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In the video I walk you through where to check what applications have access to your Twitter account and what access rights you have given.

When Foursquare launched the leaderboard was the place to see how you ranked against other early adopters.  You often did not have a long or strong friend list to compete against and badges were very new.  Swarms were hard to come by.

Now badges are gaining traction with some even competing for the number of accumulated badges.  Points are slowly becoming obsolete.  I want Foursquare to stay ahead of the pack and deprecate points and begin placing better partners and perks.

The AMEX weekend for small business was a marketing hit.  Coupons at local restaurants is a huge bonus and keeps people coming back.  Rewards for verified mayorships are harder to find and should be a growth area.

What I need from a location service is the building of recommendations built around my learned check-in behavior.  Learn the tags of types of places, areas they are in and begin expanding my circle.  Pick something outside the normal radius, suggest adjacent type tags of foods or activities.

Become not only a place for me to say where I am, but a place to look for the next place to visit.  I use Foursquare to not only announce my location for on the fly meet-ups, events or fun, but I began long ago to use the service to place markers on places I really liked and want to visit again in the future. (I wish they would buy sub-services like Foodspotting to match what I like at the locations I check into).

Foursquare has become an event logging, taste building and location service.  I am only giving suggestions to maintain the growth and usage before something else comes along that scoops that part up.

The first sign was an email asking if anyone was interested in purchasing or acquiring the assets or technology behind Refynr.  This service helps build filters for your social media streams in Twitter and Facebook to remove the clutter.

I have begun talks with a few companies already, but am wondering if you, your company, or anyone in your network would be interested in acquiring/buying my company. The Refynr technology has been built up over the past 14 months, has over 1,000 users…

I love this service, yet I forgot about it at some point and failed to go back.  Deconstructing the activity streams is what will save the enterprise worker with recent pushes to include them in every social product and cause users to oversubscribe.

I then received an email from a very cool site VisualCV that helped you build  outstanding online resumes.  They talked about a freemuim model that never really developed I am guessing.

Dear VisualCV Member

We regret to inform you that the VisualCV.com website will be ceasing operations, effective December 30, 2011.
To ensure we meet all our members’ privacy concerns, we will destroy all user data once website operations have ceased. This includes any and all backups we have.

The email goes on to say they will refund prorated funds to paying members.  I am surprised sites liked LinkedIn would not have been interested in this technology to boost their resume creation abilities.   They let you embed images and save off your resume as a clean looking pdf file.

In the middle of these two notices I received another email notifying me of the closing of Strands Fitness on December 30th.  this site created and maintained training logs.  With the creation of such items as Fitbit I can see where they had heavy competition.

I was also confused that you could still create an account with some of these services with the pending shutdowns.  Strands did support quite a few devices, but never caught on in the three years they existed.  They are allowing you to export your data with provided instructions.

The parent site of Strands.com does have other products and sites that are fee based only so they might just be readjusting their focus to viable networks and services they have built.

This begins to ask the question if these smaller social networks can maintain themselves without being bought by the larger.  With limited numbers of users and the larger sites building more features to match close enough, I can see the pull of the users away.

Plus you go where you friends are.  Apparently they are not on many of these smaller networks.

Here is what you missed the last two episodes by not subscribing to the podcast.

Episode 41 – On the Path

• Why did Facebook buy Gowalla?
• What we think of Path and the update to 2.0
• Whim launches in beta
• I ask the question “Are we too early as early adopters?” and get surprising answers

Episode 40  - Cover Your Face

• New facial recognition apps, privacy and usability
• Personal.com launches and wants you to share more personal information than ever before
• Google Plus discussions
• Pepperspray memes and viral videos

Use TheSocialGeeks as your personal filter for the top social news and opinions.  Why not look smarter tomorrow by listening anytime you get a chance.

You can stream live, subscribe on iTunes and even find us on numerous other devices.

Click through for the full HD version via the Spiked Studio page on YouTube!

There will be a part 2 for this explaining how to then hook your website of blog with the new Google Plus page.

I found a few UI issues along the way, but nothing to call a show stopper. Plus this is still a beta product with room to grow and take over what was a space for Gist before they were bought by Research In Motion (BlackBerry).  The service includes seeing:

• inline updates
• it’s own menu on the left navigation
• reminders
• a global address book feature
• new contact alerts

I am eager to see how they evolve and add new social services into the product.  Their feature request list in the FAQ listed Skype and even Google Voice on the wishlist.  So give them a shot and see what you think.  Did I mention it is free?

Related posts

• Gist for BlackBerry review
• Rim buys Gist and deletes all my data?
• Rim buys Gist – thoughts

I downloaded the 1.6.12 version client while at BlackBerry DevCon.  After the 2.5 MB package installed, and I approved the trusted status I went to work with the features.

The first step was logging into an existing Gist account or creating a new one.  I recently posted how Gist had removed basically a year of work and data in building my dashboard.  So while I had a login I had no data behind it.

As you can see, I hooked Twitter in right away and hesitated with the others until I saw what it did with synchronizing the contact data.  My point being that I did not want all my contacts being merged into my BlackBerry from all of the above networks.

You are also able to share, send feedback and look at the license agreement lower in Image 1 above.

From there I explored a bit and I am choosing Caleb Elston of Yobongo as my test victim.  It pulled his bio from Twitter (so this screenshot shows nothing outside what is public there anyway) and if I continued to hook to things like Google Apps or even Facebook, it would draw even more information.

The number you see is the order of importance you assign to users for updates and placement in the dashboard.  That takes a lot of tweaking over time when you have hundreds to thousands of contacts and companies in the dashboard on the web.

I did find out that no contacts were brought into my BlackBerry address book and any advanced things I wanted to know about them I had to do inside the Gist application itself.  As you can see, there is another tab to show the contact feed from all the places you hook together about them.  This includes Twitter, blogs, Facebook, corporate news and more.

There was not much else possible in the menus except to be able to email every one of the contacts in your Gist address book.  A scary thought that you may want to send an email that size, and it was unclear what email account sent them as I was scared to even click that option not knowing if there was another prompt behind it.

One other option in the menu is to read your calendar for upcoming meetings and then gather data about the other attendees that it matches to your Gist listing.  I only had one that matched and I got the same information from the images above.  It could be a good way to gather information before your meeting, but you need those people to be synchronized with Gist to get the full effect. It even states in a help screen that the more connected you are to a person across the social networks the richer the profile available.

From there I have closed the application and not really opened it again on the BlackBerry. I did the reverse test where I had a contact locally in my address book and I used the menu item to ‘Get the Gist” on that person.

You can share news and things from inside the application about those.  I am unsure how security works if that person allows you to be their friend on Facebook or follow them on Twitter, does it obey the security and sharing functions of those services? These are a few more things I need to test later.

The app itself had below a 3 star rating in AppWorld which is curious since it did so well before and is actually owned by RIM now, I would think the integration and development behind it would make this a 5 star app.

I am beginning to feel much of this is not true no matter how transparent you make yourself.  It was summarized well by Jason Falls at a recent speaking event and then the dinner after when a lot of this sunk in.

Much of social business is not so much about what the business does on the back end, but how much the consumers know, like and trust you.

Know

Outside of you personally being knowledgeable about a business, word of mouth is still the strongest form of recommendation engine that exists.  Starting with friends and family and moving into the concierge at the hotel, they tell you based on knowledge and experience where to go.  You then know of it.

Sure, the business can have banners, Twitter accounts, Facebook fan pages or other forms of social media.  But until you experience it or someone close does, you do not know it.  Certainly there are tons of places you pass daily or have read about, that you wouldn’t claim knowledge.

You might refer the fact that “my sister went there for dinner” which moves into knowledge.  Otherwise you say I pass that place all the time, but I know nothing about it.

Like

After knowing a place well enough to try it, you make an instant assessment of countless areas of your experience.  Any portion is scrutinized and you form some mental scoring that balances into like or dislike.  This result gets transposed back into knowledge and passed on to others building the cycle ad influence.

The like portion of this formula is crucial to the trust and recommendations.  If it fails, there is no trust and bad recommendations are passed along as dislike.  A pleasant experience that is had one to numerous times moves you along to the final portion.

Trust

Once you know a business, person, site or whatever and like them, the comfort level rises and minor issues are ignored.  You begin to trust that you will have a pleasant experience more often that not (or never) and will gladly pass this along as like and know.  As well as revisit again and again yourself.

Everyone has a small circle of trusted places to eat for lunch.  It might be the speedy service, friendly staff, low cost or total combination that is always met bringing you back again and again.  You then drag along other saying you know and like this place.  They then gain the same knowledge and liking building their trust.

Summary

So what we are starting to hear is that businesses should invest heavily in software, analytics to gauge sentiment and dedicating resources to start being more social.  What you find is that no matter how much money you throw at becoming transparent, nimble and whatever else, it doesn’t matter if the consumer doesn’t know, like and trust you first.  Otherwise the message from being a social business is never received.

• Aug 24, 2009 I get invited to a new service and screencast it.  One of the highest viewed screencasts I have.
• Oct 14, 2009 I write about possible competitors in my blog archives
• Somewhere in 2010 I think I activate the Gist plug-in for Google Apps and mail.  Yes Rapportive comes along and beta it in function and look, but I leave both in place.
• Dec 2010 I write about RIM moving to buy Gist
• Mar 23, 2011 I screencast and compare Plaxo to Gist and say that Plaxo didn’t beat them in contact management.
• May 30 2011 I mention on my blog that Gist is ceasing support in Google Apps after the RIM purchase
• Somewhere in June I got an email saying I hadn’t logged on to Gist.  Well I was using the Google plug-in and didn’t need to hit the dashboard.  That email didn’t make it to the Priority Inbox for TheSocialNetworker.
• I log in today to merge another contact list and the account is gone.

So what does this mean?  RIM is purging old users from the system in preparation of something new inside the BlackBerry devices? Gist is scaling back after the purchase and is cleansing some data?  Somewhere along the way they had a Terms of Service you must log into your cloud data every couple months via the site to keep it active?

I do not know the answer to any of these but I am debating importing data into the service again at this point.

All IBMers had access to this micro-blogging status and unlike Twitter, he/she was able to post the customers name. IBM guidelines prevent employes from specifically sharing customer names unless authorized. Had it not been for he/she stating she was working with “Endicott College”, the thread would not have generated local responses and the details that followed.

Now I took great interest as any business would love to have open range chats and discuss confidential possible customer data.  The article went on to give a fictitious scenario in how the flow would work, allowing the employee to get feedback ad possible insights into the new lead.  What caught my eye is a few things I pieced together from numerous posts.  IBM does have a new initiative around social business.  Even going so far as to grade performance on use of the tools, followers and sharing (unconfirmed but heard from numerous places inside).  Further up in this social lead passing article a mention was made how the IBMer connects to the possible lead.

After a couple conversation, connecting on LinkedIN, and additional information is provided, the customer wants to see how the product works and talk with other customers.

Some may have just caught where I was going with this posting.  I went to LinkedIn, searched for employees at IBM that are in inside sales, telecenter and more and soon found I could watch as they connected to companies after becoming connected myself.

So the idea about social lead sharing takes an interesting twist in security when you blend external data sites along with internal communication channels.  I know many reps that never even check in using Foursquare or other services for fear that competitors are watching where they go.  LinkedIn provides even more information as it shows exactly who they are talking to at the companies themselves.

Watch how you blend customer data and social privacy management.  Couple this with rating employees on social interaction and some things are bound to slip through.