So earlier today I ranted about loose connections on location based services and individuals using them. People befriending people/loose connections on foursquare/gowalla are a pet peeve, but businesses misusing location based services is a slightly more annoying and disappointing to be frank. I expect lots of people to take the plunge and try things out, but i also expect companies to do some research before risking their brand and social capital blindly.

So how should a business be using location based services?
If you’ve got a physical presence, you need to claim your venue. Most services offer a means to do so. Yelp, foursquare, and a bunch of the others which are centered around venues, or where actual locations are the “social object.” Businesses with physical presences should be treading lightly into these waters for now. They should be offering discounts for checking in, for mayorships, for regular patronage. These things build brand capital with your customers. If the deal is enticing enough, you can draw in people who would otherwise be ignoring your business. These tools are here for you to put names/faces to your largely anonymous customers you’ve been either serving or hoping to serve for years. Thousands of articles are out there discussing the basic tips for building up your LBS presence, and they all boil down to the following: offer something compelling, and reward your regulars. Those are tips that we should all be following in general.

How businesses should not be using location based services
If you run a physical business, please please please don’t create a regular human account and send people friend requests. Your business isn’t MOVING anywhere, you can’t check in at other places, you’re basically just wasting your social capital. I’m going to call out one of the local newspapers for sending me a friend request and befriending 44 others, but having 0 check-ins, 0 activity. I can understand if they were doing this to secure a username, but if that’s your objective, grab the username, and keep it quiet until there is a tangible use for it. Don’t waste my attention capital sending out friend requests to people when there are no communication tools built into foursquare that you can use yet. [edit: I spoke to them after, and that is exactly what they were doing, securing a username. So they get a pass for now. ]

So don’t waste your social capital. If you’re a business owner and want to be active in foursquare, do it as yourself for now, or claim your venue. Otherwise you’re just missing the point.

This is actually one half of the rant I want to spew, the other half is how businesses are misunderstanding the true use of Location Based Services. I’ll post that later today. This rant really covers only the following tools: Foursquare, Gowalla, Google Latitude. Why am I not going into Loopt or Brightkite or any of these other LBS services? Well they aren’t as exciting to me, and there is only a small amount of time for me to get my point across.

So first up, let’s talk about the privacy issues surrounding LBS. I’ll assume you are familiar with Twitter and Facebook at this point, and the privacy implications therein. So in those big social services you are sharing your thoughts, free speech, thats great. However that doesn’t really get any more intrusive than doing what I’m doing right now, publishing my thoughts on a blog. The dynamics might be different, but the idea is the same. I’m publishing words for the world. Location services have shifted the message from being about what you’re thinking to where you are doing that thinking. There is an important safety issue to take into account here, especially as your network grows, and your checkins get publicized (strangers might not see them on your 4SQ page, but they see them when you cross-post to twitter). Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not even touching on the “please rob me” site that shows when people check in away from home, that’s a whole ‘nother can of worms.

Oh yeah, did you know foursquare shares your phone number with your new “friends” ? Maybe I should go through with my plan to only accept friend requests from cute women on foursquare… hmm.

Beyond the safety issues inherent in all these services, is the quality of the connections. I have a substantial twitter following compared to the average user, but I don’t want them knowing where I am all the time. Those are loose connections, loose bonds. Very few of the people I follow/follow me on twitter are my real friends who I would want to hang out with in real life. Actually it may even be simpler: I have no interest in knowing where some random person from twitter whom I’ve never met is going tonight. So I ask you, why would you want to automatically connect with all your twitter or possibly facebook friends on location based services?

Real friendships = real trust = safe for LBS/interesting to follow
Loose friendships = no real trust = not safe for LBS/uninteresting to follow

Maybe I’m missing the point, but I welcome you to correct my viewpoint. Unless you are an event promoter, why would you want/need 5000 people knowing where you are going (cough Scoble cough).

So if you take nothing away from this post, please don’t take offense when I don’t accept your foursquare/gowalla/brightkite friendship.

Or all you ever needed to know to avoid being referred to as a jackass

Some of you might be new to the Internet or new to social networks or just need some light suggestions, so this is for you. Every day millions and millions of people sign on to the internet for the first time, or join social networks such as facebook or twitter or myspace and aren’t necessarily privy to the social conventions that are already established in these spaces. Its my goal to teach you them in the next 5 minutes. So let’s get started with the basics.

Email:
You might wonder why I even need to include this, but you’d be surprised at how wrong some people are when it comes to email.
Do’s:

• Write a clear and concise subject
• Make use of keywords in your email (think SEO for email) to make it easier to track down later
• Use a custom signature (i.e. don’t send EVERYONE the same salutation at the end of your email – aka “Love ya boo, John Rockefeller CEO”
• Reply to emails you get within a timely manner (my theory is 36 hours max if you aren’t on vacation. 48 is pushing it. – if you are in a service business, try for under 24)

Don’ts:

• USE ALL CAPS WHEN YOU TYPE (its considered yelling, and you can turn off caps by hitting the caps lock button above your shift key)
• Send an email asking about something that you could have googled yourself.
• Don’t reply to an email with only a link to a google search for said question
• Send an email and then call ten minutes later to make sure I got it (unless it’s an important document attachment).
• Forward me useless nonsense (aka chain letters, wtf is this, 1996?)

Twitter:
I could write a whole post about the kind of jackassery going on right now on twitter, and maybe I will, but for now this will have to suffice. Following these simple guidelines will make you a more interesting Twitterer.
Do’s:

• Follow people you find interesting, or actually will care to hear about their lives later.
• Respond to people you follow when they say something interesting
• Share interesting links when you find them.
• Look at the person’s profile and recent tweets before you follow them or send them a direct message.
• Be genuine and authentic, not canned and dull
• Respond to direct messages in a timely manner (think halfway between email and txt messages – so under 24 hours)

Don’ts:

• Send automated direct messages to people who follow you. – at least not when they are sales or marketing messages
• Post only links to your site in your twitter stream (its like spamming)
• Demand people follow you, you aren’t that interesting, and its kind of obnoxious
• Get mad when people don’t follow you back, maybe you aren’t as special as you thought (I know, the horror!)
• Assume everyone who follows you is actually reading every damn thing you post (statistically, maybe 5% really are)
• Use one of these silly pyramid follower schemes, they really only benefit the creator, and are lame, they make you seem less genuine.
• Overtly ask for people to retweet everything you post. A retweet is a powerful thing, be subtle about it.

Facebook
I did a video on this a year ago, will likely follow this up with a revised post for 2009. So here are a few basics.
Do’s:

• Find your friends (real life and people you interact with) and request their friendship
• Share stuff about yourself
• Keep up with old friends
• Add your kids or parents as friends (you can always filter what they can see)
• Reply to messages in a timely manner (if you are under 21, less than 24 hours, over 21, treat it less seriously than email so 48 hours)

Don’ts:

• Add unknown random people just because you want lots of “friends” if you wouldn’t want to talk to them or haven’t interacted with them before, why would you now (send them an email first at least)?
• Spam your friends every day (the fewer things you send out, the less “noise” they become)
• Create a personal profile for a business or a product. There are special fan pages/public profiles for those things. Trust me.
• Poke people you don’t know (its like flirting)
• Request a friend, then not respond to their message back asking who you are (if you are asking them to SPEND attention on you, then it’s the least you can do)
• Ask people to donate their status to you, its cheesy, and not that effective. Much more effective would be to ask them to share a link you had shared (re-share) or “like” it.
• Publicly write pickup lines on girls or guys pictures you are trying to pick up. Send them a private email if anything.

Note, all these rules have exceptions. If you’re traveling, on vacation, or just not near the web, you don’t need to keep such a close tab on the situation.

A LOT of fuss has been made over the transition to the facebook design in the last 60 days, and understandably it is a big change to make to over 100 million people. However, most of those complaining really don’t understand why they are complaining, they just want an excuse to create a group and get a million people on it (so they can possibly spam you or use it to promote other things).

So let me break it down for you in simple terms.

As a facebook user:
The new design means your apps will be able to have better experiences (more screen space for them to fill for you) on the canvas area (the space inside http://apps.facebook.com/whatever ).  The redesign also means your profile will be faster (not a billion boxes loading at once), which will make checking out your friends profiles less time consuming (less time = more profiles you can check out while at work).  It also means applications will be forced to engage with you, not just reward your friends for spamming you (sorry if that was your favorite aspect of apps).  So you should eventually get a richer experience out of the apps (the good ones at least).

As a marketer:
You now get more options on types of ads you can display to facebook users, you also get more engagement metrics to boot. But really the goldmine is in creating branding opportunities with the smart applications and application developers. Gone are the soft-touch applications that had a touch once and ignore forever relationship with their audience, you have to build truly engaging experiences to leverage the brand potential available to you.  The tabs on the user profiles are a perfect place for self-expression and brand affinity, you just have to grab it.

As a developer:
You unfortunately have the most work cut out for you, but who knows, maybe you can get renewed business out of reworking the apps you built before.  To a developer though, the changes are the most dramatic shift in the platform we’ve seen so far. You have to re-work the interactions and demands you are making of your users to build up something that has a more valid value proposition.  What incentive does your app have to bring its users back? What activities or enhancements are you offering them? Realistically good application design hasn’t changed much from the previous platform iteration to now, you just have less incentive to use BAD app design to promote yourself.  It also means this isn’t a real-estate grab as it once was, its an attention land rush. Attention we are going to learn is an incredibly valuable asset to possess in this new economy.

So what next? Where is this all heading? Well I think this all plays into my original theory of a multi-pronged approach, which I discussed a year ago. You need to use facebook as a net you are casting to engage users and drive their activities from wherever they are (in facebook our out) and figure out how to benefit from that traffic regardless of where it comes from.

I waited a week before writing this, why? Well I was busy, and I wanted things to settle a  bit before I kicked up the dust again. But the AOL buy of Bebo is a much bigger deal than we are all realizing or giving AOL credit for. So the $850 Million might seem like an obscene price to some (lest we forget some other large purchases of the last few years make this pale in comparison), and to others it is simply confusing. How could AOL plunk down the equivalent of $20/user on what is ultimately a 3rd place network in the US?

Why the numbers make sense.
AOL’s mostly cash deal gives them an instant boost on the social network scene where their AIM pages project died after not receiving much if any fanfare (AOL seemingly didn’t bother informing their AIM users about it).  It gives AOL a big foothold overseas, where it is still weak compared to its competitors. It also gives it a big chance to cross promote its newly acquired service via AIM, AOL.com, netscape.com and the hundreds of other content properties they own.  For AOL it might be a challenge to recoup the initial investment fast, but they have a much better ability to monetize those page views than most of the players.

Remember AOL owns advertising.com and its whole PlatformA initiative encompasses many advanced ad targeting services that were just waiting for access to billions more in page views to data mine.

What you are all missing.
So AOL now owns 40 million user profiles, now what? Well one thing that people are forgetting is that Bebo has built a fairly robust representation of the social graph on their site. This data which is a goldmine for marketers is probably the second best set of social graph data on the web behind Facebook’s.  So if you think about it, they got a data set about half the size of Facebook’s for about 1/15th the cost.

Stop looking at the battle, and focus on the war.
Folks, the issue isn’t about social networks directly, its about behavioral advertising. Understanding what people want by observing them and then serving both contextual and targeted advertising to them as they search/surf through their properties.  We as a collective whole keep forgetting this about Yahoo (don’t forget they have 400million user profiles, maybe more) being one of the kings at this, but thats another story entirely.  The behavioral battle is being waged on all fronts, but what it ultimately needs is enough  page view inventory to be truly useful to the data crunchers, and thats what a few billion page views a day will give you if you’re AOL/Bebo.

So where do we go from here?
Well I really see AOL trying to promote the heck out of Bebo, and hopefully working on improving their infrastructure substantially. But the first thing we’ll see is Bebo beating the 2008 earnings estimates they had set forth simply by having AOL up their CPM rates from $.50 to $2.  If Time Warner wasn’t such a bad fit with AOL, I would almost recommend buying AOL right now, but then again, maybe AOL + Platform A will be spun off, which would definitely change the game.

I remember getting all excited late last year about Virb, the social network that emerged from the guys at neubix/purevolume. This was supposed to be the anti-myspace with its CSS support and clean designs. So where are they now? compete says under 80,000 users a month vs 5 million on hi5 or bebo.

Does this prove anything? Not really. I was probably more curious than anything. But I am definitely wondering where they are going to play in this opensocial vs facebook platform war.

The big news out there today is that bebo has announced their new platform will be facebook compatible. This was quickly followed by news that Facebook is opening up the architecture of their platform to everyone else.

So what does this mean? It means Bebo has some smart people working there who know a good thing when they see it. I would probably not have paid much attention to it had they not done this, even with future opensocial support.  This move also means that OpenSocial even though it was obscenely hyped, and a lot of people were salivating over it, is no where near ready and people aren’t willing to wait for it.  Its one thing for an Orkut to wait around for OpenSocial, since they are owned by google, but to the rest of the SocNets, time is of the essence.

Surprisingly Friendster in all the hubub the last few days announced their own platform, but didn’t pursue this route. I guess they didn’t think they needed to.

Metcalfe’s law states the value of the network increases exponentially with each additional node that is added. This theory was originally developed for the telecom networks to show how a telephony network’s value increases the more phones that are added. The same is true of social networks, look at myspace, its intrinsic value at this point is that everyone is on it, not that it offers any particular features the others lack. In all honesty it probably has weaker feature-sets than most of the competitors (look at tagworld or bebo or facebook). Now this brings me to the topic at hand: what value does your community bring to the table?Your community can be any number of things, be it your regular poker group, or the business networking group you are a member of, or even your reader community on your website. So now that you’ve established in your mind what your community is, lets talk about it. The first question to ask yourself is: what value is there in my particular community? Why should people join my social network/blog/google group for: high school sports, college fraternities, musical groups, movie fans, etc?Since I don’t really know much of anything about your particular community, I’ll use the Miami web scene and RefreshMiami as my examples. When I decided to get the ball rolling and start the refreshmiami.org site a little over a year ago, I saw it as offering the following values to the community:

1. Increased networking in a widely isolated local community
2. The opportunity for people to share ideas and collaborate
3. Business opportunities for the members
4. Learning opportunities (heck I’ve learned a lot of CSS stuff from Nick alone)

With those values in mind, how has our little community provided value to its members? Well its created business and employment opportunities for a number of people, it has also enabled a lot of people (we have over 80 people on our mailing list now) to get together and come up with new and exciting ideas.So now when you go to start your very own social network, social group, or fan community you know what questions to ask yourself. In case you didn’t get it, they are:

1. How do my members benefit from being in my network?
2. How do my members benefit from getting their friends to joinr my network?
3. Remember everyone is asking “what’s in it for me?”

The refresh movement is without a doubt one of the most unifying things going on now in the web. It might not be making the most waves in the public, but in the web design and development community it is definitely taking hold.The Refresh movement is providing a venue for small businesses, entrepreneurs, and other web related people to get together and do business. This is the same concept the barcamp movement is providing, but on a more individual basis. The underlying message here: old school networking and old boys clubs are making room for the new wave of businesses.

Just this week Facebook raised another $25 million in venture funding from Greylock, bringing their pre-money valuation to close to $525 million.  Now this indicates one of two things, either they are burning cash like CRAZY and can’t generate enough to support their big staff, OR they are looking to finance some new expansions or new features. I’m hoping for the latter, but for the purposes of this article, let’s go with the former.

Note before I get started, let me say that the closest my affiliation goes to Facebook is that I’ve met a few of their employees, and use their site from time to time.

Now on to the good stuff.

How Facebook can save face in 5 steps:

1. Partner up like crazy: make deals with companies that cater to college kids (AOL’s AIM, Book publishers, music and film companies, etc.). Use these deals to leverage some of your influence and cash in on the rich demographic info you’ve got just sitting there waiting to be mined. These partnerships have to be done in a sensitive manner though, as young adults are very fickle about being overly marketed to. But some of the partnerships could be in promotion form: i.e Facebook members save $2 on  Netflix, get 1 free rental coupon at Blockbuster, can purchase the new Strokes album 2 days before everyone else online, etc. Things along these lines would be a boon to Facebook’s bottom line, and work extremely well for the marketers involved as well.

2. Open up your site to APIs, let people create applications and services which piggy back on your network, have them charge a fee, then you take a cut. Someone like Dodgeball would be a good fit, TONS of students would pay a per message fee to see where their buddies are (or that guy they like).

3. Leverage the fact that you are so deeply ingrained in student life, by letting them create more content that is relevant to each other. (note: this steps on the toes of what I’ve got planned for CampusFix, but if they benefit, we all benefit, right?) If students can do a lot more sharing of microcontent, then they will come back more, and Facebook won’t lose its #7 traffic ranking.

4. Go international! This should’ve been number 2, but its tough to localize the software for use elsewhere. College kids across the globe are getting more and more ingrained in the network, so it only makes sense. Take the current new model (lots of local services) and replicate it another 1000x, and you’ve got yourself a Billion in revenues just like that.

4b. Partner up with established communities/sites abroad, this will make handling the problems easier (as each partner has a stake in the local site, and knows the market).

5. Merge with LinkedIn. Why? Because you are both funded by Greylock, LinkedIn could use a huge boost in membership, and this way your network keeps feeding itself. Once everyone graduates, they won’t mind having their Linkedin account created automatically, as employment is going to be the key factor here. Or even let Facebook users tap into the Linkedin job market before they graduate. Lots of employers hire based on your Alma Matter, so this makes perfect sense to boost recruitment, etc.

The key to all of these issues is monetizing the traffic you have. From what I can gather they are trying little things here and there (facebook flyers, etc), but on an aggregate, these can’t be producing hundreds of millions per year ( so as to justify the valuation).