Joshua Guffey

Posts Tagged ‘social media’

Tech startup Placethings is doing what I’d hoped augmented reality would do, putting user-generated media into physical locations using the multimedia and geotagging capabilities of today’s mobile devices.

The service will capture any type of multimedia; such as pictures, video, audio and text and will ‘place’ this content in a physical location by linking it to GPS coordinates for others to view and interact with.

The company presented at the Mobilize 2008 Conference [video here].  At the conference they discussed how you will have the ability, with your mobile device, to create ‘persistent media’ which will remain tied to that location for others to view and even reply to.  This could transform the way we interact with venues around our home towns, help us to meet interesting people in our area, learn more about our environment and share relevant information about any place any time.  Think of it as writing on an ‘invisible’ wall, anywhere.

It’s a compelling idea that opens up a lot of possibilities.

You could post pictures of concerts, leave messages in places you know that your friends frequent or play location-based geotagging games.  Businesses could keep tabs on what sorts of activities are taking place local to their business and adjust their offerings or other aspects of their business to make better use of this information.  There are a million uses for adding an informational media layer to our existing experience. Not to mention that it’d be loads of fun!

In their presentation the co-founder, Dean Terry, mentions that there’s even a ‘secret message’ function so that you could leave a message at a specific location for someone.  When that person visits that location they receive their message.  This immediately makes me think of leaving digital love notes for my wife, but I’m sure you could think of some less nauseating examples.

I actually see services such as Placethings as poised to become more popular than the check-in trend happening right now with Foursquare, Gowalla, Yelp, Buzz and the like.  Without going to far down the rabbit hole, my thinking on this is that check-ins are real-time; and for location-based services this could be a problem since it’s kinda like saying “I’m not home, please rob me“.  All of these services could likely do well to have a delay built into them for safety.

As for Placethings, I cannot say if it is real-time (likely it is) but the shift of focus from geotagging as person-centric to location-and-media-centric may be a healthy direction to take things.

What uses would you find for this? How would you use it or like to see it used?

So here’s my thought. Tell me if you think I’m wrong. Or right.

“If you follow out of obligation, you’ve not helped anyone.”

Here’s my argument for this:
Does following someone who tweets primarily about fly fishing in Alaska really create meaningful connections. Does it help you to stay current in your field? Who are you actually benefiting if you follow out of obligation?

I would argue that the power of a network is not merely in it’s numbers, but also in its loyalty and its relevance to a central idea, pasison or value-set.

If I have a number of regular tweeps in my stream who actively tweet things that have no relevance to me they gain nothing. Not only that, but I’m now not seeing a more relevant tweet for every one one that ISN’T relevant to me. That sucks.

Furthermore, I’m following out of obligation and am annoyed by their six hundredth tweet about Alaskan bass. A negativite emotionality may develop with them and the whole of the Twitter platform as a result. If my irritation prevents or delay my participation on the network, the entire network potentially looses out from my absence.

Yeah, I’m that crazy.

Meanwhile all this same stuff is going on for the other party too. They can’t unfollow you because they’re afraid that you’ll unfollow them and end their world. Or loose a sale, whichever comes first.

Anyway. We all loose. Nobody wins. Just follow what’s relavant. The end.

And be sure you don’t follow me on ‘the Twitter’ at @JoshuaGuffey

Your thoughts?

Today I had to move some of the people I follow on Twitter into a list entitled “oversharers“.  They post great stuff so I don’t want to unfollow them, but having them in my main Twitter stream kills.  Now I can go check out what they are posting about anytime I want without having them population my main stream.  Just a quick note about these tweeps…they both share each item multiple times.  As of now it’s just @QuadMedia and @Minervity, but as all things do, I’m sure it will grow with time.

You can make lists for anything.  I also have one for health and wellness and one for funny tweeps.  They each only have one tweep right now, but again…that’ll change.  The nice thing is that you can follow other people’s lists if they’ve made them into public lists.

You can follow my Twitter lists above by clicking on the associated links.  Or you can follow me on Twitter and see what I have to say.

What good uses can you think of for Twitter lists?

Twitter has lists & hashtags. That’s fine.
Facebook has lists, groups, pages, fine-grain privacy controls and the ability to hide users from our stream. That’s fine.

So what’s the problem??? — Relevance!

Is the data relevant for you in this moment? If you work in the tech world or even (and especially) in the social media space, it’s pretty likely that managing all of your connections  and non-stop, real-time data can be a major undertaking.

Twitter and Facebook have provided us with some basic tools for managing our data streams, but they are still relatively rudimentary and require us to manually categorize our connections by placing them, one-at-a-time into lists or groups of contacts.

I haven’t yet seen anything that goes beyond this level of sophistication for segmenting and filtering out, in real-time, data based on RELEVANCE and not merely upon the source of the data.

Hashtags and Twitter Search begin this process but there are some issues with these tools.

Hashtags are not used by everyone and therefore lose relevance as a tool since important information may not be tagged in a way that brings it to your attention.

An advanced Twitter Search can turn up some pretty relevant data in real-time; and some fancy RSS feed action can make this data more useful, but this tends to cast a wide net and still requires some significant wading to find the data that is most relevant for you. You can build some very specific searches that turn up more targeted data but this also typically filters out some terms you may not have thought of and ends up in a multitude of Twitter search RSS feeds to manage.

If this all sounds like a hell of a lot of work…that’s because it is.

As more of the world adopts Twitter, Buzz and other real-time data sharing technologies, we will have more people connecting with us, and hence, a bigger challenge then we’ve ever seen in trying to read more of what helps move us to forward and less of what doesn’t.

Social media isn’t going away. So how can we stay on top of our game? Well right now you can geek out and plug some Twitter search feeds into Google Reader and you’ll find your reader full of interesting things.  But it takes a special type of geek to even consider playing around with this level of “real-time, data-piping architecture”.

So what do the rest of us do?
I have a few ideas that may help moving forward.

Redundant tweet filtration

It’s my guess if you’ve read this far, that you know a lot of people on Twitter, many of which re-tweet and share the same articles. How many times do you really need to read a tweet about Google’s new policy change? Tweets that share the same links or information could be filtered out or downplayed to make room for unique information.

Real-time tweet relevance filtration

Google certainly has the advantage in this area.  In fact this technology is already in place in Google’s own search engine in the form of suggested search queries.  And even more robustly in the keyword selection tool for their ad network, Google Adwords.

The system knows what words and phrases are generally synonymous or in some way related. On Google.com the technology returns the most popular search terms based on the search habits of entire populations.  Imagine though if your tweet stream (tweets from those you follow) were filtered by relevance to your interests and even the specifics of your current project.  This reality isn’t far for Google.

Better collaborative spam filtration

Perhaps unfortunately for Twitter, Google has a clear lead here again. Gmail has provided a surprisingly spam resistant email experience based upon the ability to block spam message across the entire network given the input of the community it serves, Gmail users.

Yet over at Twitter, auto DMs haunt Twitter like an over-friendly neighbor with bad hygiene. Much of it outright offensive spam that has NO basis on any relationship with you or specific interest of yours as a prospective customer. [dramatic rant]

Google has always been about relevance and “organizing the world’s information”.   Given their ability to provide content in a relevance-centric fashion, I see potential for Google to truly move into social media in an even bigger way in the coming future when there is a potential for more noise in the social space.

Written by Joshua Guffey.  You can follow me on Twitter: @JoshuaGuffey

What do you have to say about this?
How else can we mere mortals manage to keep up with the increasing influx of information?  How  do you think the playing field will change in the next 6-12 months?

If you attempted to use Google Wave when it came out last year, it’s likely that you met with the same fate as I did.  Honestly, I tried it for a bit, found (at least at first) that NO ONE was on the service, and discovered that, worst of all, there were no notifications of any kind when ‘waves’ were updated.  (They also don’t have a practical version for iPhone yet, but I won’t go into that.)  So I dropped it.

Well yesterday Google announced that they have created the option for email alerts when waves are updated.  It’s a bit tricky to find the option to turn it on.  You’ve got to push the arrow to the right of your Wave inbox tab to view the option.

Google hasn’t gotten it perfect yet, as you can see from their psuedo-disclaimer below.  Still, this is a huge leap forward with a feature that, in retrospect, should have been shipped out-of-box for a service that has positioned itself as a tremendous advance in online collaboration.

How do you use Google Wave?