite problem—way, way too much information that it takes much too much work to sort through.

The Gmail/Google account context is different. I think it’s safe to say that people have fewer Google contacts (people who show up in the Gchat widget within Gmail) than they do Facebook friends. These Google contacts are established (by default) based on exchanged emails. Facebook, by virtue of its size, ubiquity, publicness, and the culture around it leads to contacts being established by encountering another individual at all, no matter how fleetingly.

And for all of Facebook’s new feature releases, its friendship connections are still basically “dumb”. Gmail has released little, seemingly novelty features like notifications for when one sends an email to a group but leaves out someone normally associated with that group of addresses. In the context of a social sharing tool that sort of grouping and organizing of relationships is actually incredibly powerful. Not least because it’s information that the system learns from the user’s behavior, rather than demanding that the user enter.

Gmail itself is organized primarily around chronology and conversation threading, with little interrupting boxes for instant messages. There are some widgets one can add and other customizations but by-and-large it’s about sending messages to a fairly circumscribed group of regular contacts. Facebook is, by comparison, utter chaos.

The language used in the official Google blog post fits pretty well with this reading of things:

Today, communication on the web has evolved beyond email and chat — people are sharing photos with friends and family, commenting on news happening around them, and telling the world what they’re up to in real-time. This new social sharing is valuable, but it means there’s a lot more stuff to sort through, and it’s harder to get past status updates and engage in meaningful discussions.

Sound familiar at all, coming from Google? It should. Remember the last time the Web went into a tizzy over Google announcing a reinvention of email? Just about nine months ago, also from the official Google blog:

[T]wo of the most spectacular successes in digital communication, email and instant messaging, were originally designed in the ’60s to imitate analog formats — email mimicked snail mail, and IM mimicked phone calls. Since then, so many different forms of communication had been invented — blogs, wikis, collaborative documents, etc. — and computers and networks had dramatically improved. So Jens proposed a new communications model that presumed all these advances as a starting point…A “wave” is equal parts conversation and document, where people can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

The Jens mentioned there is Jens Rasmussen and the post is by his brother Lars, describing the genesis of what would become the much-talked about Google Wave.

I’m not the only one who thinks Buzz and Wave have more than a just a little in common. TechCrunch’s coverage of the Buzz launch is headlined: “If Google Wave Is The Future, Google Buzz Is The Present”. The post concludes with:

The big question is: will Gmail users buy into this quick sharing? Google thinks so because it’s a part of the evolution from email, to IM, to status updates. It’s also, in their eyes, a part of the evolution to the next step, Google Wave. So far, the public has proven to be not ready for Wave yet. But Buzz might be the perfect tool in getting people to think about communicating in a way beyond email and IM. Or it may be another misstep in Google’s social quest. [Emphasis Added]

This is just one example of what is bound to be Web-wide chatter about the new service, and the point that Google hasn’t had the best of luck with the really social aspects of the Web is an important one. However, I think it’s a big mistake to see Buzz as a stepping stone on the way to Wave. Buzz isn’t just “Wave lite”, created because “the public has proven to be not ready for Wave yet” (also, it’s worth pointing out that Wave hasn’t even been officially released beyond a limited preview version yet, so it’s not really ready for the public either). On the contrary, I think Buzz and Wave have different applications and fill different needs. One needn’t be a step to the other because there is good reason to have both at the same time.

Specifically, I think that Buzz is a tool for individuals and Wave is a tool for groups. Buzz is about the on-going personal practice of using technology to communicate and share, Wave is about collaboration to accomplish goals. Buzz is a big move by Google to get involved in the social Web in a way it hasn’t before, and that’s quite different from the agenda with Wave—I think Wave’s ultimate destiny lies more with the enterprise (or other organizational contexts) than with “the public” TechCrunch suggests isn’t ready for it.

By way of illustration, let’s make some reductive comparisons and line up the Buzz/Wave dichotomy with one I set up in a recent post and another I haven’t gotten around to writing about yet:

Status updating vs. digital publishing was the subject of a post from the end of December:

So on the one hand there is status updating (an increasingly popular, real time–oriented form of online social communication and content creation/sharing) and on the other there is digital publishing (producing larger units of content like long blog posts or things resembling articles that appear in print).

I know I’m pushing it with the block quotes (and the self-reference), but here’s the explanation of that pair that I think is relevant:

[S]tatus updating can be done from your phone. These are usually short messages and a typo every so often isn’t the end of the world. Digital publishing is much more of a sit-down-at-a-desk sort of affair. And this is even somewhat supported (or more accurately suggested) by the data from Pew indicating that individuals who connect to the Internet from their mobile device is a key group responsible for driving this year’s increase in status updating.

Meanwhile, digital publishing continues to define itself. In the past few months especially there has been a lot of buzz about magazines and newspapers potentially shifting to tablet computer devices (Mag+, Sports Illustrated, the elusive and magical Apple tablet, among others). Online-only outlets like the Huffington Post and the Daily Beast become more established each day. Most interesting of all might be a “post” from Smashing Magazine, the online Web design publication, about “the death of the boring blog post“. It’s a call for Web sites to start laying out individual pieces separately with their own content-appropriate graphics—to make what they call “blogazines.”

Buzz is a tool one might use to do activities that fall under the broad heading of “status updates”. They get zipped out to a bunch of personal contacts who can easily browse all these bite-sized communiques on their iPhone (or other device). Wave is a tool one might use to compose that ill-defined future sort of content that the iPad is uniquely suited to consume. Wave facilitates incorporation of all sorts of rich media content and, because it’s an extensible platform, could even be used to develop new sorts of embedded interactive elements. Even absent such fancy stuff, Wave is built for collaboration, editing, revision, reversion…it’s a little much for sending one’s friends that photo of a butterfly.

In short, column one is about one’s own time. Column two is about things people hope to be paid for. That doesn’t mean companies won’t someday race to “get on Buzz” the way they’re tripping over themselves to get on Twitter and Facebook, or that groups of friends won’t use Wave for totally noncommercial purposes. The important thing is that in the main an individual or an entity “gets on” Buzz (becomes present on that platform indefinitely); members of a group use Wave for particular purposes (which are presumably discrete).

While being on Buzz might be a continuous state, individual posts or updates (buzzes?) are momentary. That fact is illustrated by Buzz’s support for location-aware updating from a mobile device. If units of Buzz content/communication were meant to be composed over time, how could they be mapped in space? In that sense Buzz might be best compared to Twitter—real-time, location-aware (though Twitter’s version of that feature hasn’t gotten much attention), continuously connected social communication.

But there’s a critical difference the separates Buzz from Twitter, and also from the light-weight social blogging platform Tumblr, which one might also be tempted to make a comparison to. At least as far as I can tell, Buzz content doesn’t publish directly to the public Web. You can’t find a Buzz update by searching Google the same way you can’t find an email or a Facebook wall post by searching Google. Twitter and Tumblr both broadcast out to anyone who wants to listen. Buzz, like Facebook, happens within a more bounded system. [NOTE: This is incorrect.]

There are some caveats to that. Twitter and Tumblr both have some features that only work from within their own interface and for users that have an account on the service (notably retweeting/reblogging and starring/liking). Also, Google has given assurances that Buzz will be very developer-friendly, meaning there will certainly be a way to export one’s content elsewhere (and probably do many other things, even import material from networks as ostensibly closed as Facebook).

Tumblr is as good a note as any to end on. While it offers some integration with Twitter, it mostly stands alone. As mentioned, it also publishes users’ content directly to the public Web (as well as through the internal follow-based dashboard). It’s really quite simple. From a certain perspective (mine), it makes Buzz look as needlessly involved as Buzz makes Facebook look to some (again, me).

Buzz might turn out to be an absolutely fantastic tool, but its potential for success rests largely on leveraging its built-in initial user base of Gmail users. Not everyone is going to be ready to map their email contacts directly onto their social content sharing network. Having Buzz bundled with everything else associated with a Gmail address/Google account is just as likely to make it irritating to incorporate into one’s online routine as it is to encourage adoption. Something like Tumblr, on the other hand, gets to operate in its own separately defined and managed context. (Better to do one thing well…)

Part I ends here because there’s not much further to go with this without having had the chance to actually play around with the thing. Part II will (more accurately, may) come once I’ve done so and can move beyond conjecture.