#RefreshCA – GeoSocial Showdown
Be sure to join the Central Arkansas Refresh on February 23rd for our GeoSocial Showdown to discuss several of today’s top applications. After a lot of discussion we have decided to have a little bit different format for this month’s meeting. As opposed to having one speaker offer a presentation and then have group questions, we are going to have a moderator and 5 representatives from within the group to represent the top 5 services. Each presenter will give a short overview of the app they represent (approximately 3 minutes long) and then the group will be invited to interact with the panel and ask questions. It should be an awesome time. The volunteer representatives and applications represented will be:
- BrightKite – Anthony Valley
- Foursquare – Amy Bradley Hole
- Loopt – Bryan Jones
- Gowalla – Khara Cavaness
- Waze – Keith Crawford
If you have never attended one of our meetings, we invite you to attend this one. Our meetings are held in the basement of The Flying Saucer in downtown Little Rock at 6:00pm on the last Tuesday of each month. For additional information please join our Facebook Group and follow @RefreshCA on Twitter. Our meetings are open to the public and free! Below you will find a map to The Flying Saucer…
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EP:005 – The Cotton Club Podcast
Keith Crawford and I recorded Episode 2 tonight of The Social Radar podcast. Tonight Keith was gracious enough to allow me to start out the show w/ a rant of my own regarding Facebook’s lax privacy in regards to wall posts from applications to profile pages. This is something that I will never understand, especially realizing the cluttered path that MySpace went down to their demise.
We also discussed some Lifestreaming practices that are good for both individuals and businesses that utilize social media. Keith also offered up an awesome definition of Lifestreaming as opposed to what can be found in Wikipedia. After briefly touching on the hot topic of Geo-location / Geo-social applications we went right on into our weekly run down of our favorite new iPhone applications.
Again, we are still in the process of getting everything setup in iTunes for The Social Radar but we hope to have that very soon so that all of our loyal listeners can subscribe. In the meantime, here’s a brief overview of what we covered on tonight’s show:
In the second episode of The Social Radar Podcast, hosts Cotton Rohrscheib & Keith Crawford discuss a wide variety of topics related to Social Media including a rant by Cotton regarding Facebook’s recent lapse of privacy concerning applications posting to profiles, an awesome definition of Lifestreaming from Keith as well as a need that is not presently being met by todays geo-social applications. As usual the guys also run down some of their favorite iPhone applications to close out the show.
Programming Note: My guest host, Keith Crawford, and I have decided to no longer use the name, The Social Radar, for our podcast. I am publishing our previously recorded episodes to The Cotton Club Podcast for those of you who have requested them.
#RefreshCA GeoSocial Showdown (Update)
Recently I did a blog post asking for feedback regarding the format for our upcoming February Central Arkansas Refresh meeting on GeoSocial Applications. I think for the most part we all agreed that there needs to be some sort of “intro” to each of the applications we are going to showcase.
Daniel Spillers brought up a good point in the comments from my last post that these presentations need to be pretty brief and concise laying out the specifics and differences between each app. Keith Crawford also agreed that he thought a short overview for each application regarding their implications and differentiations would be wise. My thoughts all along have been that this meeting in particular might have the same kind of response from the community that our Google Wave meeting had back in November where we had a lot of people attend that usually don’t attend. Based on our November meeting attendance I walked away thinking that we had actually given something back to the community, which was pretty cool. That’s not to say that our meetings where it’s just us nerds aren’t fun, because they are!
One thing that we accomplished in my initial blog post was setting up our panel of representatives for this meeting as well as the apps that we are going to discuss, here’s how things have shaped up:
- BrightKite – Anthony Valley
- Foursquare – Amy Bradley Hole
- Loopt – Bryan Jones
- Gowalla – Khara Cavaness
- Waze – Keith Crawford
I will probably act as the moderator for the meeting to kind of kick things off and introduce each panelist. Each panelist will have about 2-3 minutes to give a brief rundown of their application and tell how it’s different from the others and it’s implications.
I think the consensus from those that I have heard from was that after the presentations for each app were complete we could then open up the room for discussion, questions, etc. regarding each application. I think that if we all hustle we can knock out the presentations in about 20 minutes or so and leave the remainder of the evening open for discussion. I guess my question is,
How Does This Sound?? Leave a comment if you want to add something or if I forgot anything…
By the way, our meeting is scheduled for February 23, 2010 at 6pm at our normal location, The Flying Saucer. If you are a member of Facebook Group you should get an event notification. Also, be sure to follow @RefreshCA on Twitter for news and updates. If you have never attended a #RefreshCA meeting, here’s a map to The Flying Saucer, we meet in the basement…
Be sure to tell your friends and co-workers about this meeting, I think it has the potential to be one of our best ones yet given the popularity of geosocial apps.
#RefreshCA Geo-Social Showdown
If you missed out on the January meeting of the Central Arkansas Refresh group where Nick Brewer from CJRW did a presentation on PODS CMS for Wordpress, you missed out on an awesome presentation. Nick did an awesome job presenting PODS, hopefully we will have his presentation slides and audio online for you to download in the very near future, he is working on them now.
When we opened the meeting I asked the group what they wanted to do for the next months meeting, since the conversations prior to opening the meeting that night were primarily about all of the Geo-Social apps that are on the market right now such as Gowalla, Foursquare, loopt, Brightkite, and Waze, I proposed that we have some sort of broad scope group discussion on these apps to discuss where we all see these apps going. I think we all agreed that this is the next wave of social media.
The idea that we came up with was that we could have different representatives from within our group kind of give a 5 minute overview of their favorite Geo-Social app and then we could open the floor to discuss these apps and how we can leverage them to meet our clients needs as well as our own moving forward from an industry perspective.
Now, here’s where I need some feedback:
- What does everyone think of this meeting layout?
- Do you have any format suggestions?
- If this is cool, then we will need volunteers to do 5 minute overviews of each product, here’s what we have so far in terms of volunteers: * Cotton Rohrscheib (Gowalla), Khara Cavaness (Yelp), ** Amy Bradley Hole (Foursquare), and Bryan Jones (Loopt). I guess that leaves us needing someone to do an overview of Brightkite and Waze, any takers?? @AkValley, @tsudo, @brantc ???
The meeting is scheduled for the last Tuesday in February, that falls on February 23, 2010, I think given the popularity of this topic we stand a chance of having another really good turnout, possibly rivaling our Google Wave discussion. The location will still be The Flying Saucer in Downtown Little Rock and will kick off around 6-6:30pm.
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* = I can easily speak on Waze too if someone wants to take Gowalla
** = She is awesome and was volunteered by the group. Hopefully we can convince her!!! 
Road Trip Using Waze (Updated)
Okay, so this past weekend my wife and I went on a road trip to see Bill Engvall in Texas with some friends. I blogged before we headed out that I was going to use Waze the entire trip, you can read that post here… For the most part I was extremely, extremely impressed w/ Waze during this trip. I did run into a few things that I wanted to mention though about the software.
Before I go into a lot of detail I want to reiterate again that for a free software app, Waze is probably the most impressive thing I have downloaded since owning my iPhone. This whole Geo-Social thing is just getting fired up with apps like Gowalla, Foursquare, and Loopt on the market, and each one getting stronger, I think we are all going to witness some amazing things in 2010 related to Geo-Social applications. Being that these apps are all new, it’s obvious that there are going to be some kinks, or bugs, here and there. In addition to bugs, there are some items of functionality that we might also want right now that are just going to take the developers a little bit of time to put in place, I am a software guy, I totally get it.
Initially I noticed that Waze allowed users to check in using Foursquare but not Gowalla. I would LOVE to see Gowalla added to the mix since it’s my primary Geo-Social app. I am sure that it’s just a matter of time before Gowalla support is added, it’s growing in popularity every day…
Trips Over 200 Miles…
When programming in our trip, we learned that presently Waze will only accommodate for trips under 200 miles. Since our trip was about 300 miles, we just picked a center location and programmed that in and hit the road. I am not for sure if I expected the audible turn by turn directions from a free application but it was certainly nice. I am not for certain but I think the voice on the app telling me which way to turn was a little bit easier to understand than the one on our Garmin. My wife and I debated the voices a few minutes, we had gotten used to our directions girl on the Garmin.
Outside 3G Coverage Areas…
I could hear the audible directions being cued or downloaded to my phone before they actually spoke. While we were in 3G areas it seemed that we got our turn by turn directions in a very timely manner, enough time to make our turns. Outside the 3G central Arkansas area, near the Texas line was a little bit different story however, we almost missed a turn for our off ramp because the audio came in at the last second and I had to cross two lanes of traffic.
Recalculating Routes after Detours…
Once I got into Texas I programmed in our final destination. As soon as our route was calculated I started driving. About halfway into the metro Tyler area we missed a turn and it took a little while for it to recalculate our route, and this was in 3G service area. I am not for sure if this was a fluke or not but I had to pull over and allow it a few minutes to get us back on track. The other times that I ventured off the pre-determined route I noticed that the recalculation time lagged here as well. I am sure that there is a lot involved with downloading, etc., but I bet that the folks at Waze improve this as time goes on. As far as outside the 3G area goes, I am not for sure if there is anything they can do on their end as programmers to adjust for that… and it’s understandable.
Reporting Traffic Jams and Speed Traps…
On more than one occasion we were able to locate speed traps before we happened upon them. We also in turn posted speed traps that we encountered a long the way, 6 of them to be exact. I really like this feature. We also reported some slower traffic areas on our way back.
Directions Near Louisiana…
We decided on our way back to detour through Shreveport, LA to visit some friends and watch the Saints game and enjoy a bowl of Duck Gumbo. As we got close to Shreveport we noticed that some of the turns the app was telling us to make simply weren’t there. This happened a few times, I am not for sure why this was the case, it could have been that the interstate system there is stacked one on top of the other, about 4 high, and maybe it saw us on one of the other roads, but it sure made for some confusion.
Once we got onto flat roads and made our exit everything started functioning normally again.
Reporting Wildlife on the Highway…
On our return trip, we traveled back roads into Hope, AR. On these back roads and even once we got on the Interstate we saw at least 100 deer grazing on the side of the road. Now, anyone that has traveled Arkansas for any length of time knows that this can be extremely hazardous. I think it would be cool if Waze added a section to their Report area that allowed you to report Wildlife hazards in the area so you could keep your eyes open.
In closing, I am still very impressed with this App and i hope to have Diann from Waze on The Cotton Club podcast one of these days very soon…
