Exploring the 2010 Web

This week I got a press release from Gowalla. It went on and on about how much better its feature set was than Foursquare, a point of view backed up by one of my favorite tech writers, Zee, so I gave it a second chance.

Why did they claim it was better?

Because their app forces users to use the GPS in their phone to check in. Foursquare does not, the press release says. That is all true.

If you read that you’d think that Gowalla was going to run away with the prize, right?

But, sorry, it won’t work out that way.

Here’s why. This “feature” is actually an anti-feature.

“What in heck’s name are you talking about Scoble?”

Well, they didn’t do their homework. On the Gillmor Gang last week Kevin Marks of British Telecom nailed it. He told us that people are freaked out by location-based applications.

Every time I show these apps to people they invariably respond with freaked out replies like “I would never use this.” Or, “stalkers would love these.” Or “something nasty is going to happen to someone because of these.”

This is a completely different response than those who I first showed, say, Twitter too. They responded merely with “that’s lame.”

You can get over being lame. You can’t get over your potential users being freaked out.

So, here’s why this is an antifeature for these apps, and probably lots of location apps (let’s talk about how Twitter is handling location troubles later):

1. Both of these apps are location games. You check in. You get virtual points. Your friends know where you are. This freaks people out. But only one app FORCES you to tell people exactly where you are when you check in: Gowalla. This is going to turn off a lot of people, plus it makes checking in a LOT harder. While staying in Sequoia Hospital I was able to check in with Foursquare, but not Gowalla (because my GPS didn’t work inside Sequoia).
2. Most people, when they play location games, want to add some “fuzziness” to their location. For instance, I am at home right now. The closest address to me is the Ritz Carlton in Half Moon Bay (I’m walking distance away from it). On Foursquare I check in there. Which lets me “win” mayorship of the Ritz, plus it lets me add some fuzziness to my actual location. On Gowalla it forces me to check in at my real address, if I want to let my friends know I’m in the neighborhood. My friend Luke, who lives nearby, could use this to know when I’m home and available for going surfing, for instance.
This makes Gowalla considerably less fun, too. One part of a location-based game is presenting people as you’d like others to see you. It’s a lot more interesting to check in at the Ritz every night than my actual home address, which, to tell you the truth, I’d be a little freaked out to report to everyone (and if I’m freaked out, imagine how freaked out the average user is).
3. These two games have two significant challenges and Gowalla’s approach will cripple them in both. The challenges? 1. Get users. 2. Get those users to add locations.
Why are those challenges? Well, if you are a normal user, try to use these systems, and you try it in your home town and no locations are there, you get pissed off and leave. Even I behaved this way, ignoring Foursquare until just recently, despite it being hot at SXSW with lots of my friends. I checked in this afternoon at Rite Aid, a pharmacy in Half Moon Bay. Both systems didn’t have that location. I added it, but adding it in Foursquare had fewer screens. Why? Because of the GPS requirement. And, Foursquare has a LOT more users. Why do I think that is? Partly because it was out earlier, but also partly because it is, well, more fun to play because it doesn’t require exact use of the GPS. The people I’ve shown both systems to tell me they are more likely to join Foursquare. Oh, and I got a nicer reward for adding a new place into Foursquare than Gowalla, which made Foursquare more fun and made it more likely I’ll add the other weird places in my town.

The more I look at it, the more I’m convinced that the strict use of the GPS in Gowalla makes it significantly less likely to gain users than Foursquare will get.

That’s why I call this feature an “antifeature.”

Now, I do admit that there will be disagreement with me. Zee, for instance, thinks that Gowalla is hot because of this feature. I think he’s misjudged it and time will tell who is right.

Oh, as to Twitter, did you see how they added “fuzziness” into the location? They are deleting location information after 15 days.

Twitter is also making the system opt in. User control is very important in getting users over their fears of revealing their location. Most users are freaked out by these features, so user control and fuzziness are the two most dominant and needed features.

What do you think?

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If you were following my Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, or Flickr feeds you know by now that we had a baby on Saturday night.

Tonight, over on my Posterous blog, I asked the industry to give me curation tools so that I can tell you what I’m seeing on my screen and give you one place to find it all. So far the industry has ignored that.

But on Saturday night I tried to use as many tools as possible to bring you along on an event important to me. All in real time. What I learned was telling.

First, came email. That’s how we let our family know the event was close. What did I say in that email? “Watch Twitter.” Why email? Because most of my family and friends still like email the best for getting notified of things. They don’t get Twitter and FriendFeed. Some have gotten Facebook, though, but there I never know if people are seeing my most important updates, so we stayed away from that at first.

Anyway, I also checked in on Google Latitude, Gowalla, and FourSquare so that people would know we were at the hospital (I even Tweeted that, so people would know I was playing around). Mostly we did that for our social media friends. Our real life family and friends have no idea what those are and don’t use them yet. I did get a couple of surprised text messages from friends after checking in at FourSquare, saying they hoped things were going OK (they hadn’t seen our Tweets saying we were having a baby). Soon I had sent a message to FriendFeed and Twitter letting everyone know where I’d keep them up to date (I used FriendFeed for this, which pushed a single message over to Twitter — I knew that if I used Twitter too much I’d piss off a lot of my audience that really didn’t care that I was having a baby).

Which brings me to a point. Very few of my friends (even professional types) read Twitter all the time. A lot of people found out only today that we had a baby, even though our baby’s birth was retweeted hundreds of times on Sunday and by lots of people with fairly large audiences.

That’s the first lesson: even though you probably are getting sick and tired of hearing about something, like Michael Jackson’s death, which was retweeted by nearly every single one of my friends within the first 10 minutes of the news hitting (that’s what it seemed like anyway) the reality is that most of your friends haven’t even heard the news yet.

My brother Ben, for instance, didn’t hear the news until I called him because he was sick and wasn’t on his computer so didn’t get my email.

Which is the second lesson for media absorption: some people just are not reachable through modern media. If you want to reach those people you’ll have to do door-to-door knocking or calling campaigns. That’s why we got so many political phone calls last year.

Anyway, as the evening went on I’d occassionally Tweet. Things like “Ryan is playing games with us” or “baby’s arrival is tonight at earliest.”

Those Tweets traveled from Twitter to FriendFeed and over to a box on my blog. So anyone visiting one of those areas would know. I also let my Facebook friends know that a baby was on the way. That made sure I got as many people to know something was about to happen as possible.

Lesson three: get your message as much distribution as possible. Some of my friends only hang out on Facebook. If you don’t let them know, your message will arrive to them slower (it will still get there, due to people retweeting and such, but why make it hard?)

Anyway, as the evening wore on, things started to speed up. I tweeted about the drugs being better here than at Stanford (by the way, Sequoia is a WAY BETTER PLACE TO HAVE A BABY than Stanford is — our second son was born at Stanford and we can tell you lengthy stories about how much better the experience is here at Sequoia. Don’t believe me? Yelp backs us up).

Over the next couple of hours I tweeted “getting ready for C-section” and within minutes: “Gotta run, little Ryan is coming soon.”

The big event was here. The doctors put me out in a hallway to wait while Maryam was prepared for surgery. It let me slow down, catch my breath, and I was able to use my iPhone to capture an image and post that up.

On my screen I could see how people were reacting to the images around the world. This was a big change from when Milan was born, two years ago (we tweeted his birth and posted photos too, but back then the real time web wasn’t so real time).

Anyway, in the surgery room I used mostly my 5D MKII. Mostly to make images for just Maryam and me. I wanted the first images to be high-quality, so I used my SLR. Luckily for this Maryam was almost asleep most of the time so I could watch the proceedure (the doctors watching me nervously because they know many guys faint at the sight of surgery — they had a screen up so that they could keep me from looking if they had to). Maryam forbade me from publishing in public any of these images. We had reached our privacy line, but I did make the images anyway — that’s the journalist training in me from photojournalism classes.

Soon little Ryan Soroush Scoble was out and crying and here I switched briefly to an iPhone, so I could get an image up right away to family. One family friend of Maryam’s told us today that it was incredible being able to watch in real time what was going on.

Over the first hour we gave little Ryan a bath, watched as he got his first clothes, first few checkups, etc. While Maryam and Ryan hung out together for the first time I had some time to upload those to Flickr and get out another email to family and friends.

Why didn’t I use Qik or Kyte? I’ve found those live video services don’t have enough quality, nor enough reliability, for what I wanted to do. Recording a video on my iPhone and uploading it to Flickr gives a lot better quality — yeah, Qik would have been real time, but it would have been a lot fuzzier. Funny enough I was expecting to use YouTube for that, but the iPhone uploader to YouTube totally sucks and failed on me three times, even for a short video. Apple needs to fix that. Luckily I had the new Flickr app on my iPhone and it worked for uploading the first time.

Also I wanted to choose the moments that get broadcast and Qik really is an all or nothing choice.

By the way, if you do this yourself, don’t forget to make an audio recording of the first cry. I did that just by using the audio recording feature on my iPhone and then I uploaded it via email to FriendFeed.

Anyway, hope you enjoyed sharing these moments with us.

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One fun thing I like asking representatives from Nokia, Microsoft, or Research in Motion is “what does the post iPhone world look like?”

It is my way of sensing whether they’ve done any creative thinking. So far I’ve gotten mostly blank stares.

It’s like Steve Jobs has convinced everyone in the industry that nothing possibly can replace the iPhone on the coolest device shelf.

Me? I’ve seen this play before. Remember Sony’s Walkman?

I like pretending we live in a post iPhone world.

How do we get there?

Well, what would happen if we lived in a Twitter world? One where every light switch, every device, every machine, had a Twitter account?

I asked a Microsoft executive recently why they haven’t released a .NET/Silverlight runtime that Tweets.

His answer surprised me “have you signed our NDA yet?”

That’s code for “we’re working on just that.”

After all, Microsoft probably doesn’t like it that IBM has ruled enterprise marketing with its “Smart Planet” meme.

So, why would Microsoft support a Twitter world? Because if Microsoft helped Twitter build a world where everything has a Twitter API then Microsoft would also get the keys to the post-iPhone world.

“Huh?”

Well, let’s assume that Microsoft had .NET runtimes on everything. Right now I’m staring at an IV machine in the hospital room where our next son will be born. Why couldn’t a doctor Tweet that machine? Using a message that looks something like this:

@sequoia_iv_0451 set level to 1 pt per hour

That would change the drip rate on her machine to 1 pint per hour.

That doesn’t seem that important, does it? But now what if EVERY device in the hospital had a runtime like this and could be queried through a Twitter language?

Wouldn’t that open up new application possibilities that don’t exist today? Absolutely!

Wouldn’t that encourage new kinds of devices to be built? Absolutely!

Wouldn’t that mean we’d need a replacement for the iPhone? Absolutely!

Why? Well, let’s put it this way. If you had tons of devices in your world that you wanted to interact with TweetDeck or SimplyTweet just wouldn’t cut it.

Now, what if Microsoft made such a Twitter system more reliable? After all, if a doctor is going to have a device that will talk to all sorts of machines during surgery there can’t be a possibility of a fail whale.

Once Microsoft got .NET runtimes out in enough things they could come in and build a shadow Twitter that’s more reliable than Twitter and that has some cool features.

Then once that’s done Microsoft could ship a post-iPhone world. Why? Because they would be able to build a device that would be optimized for this Twitter world.

Oh, OK, this is all science fiction. After all it’s preposterous to think that the iPhone won’t stay on the coolest device shelf forever.

Right?

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Go back three years ago. Twitter was being used by the same crowd that is playing with Foursquare today.

What is Foursquare? It’s a location game. When I visit somewhere, like Sequoia Hospital, where I’m hanging out with Maryam (we’re having a baby sometime in the next 24 hours) I check in on Foursquare.

What does that do? It gives me points and lets other people know where I am.

It sounds really lame, doesn’t it? But didn’t Twitter sound really lame to you when someone first told you about it?

It’s not lame.

Already I’ve met people because of the game and it’s weirdly fun.

The game gives you points for doing various checkins. If you do a lot of checkins everyday you get more points. You also get badges (which are sort of like achievements on Xbox games) for doing various things. For instance, I checked in so much at the Half Moon Bay Ritz that I became the Mayor of that location. It’s a lot of fun and great bragging rights.

Yeah, still sounds lame, huh?

But I think this lame little location game is going to be bigger than Twitter.

Why? Because eventually businesses will learn that this is an even better way to engage with customers than Twitter is.

Why? Because when you know your customers location the way this game is going to let you know you can really do some wild offers. Plus, I bet that they add in their own Twitter-style feature that will let people talk with each other.

I wonder if Twitter will build in its own version of Foursquare into Twitter? So far Twitter hasn’t built in any location-based services (other than to add in a new API which has yet to be turned on in any real way) so who knows?

Either way, this thing is growing remarkably quickly, just like Twitter did back in 2006. Now that Foursquare has funding, too, I expect to see more cities and more features turned on.

Why is Foursquare more useful than, say, Google’s Latitude? Well, you choose the moments and places you check into. With Latitude, if you leave it on and head to, say, an adult establishment, everyone will know. With Foursquare no one would know, unless you clicked checkin on your phone.

What about competitors, like Gowalla? I’ve been playing with Gowalla too and it doesn’t have the gameplay yet, which I’ve found is critical to getting me to use Foursquare. It also doesn’t have either the community (I already have about 1,000 early-adopter friends on Foursquare, but only a handful of friends on Gowalla) or the business listings that Foursquare has (every place I’ve visited today was easier to find on Foursquare than on Gowalla).

The really scary thing is how FourSquare could become a much better Yelp than Yelp. Or will know more about me than even Facebook. Think about what the stores and places you go says about you! Think about the advertising Starbucks could do with you if it knows you go into a competitor for coffee every morning at about 8 a.m.!

I see all sorts of things that can come out of this little “lame” game. Twitter better watch out. I give Foursquare 400 more days before it is on Oprah.

How about you?

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I just looked at the baby photos of Milan being born. Back then we did something pretty cool with a service called “Twittergram.” We recorded his first cry. But now Twittergram seems to have gone away and with it, our baby’s first cry. That was only two years ago. You can see the link there, but it doesn’t work.

This isn’t the first time I’ve noticed things online disappearing over time. My first two years of blogging are gone. Some of that was backed up by the wayback machine.

I’ve seen other people’s blogs, or other online items go away too. Hey, quick, find some of your Tweets from just four months ago. They are all still online, but you probably can’t find them. Me neither.

Or, wait until you are hacked and don’t have a backup, like happened with me. I love the folks who say “you should have backed up.” How do you back up everything you do online? You can’t. Quick, back up all your Google Docs, your Tweets, your Flickr photos and all the metadata surrounding them (comments, tags, etc), your Facebook items, etc etc. You will die trying.

I know, I’ve been backing up like a crazy man lately since I got hacked. What’s funny is one of my brand new hard drives died. Luckily I had a backup of that. But what if I didn’t?

What if my house burned down tonight? I wouldn’t be able to save everything. Heck, I’d be worried about getting my family out and screw the hard drives.

So our online lives leak away.

It gets worse after you die.

You think your family will be able to save your Flickr photos? Not if you don’t give them your passwords. Here’s why: they won’t be able to find them.

I let my Flickr Pro account lapse cause I was too lazy to put in a new credit card. I couldn’t even find my old photos. Why? Because Flickr’s search only shows the last few photos and they turn off the calendar and all sorts of things if you stop paying for the pro account. Yowza.

Reminds me of an interview I had with Jeremy Toeman who built a new company called Legacy Locker. But now we need to put enough cash in there to keep Flickr accounts paid up so my sons will be able to see their photos after I die.

Some best practices I’ve learned:

1. If you care that it stays around, use services from big companies. Google will probably stick around for a while. Twittergram? Gone.

2. Put your stuff in multiple places. Why? Because maybe Yahoo will decide to turn off the Flickr service in 10 years. So, make sure your photos go to other services.

3. Back up what you can, but that won’t help long term. Quick, if your dad handed you a hard drive with 10,000 photos would you be able to find anything on there? What if you got that hard drive in 30 years? Would you be able to even look at what’s on it? Remember, when I was in college my entire life was on floppy disks. I can’t even read those now.

4. Print out stuff that you really want to save. I still have my trunk of photos from my childhood, but lots of my photos taken digitally over the years are gone or hard to find.

5. Use services like Legacy Locker to ensure that your kids at least will have your passwords and rights to your stuff and accounts.

Any other “best practices?”

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