Geo-Location: Twitter and Facebook… A Promising but Murky Future- Part 2

To Tell-All or Not to Tell-All, That is the Question

In part I, the great marketing and business potential of geo-location was discussed. However, this promise hinges largely on the willingness of people to continue to broadcast their lives in great detail on social networking sites. We have all heard the cautionary tales of people losing their jobs over a post on their profile and the questionable online privacy practices of Facebook have been grabbing a lot of headlines lately.

“The marketing and business potential of geo-location hinges largely on the willingness of people to continue to broadcast their lives in great detail on social networking sites.”

Even though geo-location has the benefit of adding location-based context to people’s updates, will people feel comfortable letting a network of others (many of whom they may not know very well) know exactly where they are? There have been indications of user dissatisfaction with social networking sites’ privacy policies and greater discretion being taken by people with regards to their personal information.

These events clearly signal barriers that geo-location applications will have to overcome. Adoption of geo-location by the public will largely be a result of whether people will really want to share their location with others. Though people may see the merits of using geo-location features, the issues of privacy and personal information may be hard to surmount.

Sharing Useful Information, Not Just Location

Despite the threat that privacy and security issues pose to the success of geo-location in social media, the ability of this feature to let people share useful information may help it overcome hurdles to adoption. From citizen journalism to letting friends know about good deals, people appear to want to tell others about useful public information. Whether it be witnessing a public event or participating in a public happening like shopping, people may be more willing to share their locations with others.

In the end, the success of geo-location in social media may rely heavily on whether or not people start to rethink how much they reveal about themselves online and whether any possible uneasiness can be alleviated. The groundwork for businesses to leverage geo-location as a sales tool is being laid as it makes its way into social media, but will the people follow?

]]> http://www.buzzwordchasers.com/uncategorized/twitter-and-facebook-geolocation-issues-2/feed/ http://www.buzzwordchasers.com/technology/twitter-and-facebook-geolocation-issues/ http://www.buzzwordchasers.com/technology/twitter-and-facebook-geolocation-issues/#comments Fri, 02 Jul 2010 18:24:38 +0000 chas http://www.buzzwordchasers.com/?p=1463

Geo-Location: Twitter and Facebook… Promising but Murky Future- Part 1

Imagine reading someone’s tweet about the World Cup and being able to tell if they are watching the game on TV or are actually at the stadium. This is now a reality as Twitter announced on its blog Monday the introduction of a location identification feature to help provide context to tweets. Twitter Places essentially helps people know where a tweet is coming from and allows people to:

· Tag tweets with specific places

· Create new Twitter Places

· Click a Twitter Place within a tweet to see recent tweets from a particular location.

Unsurprisingly, its social media competitor Facebook was also making noise on the geo-location front Monday. Company CEO Mark Zuckerberg confirmed to the press that Facebook will be launching location-based features in the near future.

It’s clear that geo-location is becoming a very hot feature in social media, but the questions remain: what are its implications and will this trend catch on?

Geo-Location: Where the Money Is

One of the most promising applications of geo-location is for well, what else? Helping companies make money. Marketers will take keen interest in knowing where people are relative to their businesses or products. The ability to place highly targeted, contextual ads based on the real time location of consumers could be a real game changer. Companies could not only draw consumers towards their products, but also reach shoppers in a competitor’s store to try and draw them away. Geo-location integrated into social media will allow marketers to move people physically like never before.

“The ability to place highly targeted, contextual ads based on the real time location of consumers could be a real game changer.”

Companies leveraging geo-location will also be able to take advantage of the inherently viral nature of social media. Geo-location advertising is a perfect way to promote special deals or new products as companies could offer discounts, freebies, exclusive sneak peeks etc to people who are near their store or product. Then, if people wanted to share this useful information, they could go on Facebook or Twitter (or both!) and inform all their friends or followers of the promotion with their location automatically showing up on a Google Map.

In addition, geo-location has great promise for the marketing of unused or expiring inventory. Geo-location can help move people to buy an expiring product at a discount or attend an event they would not have otherwise attended. Opportunities include:

· Sporting Events. Geo-locally targeting people in sports bars or gyms and giving them unused tickets. This would help increase brand exposure for the team as well as bring in revenue from sources like concessions, souvenirs, etc.

· Hotels. Giving away vacant rooms so as to increase brand exposure and capitalize on potential accommodations like room service, mini-bar etc

· Destinations. Museums, zoos, and theme parks could give away free passes to people in the area and profit from any other sources of revenue like concessions, souvenirs etc.

What’s Next?

Companies are tapping and integrating into the highly influential social media platforms more and more. The big players like Facebook and Twitter are making serious forays into the geo-location game.

These moves clearly pave the way for an interesting future where businesses and marketers have a unique, highly targeted and potentially very effective way to sell their products utilizing highly contextualized ads and social networks.

As Twitter’s and Facebook’s recent announcements illustrate, companies and social media sites are anticipating big things from geo-location, but the big question is whether or not the public at large will actually utilize these geo-location features. Check back soon for Part II of this series where we will discuss likely factors that influence the public’s decision to use geo-targeted services.

Everyone is talking about it on Twitter. Everyone is searching on Google and so far, everyone seems to love it!

According to several PC vendors, market acceptance of Windows 7 is already high - much higher than it was for Vista. This is good news for the new PC market and good news for Microsoft!

What are your thoughts on Windows 7, have you checked it out yet?

LA based blogger, Jessica Gottlieb and her 3 children were sitting helplessly on the tarmac at JFK airport waiting for their flight to take off, when she reached for her iPhone and decided to Tweet about her situation.

She wrote, “Dear Virgin Air, My children have been on the tarmac for one hour with 90 more minutes to wait. I am at JFK gate b25. Pls RT.”

Pls RT meaning that she wants her over 10, 000 Twitter followers to “retweet” her posting. And just that they did! With only a few minutes passed by Virgin Air had called Gottlieb to reassure her that her kids would be fine.

“They contacted the gate agent manager and explained to us the entire weather situation,” she says. “Within 20 minutes of that conversation, the plane took off.” Gottlieb said.

This goes to show, social media sites that allow people to interact in the moment are changing how travel companies talk to their customers — and how their customers talk back.

The end result, the way you travel is improving.

Now that real-time search is really evolving, every word really counts because keywords play an important role in which tweets are appearing in results. To fit everything into 140 characters, abbreviating is what most people have been having to do; although, abbreviating does not always look so smart.

You can use the same login information you had for your Bit.ly on J.mp. It even transfers your previous links over for you.

Gmail has thousands and thousands of overlapping mail servers which can take the reins if one fails because the data is replicated and spread all around. However there are also request servers which route the requests for email to whichever server is available at the time.

It’s now been found that Google has blamed the down time on some recent changes to the request routers. Ironically, at least some of the changes were meant to improve Gmail’s ability to stay online, but Google underestimated the load these changes would place on the routers when it took a relatively small number of servers offline for upgrades.

Google engineering VP Ben Treynor says:

At about 12:30 pm Pacific a few of the request routers became overloaded and in effect told the rest of the system “stop sending us traffic, we’re too slow!”. This transferred the load onto the remaining request routers, causing a few more of them to also become overloaded, and within minutes nearly all of the request routers were overloaded. As a result, people couldn’t access Gmail via the web interface because their requests couldn’t be routed to a Gmail server. IMAP/POP access and mail processing continued to work normally because these requests don’t use the same routers.

I’d like to apologize to all of you — today’s outage was a Big Deal, and we’re treating it as such. We’ve already thoroughly investigated what happened, and we’re currently compiling a list of things we intend to fix or improve as a result of the investigation.

Looks like Google, although just becoming the third largest Web Mail Service in the U.S, isn’t immune to technical difficulties. They too can mess up every once in a while just like the best of us!

With the new BlackBerry TwitVid application, TwitVid hopes to expand its overall market share for video sharing on Twitter.

“We believe that video will help to drive further Twitter adoption because it dramatically enriches the Twitter experience,” says Mo Adham, Co-Founder of TwitVid.com. “Now people are not just restricted to experiencing the Twitter universe from the 140 character view, they can see and more deeply communicate what’s happening in their social circle and beyond.”

It’s easy:

1. Download the app
2. Open the app
3. Select or record a video
4. Type a tweet
5. Click post and let your video upload

Check it out at Blackberry App World

• Integrated ability to upload pictures to a site dedicated to serving UberTwitter users
• Ability to optionally update your Google Talk status with your last tweet, making your tweets reach a wider audience than just your followers
• Automatically update your location based on the cell tower information provided by your phone, no GPS hardware required
• Embed and send videos in tweets
• See everyone who is tweeting near your current location

They are in their fourth beta phase at this point, and are continuing to refine and develop it as feedback is received.

Facebook began testing new versions of their real-time search feature with a small group of people last month, and today, the testing phase has ended. 

It searches through the last 30 days of your news feed for status updates, photos, links, videos, and notes shared by your friends and the Facebook Pages you are a fan of. You will not be able to see other member information, unless they have changed their privacy settings to make their content available to everyone. 

Google is also rolling out its own project for real-time search, and its called Caffeine. It could also change how your company ranks in its search results. Two web engineers from the Google’s official blog wrote,

“It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. The new infrastructure sits ‘under the hood’ of Google’s search engine, which means that most users won’t notice a difference in search results.”

Click here to try it out.