O’Reilly’s Where 2.0 conference has just wrapped up. I’ve been to my share of conferences lately but Brady Forrest and company really outdid themselves with this one. The entire experience was solid at every level of detail, from the big (interesting and relevant keynotes and sessions) to the small (food and drinks that actually didn’t suck).
I had the pleasure of giving a talk at Where 2.0 this year, entitled “Bringing Geo Home To Roost”. My presentation explored various ways that we might take geolocal services beyond their early-adopter status and make them broadly appealing to the mainstream masses. Fortunately, BlockChalk serves as an interesting reference here. Convenient, eh?
Here are the slides from my presentation, modified to make them more understandable without the benefit of my soothing voice:
As everyone knows, the focus at South By Southwest this year (at least from a tech perspective) is on location-based services (I’m there representing BlockChalk).
Oh, and apparently we’re all at war! Foursquare and Gowalla are at each other’s throats, and the other startups are fighting over the scraps. It’s a Highlander-esque battle royale, and only one fighter can emerge with its head attached to its shoulders and thus claim The Prize. Or at least that’s the story everyone is writing about.
That story is inaccurate and it overlooks the real value of this event.
Yes, it’s true that Foursquare and Gowalla are in a fight, but what would you expect? They are the biggest names and their products are essentially identical. Look beyond these two players and you’ll find a group of startups that is as diverse as it is large.
Entrepreneurs and journalists who think of SXSW as a battlefield are making two key mistakes.
The first lies in the implication that “location-based” startups are all competitive with each other. That’s simply not true. Location is not a strategy or a product. It is a feature. BlockChalk is no more competitive with something like Gowalla than lettuce is competitive with asparagus. Just like everyone benefits from eating more vegetables, all location-based startups benefit from increased experimentation with and adoption of geo-local services.
The other mistake is in coming to SXSW looking for winners and losers. This is not a contest; it is a chance to talk to real people who use (or don’t use) your product. This is why we talk to users — to learn. Let’s not lose sight of that.
SXSW represents a golden opportunity for learning. Don’t miss it because you’re busy sharpening your sword.
[For my first post I’m reprinting a piece I wrote for the BlockChalk blog in late November of last year. With the recent Google Buzz privacy fiasco, the subject matter seems more relevant than ever.]
Last Friday I attended TechCrunch’s excellent Real Time CrunchUp in San Francisco. Real time web services are all the rage these days of course, and this conference brought together entrepreneurs, engineers, investors, and others to discuss the field and debate where it’s going.
Much of the focus was on location-based services and information “streams”. Since this is the area in which BlockChalk plays, the discussion was of personal interest to me. Companies like Twitter and Foursquare were in the spotlight, although newcomers like SimpleGeo, GeoAPI, and HotPotato attracted their share of well-deserved attention. Great products, smart people.
As I listened I heard some exciting predictions for the future: how one day soon we would all know where everyone is all the time; that people everywhere would share such information willingly and benefit from it greatly; and how this would fundamentally alter the way we interact as a society.
But something about all this didn’t feel quite right. There seemed to be an underlying assumption at play: that today’s location-based services show us the shape of things to come. And so it was that about halfway through the day I finally realized what was bothering me.
credit: h.koppdelaney on Flickr
What’s the geo bubble? It’s a land populated by the early adopters of today’s location-based services. Inside the bubble, people’s online actions are primarily driven by social activity and personal reputation. This has many implications, but the one I want to address here is privacy: bubble-dwellers have a reduced expectation of it, because it gets in the way of the things they want to do.
Now, the bubble is a great place to live, and bubble-dwellers are perfectly nice folks. It’s not my intent to besmirch them (hell, I frequently visit the bubble myself). Instead, my intent is to point out that, by definition, there is a world outside the bubble. That’s where most people live, and yet as an industry we’ve barely scratched the surface of what can be done there.
Today’s hottest services are pitched directly at bubble-dwellers, and by all accounts they are popular, useful, and fun. But by linking your identity to your location and sharing this information broadly, many of these services largely ignore issues of personal privacy and security. As a result, there are a wide range of everyday social interactions and transactions to which they are ill suited — buying and selling goods and services, lodging anonymous complaints, reporting crimes, the list goes on. It also means that a large portion of the population may never feel comfortable using them.
Dave and I created BlockChalk in part because we believe that the world outside the bubble is every bit as interesting as (and larger than) the world inside. Bubble-based apps will undoubtedly continue to grow dramatically, and the bubble itself will grow as early adopter behavior trickles down to a broader audience. But in order for location-based services to truly reach the mainstream, we as product designers will need to get even smarter about the social assumptions that we are harnessing — or in some cases, undermining.
For BlockChalk, that means a focus on personal privacy. We’re building it from the ground up to be a location-based service for everyone, where the user is always in control of how much identity and location information they share. We’ve also made it aggressively hyper-local, with a strong focus on what’s going on in your neighborhood. We think this will encourage people to use BlockChalk for completely different purposes than systems like Twitter and Foursquare [Ed. - and now, Buzz]. We also think it will attract entirely new types of users to this space. And we’re already seeing both happening.
The world of location-based services is moving faster than ever, and the hottest products out there today are innovative and fun to use. But it would be a mistake for us to assume that today’s users are representative of the overall population, and that today’s products necessarily represent the shape of things to come.
The future is going to be different — and even bigger — than we expect.
