#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.
EP:001 – The Cotton Club Podcast
I finally got around to recording my first installment of The Cotton Club Podcast this evening. My guest co-host for the show this evening was Keith Crawford, you may know him as @tsudo on Twitter. This initial podcast was just a test run to see how things work so that when Keith and I get ready to launch another sideline project called The Social Radar in the very near future we can hit the ground running.
Please keep in mind that this is my first go at podcasting, the quality and content should get better over time. Despite the fact that I have invested in an awesome setup from software to microphones, the audio of me talking didn’t turn out very well at all. You can hear Keith great, and that’s probably a good thing since he is a lot cooler to listen to. 
The topics we covered on Episode 001 of The Cotton Club were as follows:
- Geosocial Applications (Gowalla, Foursquare, Brightkite, Loopt)
- iPhone Applications (Dragon Dictate, Where R U?, Evernote, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Mytown)
- Social Media Predictions for 2010 (Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed)
- Methods for Archiving Thoughts for Blog Posts (Friendfeed, Wordpress, etc.)
- Crazy Story of The Week from Hell
- NASCAR Withdrawels
- Central Arkansas Refresh Meeting – January 26th (Nick Brewer presenting on PODSCMS for Wordpress)
Thanks for tuning into my first show, I promise it’s going to get better over time, so please bear with me. If you want to subscribe to The Cotton Club Podcast, you can do so on iTunes.
Production Note: The audio at the beginning of the recording isn’t very loud, a few minutes into the recording I finally managed to get it adjusted to where you could hear me a little bit better. Please bear w/ me, this is a work in progress.
#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!!!
Thoughts on Geolocation Apps (Gowalla & Foursquare)
Probably one of the hottest things going right now in the mobile / social / wireless community has to be Geolocation applications like Gowalla, Foursquare, Brightkite, and Loopt. I am sure that there are several other applications on the market that I don’t know about but for the most part the two leaders of the pack right now are Gowalla and Foursquare.
Both Gowalla and Foursquare debuted at South by Southwest Interactive Festival this past year and have picked up a lot of momentum since then. I first started using Loopt on my iPhone but quickly downloaded Foursquare and Gowalla after seeing a lot of my friends become early adopters of these applications.
Of course both of these applications integrate w/ Twitter and Facebook just like you would expect them to, but instead of seeing these applications as “services” or “tools” a lot of the bloggers I read have labeled them “games”, and this just doesn’t resonate with me. I suppose I can see where they are coming from, both applications are somewhat unique.
Foursquare allows it’s users to become Mayors of a particular location, and they can oust their friends or co-workers anytime based on their number of check-ins.
Gowalla, which is my favorite of the two applications, takes a little bit different approach in that it is more like a scavenger hunt. One of the things that I like the most about Gowalla is that it is crowdsourced. Gowalla users can pick up various items at random when they check in at new locations, these items can consist of anything such as Guitar Amps, Skull Caps, Belt Buckles, or Longhorn Cattle (like I picked up today while getting my haircut). These items can be dropped at new locations that the user adds so that they can become the founders of that particular location. Granted, I know that this sounds a lot like a game, and for the most part in it’s infant stage right now, it probably is, but the opportunities for location based social media tools like Gowalla for businesses are endless.
Both Gowalla (@gowalla) and Foursquare (@foursquare) both have an intense presence on Twitter, both of whom have responded to questions I have had in just a few minutes. Last week I mentioned that both of these companies should work w/ businesses to build promotions, etc. and they both responded that they were already doing this. One of my friends on Twitter also notified me that they are already in talks w/ Foursquare about enhancing their Geo-presence.
In closing, my favorite of these two applications is still Gowalla, although I occasionally use Foursquare just to keep things balanced out. I think that there is definitely room in the marketplace for at least two geo-service providers / applications, if not more down the road, but for the time being I am giving Gowalla my nod. One other thing that is worth noting about Gowalla is that in December of last year, Alamofire, the company that released Gowalla received almost 9 million dollars in funding from investors. I know that there are some people out there that will disagree with me and prefer Foursquare, in fact some of my friends are power users and are the mayors of multiple locations. I would love to hear from someone who prefers Foursquare as to why it’s their favorite app right now.
One area of improvement that I think Gowalla can make, and it’s probably already in the works, is that there is no real connection between Gowalla friends and Twitter friends that I can tell. For example, I recently had a neighbor (that I previously did not know) check in at my home on Gowalla. I didn’t know this person at all. I was interested as to who they were so I added them as a friend on Gowalla, okay, so we are now Gowalla friends. Well, to add that person as a friend on Twitter required an additional step for me in looking them up and adding them. I think that this should be a “given” at some point in the future, and I am not for sure why this isn’t already a core feature of the application, could be its coming out very soon.
If you are a Foursquare user and prefer that service over Gowalla, be sure to drop me a comment and enlighten me as to why that is. I would love to hear from you.
