Technologies have a way of growing faster than the ecosystem of tools needed to support them. – Joe

I have no doubt that in this role as a meta developer, a developer developing for developers, Joe Hewitt will have a significant and sustained impact on helping new platforms be used to their fullest extent. It’s a lofty goal. Good on ya. Here’s to not just making a great app, but making tools that help an army of others make a volume of great apps – for all of us.

Good luck, Joe.

The post Joe Hewitt, Meta Developer – Leaving Facebook appeared first on The Faster Times.

The most recent TWiT had a pretty even-keeled discussion of Color by Leo Laporte, Marshall Kirkpatrick, Xeni Jardin and Baratunde Thurston that managed not to totally pan the app, but couldn’t foresee many applicable use cases. Kirkpatrick brought up the idea of music festivals as somewhere it might become useful, and all could agree that nobody knew what the hell Twitter would be good for either when it first hit, and also that there’s a high likelihood that Color is going to have a serious data mining aspect that leads to revenue tucked somewhere into its back end in order to take advantage of the data all the prophesied users are going to be pumping into it.

Here’s the thing – I don’t think it’s all that hard to see the potential utility of this app. A quick preface: I don’t necessarily think it’s going to take off and become the next hot thing – who knows? However, I do see why it could be thought to be worth so much by investors who believe that the users will come. Color essentially represents the next step in realtime content generation.

Twitter = what I’m doing Foursquare = where I am Color = what I see

1. Location, Cameras and Gyroscopes always on Color may be just a little bit ahead of its time – but not by much – for two reasons: GPS and battery life. Color doesn’t only rely on GPS – it analyzes lots of other metadata from the photos loaded into it, but GPS is a part of its location awareness. My Droid has GPS and it works great, but it drains my battery so I keep it disabled most of the time. This is the kind of thing that makes using Color a bit of a pain in the ass. I have to stop to enable GPS before taking a picture in Color, and who wants to do that? However, as battery life continues to improve for mobile devices, and gyroscope and GPS penetration increases throughout smart phones and dumb phones alike, we will find ourselves in a position where all photos taken by mobile devices (or network enabled cameras for that matter) will contain metadata about not only their GPS location, but also gyroscopic position that would be able to indicate in which direction the camera was pointing, and essentially of what location the picture is being taken.

This is powerful stuff. It’s a transition from a realtime feed of what people are saying and where they are saying it to a realtime catalog of what we see – what we’re looking at.

2. Density of usage increase over time As adoption of mobile devices increases, and as usage of these mobile devices continues to increase, the density of users and usage of this app could increase significantly in the near future. For the time being it will only truly function in denser areas of population with relatively good portions of the population that qualify as early adopters – Silicon Valley, NYC, ephemeral pockets like cons or festivals, and a few other pockets here and there. But consider the ridiculous rates of iPad adoption that have been occurring, and that all of these users – many of whom may not have previously been interested in owning a smartphone – are now indoctrinated into using devices like these, and are even more likely to pick one up in their next phone contract cycle. This adoption is only going to continue to increase over the near term.

3. Addition of meshing technologies (like Photosynth) There have already been a lot of neat applications for automated image meshing technologies like Microsoft’s Photosynth, but this technology has a whole new appeal when it gets paired with a service that is aggregating volumes of images based on location and gyroscopic metadata. With enough processing power meshed panoramics of scenes could be generated in near-realtime to create eye-witness accounts of events in a way that has been impossible up until this point. Color is a service that is designed to create that link between the potential of such technologies and the problem of how to aggregate the right content to make it possible.

4. Added value of video But we haven’t even mentioned video yet! It’s one thing to imagine that with enough content from enough cameras that a sort of rudimentary stop motion video of a scene could be generated. And beyond that there’s potential for the same effect of time-sequencing on a three dimensional space rather than traditional video. But when you consider that the concept of Color works for video as well there are other interesting options to consider. A technology like Photosynth that could be applied to video rather than still imagery could potentially create something near to realtime crowdsourced video of a live scene. The implementation of 4G networks like LTE are going to make this kind of upload capabilities a reality, even for HD quality video. People have been talking for years about wanting to watch sports like soccer or the NFL with the ability to control the viewing angle, but with enough users Color could accomplish something similar via crowdsourcing for live events, including breaking news.

5. Value to realtime news feeds It’s not just about events where someone is on stage and everyone in the crowd knows where to point their devices. This is also about breaking news situations and phenomena that occur randomly. Thinking of the recent spate of revolutions in the Middle East should give us some clue of the potential – imagine being able to navigate through a near realtime meshed or mosaic video journal within a square full of protestors.

Twitter and the blogosphere have effectively usurped the text newscycle, and YouTube and live streaming platforms like JustinTV and Ustream are new outlets for interesting video, but they still have to be distributed through more social platforms like Twitter and Facebook. It seems possible that color is looking to be the social distribution platform for live images and videos that up to this time have had to ride on the other social networks for distribution. Of course there’s no reason it still couldn’t piggy back on those platforms, the way that YouTube does on Twitter and Facebook, but there is value to being dedicated to specific media.

6. Distributed CCTV for the world Yes – there is a lot of work to be done before the technology can live up to some of the ideas I’ve put forward, and yes there is a lot of adoption of technology that must occur as well, but these things are not at all out of the realm of possibility. The speed of innovation only continues to increase, and I think it’s entirely possible that Color is trying to plant a stake in the ground early on what it thinks is bound to be a much larger opportunity around mobile photos and video. Coming out of the gate with these aspirations would look insane to anyone but investors with matching vision, so it makes sense to open the doors with something simpler that can be understood – like geo-specific photo albums. I think that color is coming out of the gates with the simplest possible version of itself that is usable based on today’s smartphone penetration and network and technology capabilities.

The only question left is about how far the team from Color will really be able to take this. Will Color one day be able to serve as a CCTV service for the world, covering points of interest anywhere on the globe with a sufficient network connection and aggregating content from a crowd full of sources into a comprehensive feed and archive of visual content? Let’s watch and find out. Maybe someday soon you’ll be following a link to Color yourself in.

The post Color Me In – Let’s See Where This Goes appeared first on The Faster Times.

Matt the Electrician is awesome. I’ve seen him live several times, and it’s great every time. He’s making a new album, and without Kickstarter he’d probably have to put a lot of the costs on less advantageous funding sources like credit cards. Bad. But with Kickstarter people can basically pledge to pay for their albums ahead of time, thereby funding the music they want to hear without forcing the artist to take on debt to get it done in the first place, which ends up making a good portion of the proceeds from selling the work go towards paying down accrued interest. Bad.

Matt the Electrician is also great because his Kickstarter application involves his whole family, and tells a story that uses his very music as the soundtrack. Check out Matt’s Kickstarter video to see what I mean. This is a great way to make your potential supporters feel like they’re really helping – not just the art, and not just the person, but the family that they now feel connected to, and that their contributions are really making an impact.

So check out the video at the very least, and maybe chip in a little!

The post Matt The Electrician – A Kickstarter Use Case appeared first on The Faster Times.

(1) : effective operation as measured by a comparison of production with cost (as in energy, time, and money)

(2) : the ratio of the useful energy delivered by a dynamic system to the energy supplied to it

(from Mirriam-Webster’s)

Has modern efficiency created the capability to attain levels of perfectionism such that their attainment leads to more hours working than had we not been enabled by the efficiencies to begin with? And is attention to detail in a world of intricacies a new form of artisanship or just the new tediousness of production line work?

I think we could all agree that many processes have become much more efficient over the span of our lifetimes. Not all… it’s true that now we ship food from one side of the country to another to feed cows whose milk and beef we ship back across the country to feed people, and whose manure we ship to other parts of the country to grow food that gets shipped back to where the manure came from. The government subsidizes any number of things to create artificial efficiencies in the market as well, for example driving corn syrup into so much of our food supply. In that sense inefficiencies abound. it’s clear.

However, in another sense it is impossible to deny the progress. Mechanical processes. Fabrication. Design. Communication. By definition all of these things have become much more efficient. Consider a paper – a text document, that is. When it was printed on paper an edit meant White-Out at the very least, and potentially having to retype the entire paper. If a section needed to be added in a way such that the whole paper shifted down and reset the page breaks through to the final page, then the whole document from the point of the edit onward required retyping. Today it is a few clicks of the mouse, and it probably won’t get printed anyway, so that’s all it takes.

Video (or audio) editing has evolved in a similar manner. Those of us who learned to edit video on analog decks recall the wince of pain upon realizing something had to be inserted early on in a sequence that had already been nearly completed, thus requiring that every edit be recut and shifted back to accommodate. Sharing music illustrates it as well. First it was impossible, then it had to be copied from one tape to another, more or less in real time, and now we can dump gigabytes and gigabytes of music onto thumb drives in seconds – or better yet, just share a link to the media in the cloud so that we don’t have to share hardly any data at all; just an address of where that data can be found!

So why are we working so much more than people used to? What is it about this efficiency that ends up taking up so much more of our time rather than liberating us to run through the hills like Julie Andrews or sit in coffee shops all day long pondering life. (Disclaimer – I live in Portland, so there are actually a lot of people around me who manage to do that.)

What happened to the halcyon days… ok, ok there was a lot of misogyny, alcoholism and general myopia… so let’s just say, what happened to the days when you could have a whiskey midday at work, brainstorm for a while and then call it a day? What happened to easily taking the afternoon off for a ballgame with your son, or even to not needing both parents of a household working to make ends meet. I’m not so concerned with the economics of it – more like the time it takes to do things to a point where people agree that they are finished.

The efficiency garnered from things like digital editing and mobile communication are effectively enabling us to create works that are more detailed, intricate, exact and perfect than we could have imagined previously. We’re producing “better” things in many ways. Not that we didn’t produce things of “quality” before, but it seems like the intricacy of that quality is increasing at a frightening pace. There are the obvious intricate productions, such as the entire internet and the intricacies of the code-based wonders that have come from there. Consider the code behind the compendium of Google services and the algorithmic complexity behind their rankings, or that of a relative newcomer like Facebook with all of its relational dependency, rankings and realtime sharing capabilities. Or even consider something much younger like Square that as a “small” startup company must achieve competency in terms of transactions with traditional financial institutions, fraud prevention and actuarial calculations for earning a profit and hardware production – all in parallel.

In design and creative fields the same can be seen as more and more intricate projects begin to cost less and less. To a certain degree this is because they can be built on existing platforms and accomplishments of others – like how creating a blog for a client can be built upon WordPress or any number of other blogging platforms without having to code the core functionality from scratch. But all wiggle room has been lost, in some cases because the expectations of clients has grown to the point of expecting the impossible while our capabilities of production have expanded to be able to nearly achieve the impossible.

And beyond the mere production and revision of whatever one does for a living now there is an added burden of more precise tracking. Everyone can track everything, and they can do it “easily,” and in addition to that they can compare these tracked figures to other options. Everyone’s finances are tracked and recorded, so you can drive down the margins of your providers against their competitors over time for everything but the very newest and most innovative services. Moreover, you can sue if you’re not happy, which means that everyone else is forced to efficiently organize and track in ways to protect themselves in case they end up with differing opinions from the client with regards to what the finished deliverable was supposed to be.

There’s an argument to be made that we have moved from a place where artisanship meant to do things the slow way to a new paradigm that includes managing a vast multitud of small things and making sure that they all are correct and stay correct over time? Thinking about the existence of find/replace functions in text editors it’s easy to request of people that they make tedious but necessary changes to bring a document from “pretty close” to a state of perfection. The tediousness grows with the scope and complexity of the project until managing all of the details and intricacies, as enabled by the efficiency of our modern tools, is an artisanship of detail oriented-ness that is new to our generation.

But what are we truly creating? Which of these are masterpieces, and how do these works serve as baselines for the even more intricate works of tomorrow? New artisans of modern intricacy do exist, but there is a great deal of intricate mediocrity being swept along in the same tide. But is a shame that so many nights and weekends are being sacrificed by worker bees to accommodate a modern need for intricacy because of the trend of modern artisanship.

I wish I had more time to put toward this, but I have a very intricate project that needs to be finished (tempered laughter) …but I am interested in thoughts on this if you’ve got them.

Follow the author on Twitter: @supnah. Originally posted on Brad’s blog at whatsupnah.com.

The post This Efficiency Is Killing Me appeared first on The Faster Times.

Screw the Maccabeats. I mean… Ok, I get it. It’s fine and great and in the long tradition of our culture where Jews all around the world since the dawn of time have replaced words for other words to make something funny. It’s in the long tradition of youth groups and Jewish summer camps where song lyrics were rewritten to oft humorous effect. It’s also funny because yeah… it’s a bunch of Jewish kids from Yeshiva U. covering Taio Cruz’s song “Dynamite,” admittedly occasionally with better rhymes than the original.

So you’ve heard the Maccabeats. Now listen to this.

That is the song Die Goldene Chasene by Dave Tarras (Remixed by xntrxx), and it was released as part of a free downloadable Hanukah remix album named Anander Mol, Anander Veig by Tablet Magazine. Here’s a feature on it from Boingboing.net.

Anander Mol, Anander Veig is Yiddish for Another Time, Another Way, and in contrast the Maccabeats sound like a jaundiced kitschfest. I know that these two memes weren’t necessarily intended to be critiqued through juxtaposition, but they’re two different directions for this new time in which we find ourselves – Jewish Pop Culture versus Jewish Sub-Culture. Or maybe it’s better described as spreading a thin layer of Jewtella over the top of popular toast versus taking apart a sandwich and making a new meal out of it based on cues from Jewish culture and experiences as Jews.

Both have their role, and I don’t mean that in an evangelistic way, rather in terms of serving as expressions of culture and artistic endeavor, but Anander Mol poses the question of what it means to be Jewish today. How should things change in this new time, and what is our new way? This is an important question not just for Jews in the world, but for all people in the world.

For me the Maccabeats pose this question “Isn’t that hilarious?” To which I would have to answer, “No. It’s cute.”

Anander Mol poses a real question of what it means to be Jewish (or a human) today. The Maccabeats can sing on key.

Download Anander Mol, Anander Veig (you can get the cover art as well) for a modern remix Hanukah album. And share it like you did with the Maccabeats.

Follow the author on Twitter: @supnah. Originally posted at whatsupnah.com.

The post Anander Mol, Anander Veig Is Better Than The Maccabeats appeared first on The Faster Times.

What is Google Instant Search?

Google Instant Search basically means that when you are performing a search from google.com Google will start serving results to you before you hit the “return” button – while you are still typing in your search term. Google effectively tries to guess what term you are ultimately going to type in and serve related results for it before you’ve even finished in order to help you save time. Google will also serve up recommended search terms that it thinks you might be aiming for so that you can quickly select one of those with one click rather than having to finish typing all of the rest of the letters in your search term. Here are examples of both… (click for enlarged view)

These are examples taken from three different points in time as I typed in the phrase “SEO for google instant.” The first taken at “SEO,” the second taken at “SEO for” and the third taken at then end, but before hitting the return button with the instant results for “SEO for google instant.”

What’s interesting is the top results for the final example are a post by Steve Rubel, an SVP for Edelman talking about how Instant Search has killed SEO because “no two people will see the same web. Once a single search would do the trick – and everyone saw the same results. That’s what made search engine optimization work. Now, with this, everyone is going to start tweaking their searches in real-time.” Now I fully respect Steve Rubel, and I’ve shared clients with Edelmen and seen them do stellar work, but I just don’t think this explanation gets it right.

Other Google search developments like integration of social results, local results and personalized results have been producing results pages that vary from user to user for quite some time. And this isn’t really a huge problem. If you target relatively popular keywords around a topic, the odds are that across a large sample of searchers, even the personalized results will include top performing pages. In SEO we are not targeting any single user individually – rather, we are targeting populations, and more specifically, the portions of those populations that will click-through on our optimized result.

Google Instant Search isn’t killing anything, and Matt Cutts (from Google) has explained as much already. The point is that instant search results are potential interceptors of searchers who are on their way to typing in a keyword. But interception isn’t death, it’s just disruption. Google is shaking the SEO snowglobe a bit, but good strategic thinking can take advantage and come out on top of things when all the flakes settle. All of the analytic tools aren’t ready yet, but here are some things to consider in SEO strategy for Google Instant moving forward:

• What results & intermediate keywords show up while typing in my keywords? The recommended keywords that Instant Search provides to users (as seen in the images above) are potential points of interception, but they are also indicators of opportunity. These may vary based on personalized results between users, but there will still be a great deal of overlap, and because you are targeting portions of populations rather than specific individuals, everything will work out fine. The point is that it’s not enough anymore just to pull the search volume for the keyword you’re targeting, you should also now be paying attention to the search volumes of search fragments that users will be typing in on the way to that keyword, when they’ve only entered the first few letters, first word, or at other points along the progression to typing the full search term. And don’t stop there, continue on to look at the related terms for those partial queries as well as the recommended terms that are served back and the results returned by Instant Search. Again, the tools aren’t completely there for doing this comprehensively if you’re not savvy to build some of these protocols on your own, but a great deal can be learned anecdotally by simply observing Instant Search results and recommendations on your own and looking for opportunities to intercept your own targeted population of searchers.

• Do any of the recommended intermediate keywords look like viable options from the searcher’s perspective, and should I target those as well? Of all of the potential intermediary keywords returned by Instant Search, do any of them look like they are related to your targeted keywords in a way that your targeted searchers would consider clicking on them rather than finishing typing in their intended query? Remember, you are most interested in the people who are looking for your information – your best click-through rates will come from those searchers to whom you are really providing an answer or relevant information. So it’s usually inefficient to target searchers who would click on unrelated or severely tangential intermediate keywords. However, the keywords that look very relevant are jumping off points where the user might abandon their intended query for the instant result, and this is an interception point where you will need to work to gain a placement. Earning a ranking page in the most important and trafficked interception points of instant search for your targeted keywords will protect against diminished impressions and click-through, and it has the potential to actually earn more by strategically poaching users from other searches where you wouldn’t normally be able to rank.

• You heard me right – use this as an offensive strategy! That’s right! Stop just thinking about how this might screw up your current strategy and start thinking about how this might help you in areas you were unable to break into previously. When Google introduced their Universal Search features like News, Shopping, Local, and others they were all opportunities to leapfrog competitors who outranked you in standard Google results by beating them in the less competitive areas of local, shopping, etc. This presents the same opportunity again. Identify less competitive intermediate keywords that appear in the Instant Search results for more competitive search terms, and then target pages to rank for them. This can potentially squeeze your pages into view of a very high volume of searchers who are on their way to the more competitive final search term. Don’t forget to make your meta descriptions really count in this case in order to maximize click-through and grab users’ attention in the middle of their searches.

• Are any of these intermediate keywords shared between multiple keywords I’m targeting? Tracking the intermediate keyword recommendations across a group of targeted keywords can give you a list of overlaps. If you have a set of keywords all related to a certain category or topic, it is likely that there will be overlapping suggestions in the middle of some of those searches. These overlapping keywords represent opportunities to optimize for interceptor terms that have the potential to intercept across more than one of your targeted keywords. These are efficient places to optimize for Instant Search.

So SEO isn’t dead… not by a long shot, but it is changing fast – instantly even, and that’s always what has kept it interesting. Want to say something but hate my crappy commenting system? Hit me up at @supnah on Twitter.

This article was originally posted at whatsupnah.com

The post Google Instant Kills SEO If You’re Terrible At SEO appeared first on The Faster Times.

This past weekend I sank my HTC Incredible in water for an extended period of time and let it dry out for a couple of days (at the end of which it still works!!!! Thanks HTC!!!). During that time I was without a phone, but because I use Google Voice as my primary phone number I could still make and receive text messages. I could also receive my voicemail, and with Google’s new call from Gmail service that just launched I could also make phone calls right from the browser. I was in a situation that only a short time ago would have required an emergency phone purchase, and yet now I was barely crippled in terms of functionality. In fact, what I missed most was the ability to do other things with my phone like use the GPS navigation, browse the internet and check email on the go. I barely missed the phone part of my phone at all!

This is a real disruption – a disintermediation of the phone call as the most important part of what our phones do, and therefore a major step in the direction of turning phone contracts that have charges for voice minutes into data contracts where voice is just another use of the bits and bytes that flow into and out of our phones (and other devices). This is the beginning of every device being a phone, and of your email addresses and other online profiles (like Twitter, Facebook, etc.) being equally important as ‘endpoints’ that can be dialed in almost exactly the same way.

This will be interesting to watch.

But for the really interesting story about the angry cows and the waterlogged phones that spurred this post, read on: Angry Cows vs. HTC (hint: HTC wins).

The post Angry Cows Prove Gmail Calling & Google Voice Useful appeared first on The Faster Times.

This past weekend I sank my HTC Incredible in water for an extended period of time and let it dry out for a couple of days (at the end of which it still works!!!! Thanks HTC!!!). During that time I was without a phone, but because I use Google Voice as my primary phone number I could still make and receive text messages. I could also receive my voicemail, and with Google’s new call from Gmail service that just launched I could also make phone calls right from the browser. I was in a situation that only a short time ago would have required an emergency phone purchase, and yet now I was barely crippled in terms of functionality. In fact, what I missed most was the ability to do other things with my phone like use the GPS navigation, browse the internet and check email on the go. I barely missed the phone part of my phone at all!

This is a real disruption – a disintermediation of the phone call as the most important part of what our phones do, and therefore a major step in the direction of turning phone contracts that have charges for voice minutes into data contracts where voice is just another use of the bits and bytes that flow into and out of our phones (and other devices). This is the beginning of every device being a phone, and of your email addresses and other online profiles (like Twitter, Facebook, etc.) being equally important as ‘endpoints’ that can be dialed in almost exactly the same way.

This will be interesting to watch.

But for the really interesting story about the angry cows and the waterlogged phones that spurred this post, read on: Angry Cows vs. HTC (hint: HTC wins).

The post Angry Cows Prove Gmail Calling & Google Voice Useful appeared first on The Faster Times.

This is a short lesson for us all about how telling the simple truth early can save untold headaches later. On August 13th rumor leaked from Mashable.com – a fairly reliable source – that Verizon was going to push the much awaited update to Android 2.2 Froyo to their HTC Incredible devices on the 18th. Aside from being from Mashable, the rumor was given more credence because the HTC version of Froyo intended for the Incredible had leaked, and many of the users brave enough to root their devices had already installed it successfully. This indicated that the Incredible’s HTC Sense build of Froyo had been released by HTC and was awaiting the push from the Verizon side. Additionally, other HTC Android devices already are running Froyo – like the Desire.

So the Incredible community jumped onto Mashable’s article – tweeting it over 150 times and sharing it through Facebook nearly 200 times (and those counts are only through the official buttons on the article page, not even counting those who copied and pasted or shared via other methods).Between the 13th and the 18th the frenzy grew and the rumor spread, and users spoke incessantly about their excitement to finally get Froyo when the 18th rolled around. I even sent out this message on Twitter.

And then the 18th was upon us, and many Incredible owners, including myself were repeatedly checking their phones only to receive the following message: “Your system is currently up to date.” And then, on the 18th, a tweet was published by an official Verizon account saying that “We currently do not have information for the Incredible update at this time and is not being sent out today.”

Thanks, guys. It would be one thing if the update was being delayed slightly due to an unexpected last minute bug, but it’s now the 22nd and there’s still been no update. There are really only a couple of possibilities here…

1) Verizon meant to release Froyo for the Incredible on the 18th, but some bug is keeping that from happening, and it’s big enough to delay it for more than a day or two. Unlikely – the longer this update takes to arrive, the more likely it is that Verizon was aware before the 18th that nothing was going to happen on that date with the update.

2) Verizon never intended to release Froyo for the Incredible on the 18th. This is seeming more and more likely. But if this is the case, then were they completely deaf to the excitement and jubilation of their users online? Or is their social media team so isolated from decision makers in their business that they were impotent and had no freedom to address the growing conversation amongst their users around this topic?

Additionally – and now I’m just on a rant – why did they make the announcement by replying to one individual on Twitter rather than releasing a statement to everyone?

Here’s another stellar example of the fallout and their Twitter engagement and response prowess:

Whatever the case, their deafness or inability to react has led to an entire user base for one of their handsets believing that their lack of denial of an update on the 18th was a tacit affirmation, and now they are all deflated and upset and wondering why they don’t have Froyo yet.

The point is that all they had to do was deny it to avoid a massive amount of confusion and disenchantment with their users. There are still regular updates on Twitter asking where the update is, why it didn’t come on the 18th as they had heard it would, and what on earth could be taking so long. None of this would have been an issue if Verizon hadn’t let the expectations build up so much. The surest sign that there is real activity and demand ongoing behind this frustration is that spam and demand media type websites continue to rehash generic information about Froyo and the HTC Incredible into new posts that give no new information in order to capture page views from those still diligently searching for information about what the hell is going on with their expected Froyo update – just try searching for “Froyo Incredible” on Twitter and see if they’re still serving up the spam articles for you in the links.

So, @VZWsupport – what is the deal anyway? How did this go so badly so fast? And most importantly, do you need a consultant to talk to your supervisors and explain the merits of listening to their social media managers if they say there’s a storm a-brewin’? Give me a call.

This article was originally posted on whatsupnah.com. Want to follow me? >> @supnah

2nd Update (August 23rd):

The final word, and how sad it is…

What a weird thing that @VZWSupport – the official Twitter channel for Verizon Support – has no idea who is responsible for the operating system running on one of their most popular phones?! It’s too late to be eloquent, but this blows my mind.

Update:

Latest interaction, no clarification >

The post Verizon + HTC Incredible + Froyo = Social Media Fail appeared first on The Faster Times.

A lifetime ago (like two months) I was on a mountain bike trail in Bend, OR riding with my friends @cassondra and @SEOeilish. When we got to the trailhead for Phil’s Trail, a well visited site for bike-minded Bendites, @cassondra checked in with Foursquare. She had been trailing @Audette for a while and knew she was close to overtaking him for the mayorship. A moment later, and it was done – Cass was the new mayor and Adam (Audette) had been ousted. We rode for a bit more, and that’s when it struck me – Foursquare isn’t a pissing contest, it’s an ant farm! (Note: at the time of publication @Audette has triumphantly retaken mayorship of the trailhead. What goes around comes around.) This made me think. About ants. I’ll explain why – I swear. But first I digress a bit…

There was a little spike in commentary several months ago comparing Foursquare to a virtual pissing contest in the sense that people were using it to be territorial, and to claim areas as their own. People were pointing out that Foursquare users acted like dogs that piss on trees and fire hydrants and legs and such in order to stack up points, mayorships and badges and compete for dominance. They were calling it narcissistic and creepy, and worse.

Here’s an example. And another. And another. And yet another. And some more.

This analogy never sat right with me, and I appreciated the more thoughtful explanations by people like @caseorganic and her cyborg-anthropological perspective in this post that equates geo-applications like Foursquare as potential solutions to spatial amnesia.

I still thought there was something further yet to be said, but I couldn’t quite get my head around it until that day when I hit the trails with Cassondra & Eilish, and it all came together.

I think that while it is possible to use Foursquare in an egoistic and self-serving dog pissing manner, the real value of the service lies in leveraging the data in a more communal fashion. However, the primitive game mechanics we can see in Foursquare right now don’t highlight this usage. The current game mechanics focus on the individualistic and competitive tendencies of users to promote its viral spread. I think that we will see the usage of Foursquare shift to more communal ant-like benefits quickly over the next year for several reasons. Here’s how I want to explain it:

1. The pissing dog analogy doesn’t scale (or “The Real Mayors Are Already Mayors”) 2. Why it’s like an ant colony 3. What’s 10% of useful?

1) The Pissing Dog Analogy Doesn’t Scale (or “The Real Mayors Are Already Mayors”) Use of Foursquare as a territorial or marking tool is boring and stupid, and people who think of it that way are missing the point. Just like with any social platform – Facebook and Twitter included – the value you get out of the service is related to the effort you put in. With Twitter, if you put in the effort to collect followers who listen to you, and to curate a list of people to follow from whom you receive valuable information, then it’s a great tool. If you don’t put in that effort then you end up with a stream full of useless crap and wonder why anyone would ever waste their time with that tool. (See my previous article about why I hate explaining why people should use Twitter.)

New users who sign up for Foursquare and try to compete in terms of points are screwed. Early adopters like SocialJulio have been at it for a while and you’re not going to catch up. Badges are fun even if you’re not competing. It’s always nice to get a “Player Please” badge and a good laugh when checking in to a location with three members of the opposite sex, but catching up to early adopters just isn’t going to happen until they’ve jumped ship for something newer and cooler, leaving the late adopters in a MySpace-style abandoned wasteland of functional code and dysfunctional social media leprosy.

But the real gem is being the mayor of a venue, isn’t it. Oooh… the feeling when you oust someone else from being the mayor is just so delicious. The gears of social media turn, and maybe you even get a free latte or something for the effort. Yum. But being the mayor of a venue used to be simple. Months ago hardly anyone was on Foursquare, and all you had to do to become the mayor of a place was… well, go there.

Today more people are on Foursquare. Legitimate battles rage over locations like the Phil’s Trail trailhead with Cassondra and Adam Audette. But we’re still only part way to maturity, and what’s going to happen as more and more people begin to use Foursquare (or some other similar application that may oust it as the de facto geo-app) is that the mayors will become the mayors. To explain this, let’s think about what it means to be the mayor.

Let’s start with a hypothetical location… say, Uncle Paul’s Produce Market. Being the mayor means that this is your spot. You go there a lot. You can be found there a lot. In some cases maybe you get a discount. If we took Foursquare and its trappings out of the picture what would it take to get the nickname “mayor” at some location like Uncle Paul’s? It would take being there a lot – more than just about anyone else. You would either be an employee or a customer who stopped by all the time. Everyone would know your name. You might get some discounts because of your loyalty. You would be a V.I.P.

Right now the real “mayors” of locations are just starting to claim their Foursquare mayorships as they begin to login and check in as they go about their daily lives and spend time in the places where they have always spent time. But there are still plenty of places where you could show the employees a picture of the Foursquare Mayor for their bar or restaurant or whatever, and they would have no clue who it is. There are also the drive-by artists – my theory is that they’re mailmen and UPS delivery men who push through neighborhoods every day and just stack up mayorships of everywhere they pass. But they’re not the real mayors. They’re not the regulars. And as more and more of the people who are truly regulars of these locations begin to use geo-apps the real mayors will begin to displace the “mayors” who don’t really deserve it. Foursquare will start to mimic reality more and more in terms of mayorship attribution compared with a person’s actual social capital at a given location.

The current mode of usage of stacking up Mayorships and racing around checking-in to places just doesn’t scale as more and more people begin to adopt the service. You simply can’t beat the people who are actually in a place more than you, and early adopters who were taking advantage of a sparsely populated playing field are going to have to get used to it.

2. Why it’s like an ant colony Pissing dogs don’t care what another dog thought about the tree it just pissed on. They might not even care that it’s a tree at all. All they care about is that some other dog pissed on this thing (whatever it is), so I’d better piss on it too. In fact, I’d better piss on it more, and most recently! Dogs are essentially trying to keep other dogs out, or say “Hey, you’re in my zone.” This may be a functional analogy for the primitive mode of using Foursquare, but it doesn’t capture the value of the information available through more nuanced usage of the service.

Ants, on the other hand, they really know how to piss on stuff. Actually, they have special organs dedicated to making all kinds of different chemical signals that they release, and other special organs (antennae, for example) specifically for smelling or tasting those trails. In the case of ants the pheromones serve as the basis for complex routing algorithms that help the ants individually determine where to go in a way that ends up routing the energy of the colony as a whole in a very efficient way. Essentially every ant leaves a naturally degrading pheromone trail as it walks. The more ants that walk down a certain path means a heavier pheromone trail, and therefore a stronger signal, and therefore it attracts more ants and further increases the traffic on that route. Imagine two ants – X and Y. Ant X finds a piece of food 1 foot from the colony. Ant Y finds a piece of food 2 feet from the colony. By the time Ant Y has gone the 2 feet to it’s food (creating one pheromone trail), Ant X has already made one complete circuit back to the colony (two pheromone trails). By the time Ant Y has made its first complete circuit back to the colony (4 feet total) and left 2 pheromone trails, Ant X will have left 4 pheromone trails. At this point if a third ant comes along and has to choose which trail to travel, the shorter one will look much more attractive because it has been travelled twice as much in the same amount of time, so the colony is efficiently selecting how to allocate its resources.

These algorithms are so efficient that researchers have poached them over and over again to create routing algorithms for use in IT infrastructure. For example, this one.

Dogs lack all of this complexity. The point is that we have the capacity to use the data in Foursquare and other geo-applications to derive value from the patterns of others even if we’re not “mayors.” If I check in to a location and see that my connections on Foursquare have left tips to go to a different place next door instead, then I can take advantage of that information. I’m not visiting this location to check-in and become the mayor. I’m just trying to get a good meal, or a cold beer, or good service on a car repair. This is where the value lies, and that is why it’s much more like ants than dogs.

3) What’s 10% of useful? The problem is that the game mechanics are still immature. There are many pieces of data that aren’t easily accessible. I’d like to be able to check-in to a location and filter the tips for just those from my connections. I’d like to be able to check-in to a location and be notified that more of my friends have historically checked-in to another location nearby. I’d like to be able to sort tips by positive and negative, and I’d really like to be able to have threaded discussions or ping users who have left positive/negative tips for more information about what led to that decision. And Foursquare is definitely working towards this. Here’s an interview where one of the founders states that it’s only at about 10% of what it needs to be.

Crowley says, “The game mechanics are there to grab a user’s hand and bring them through the experience, but it is not the meat of the service. The meat of the service is the social utility that we are building. A lot of that going forward is taking the user’s history, like all of the check-in information we get from them, and then recycling that data by giving it back to them…”

I wholeheartedly agree, and I can’t wait for them to iterate towards more mature services and game mechanics. I look forward to the time when this data is more accessible, when mayors are mayors again, and when the narcissists stop getting in the way of the adoption of great and useful tools.

“It is not enough to be busy, so are the ants. The question is: what are we busy about?” –Henry David Thoreau

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The post Foursquare – It’s Time To Stop Acting Like Dogs appeared first on The Faster Times.