Yobongo **
Chat with people nearby is actually their slogan from this San Francisco based company.  Caleb Elston and David Kasper, both formerly of Justin.TV, took a big leap in leaving their day jobs to get this off the ground, and from everything in the press so far they have a huge winner.  Currently only available on iOS, even celebrities are popping up on the service.

Yobongo works by firing up virtual chat rooms based on heuristics, not just GPS.  They take into account the actual person involved, known connections and some other algorithms.  Working the application itself is simplicity.  By just opening the application you are put into a room to start typing away.  You can always move a conversation to private, or join in the public fun once inside.

Another key feature is the founders’ statement about verifying accounts, similar to what Facebook does now, to partrol at the best of their ability for real photos and names.  The idea is not be anonymous chat services, but provide a service grouping people together on topics/interests coupled with location.

SXSW and other events will benefit if rooms can be driven around topics or even sessions.  If we both have the same session interest, then I would want to see who you are.  Having an existing connections to someone already (picture via the Facebook authentication that is offered), that is seen to help in your room grouping. This would be a great addition to events like the Oscars for stars and backstage access people to have direct contact and then be able to walk away when they need.

I certainly understand the positive press results Yobongo has seen so far after playing with it for a short time.

HeyTell

Humorously, when I went to review this app on Android first, it was the very first featured application in the Android Marketplace.  A good sign for them that it is getting downloads and attention right now.

HeyTell, from Voxilate,  comes from a husband and wife team that are taking the old days of walkie talkie’s to the mobile front.  They already have over 3 million registered users (I read that as app downloads too).  The application is available for free on iOS and Android devices.  The monetization comes from add-on purchases and advertising.

The premise is that you broadcast a voice message via the app.  It then is available to anyone in a range based on their privacy settings HeyTell has established.  You can receive from anyone, friends of friends and lastly just friends.

Setting up the profile was simple.  Select yourself from your address book, or enter your display name.  Phone number and email address are optional.  The rest of the controls are on notification and privacy.

Once that is established, you enter the main screen which lets you immediately send to a person in your address book, blast one out loud or listen.  If you click the map icon, a pop-up notifies you that “whenever the map is displayed, the person you are talking to can see your position whenever you send a message.  If you do not want to disclose your position, avoid sending when the map is displayed“.  Clicking the map icon again made it slide off the screen.

I can see this being very popular at conferences (SXSW comes to mind), sporting events and even concerts.  Reaching out with your own voice allows a more personal approach to the application.  Unless you use a voice modifier that seems to be an option via purchase at some point.  This was simple to install on Android.  Easier to set the profile and start using it.

The question is would this become overwhelming at an event like SXSW and what is the range at which it will pick up?  How does it decide when you have enough random people blasting? I am not talking privacy controls, but the options when I am in public mode at an event.

**Disclosure: One of the founders, Caleb Elston, participates constantly in TheSocialGeeks podcast I produce but in no way would I not take the opportunity to still talk about this app like I had never heard of it.

Brightkite was a leader in the check-in space.  Competition came along just as any industry evolves.  Soon the media was measuring, weighing and comparing capabilities.  Brightkite consistently won early charts.  But something shifted.  Mass media help drive consumers one specific direction, shutting out specific players.  The press started reporting on mainly one or two location services only.

Brightkite suffered a final blow when two founders left for another startup launch.  Leadership lost in this market can be the demise if they were some of the brains behind it.  I am not saying the team there is not talented.  It would be much like Zuckerberg leaving Facebook or Dennis leaving Foursquare.

So what do you do when the space for free location services gets too crowded?  You emerge again with a new business plan and untapped market.  I am not saying that group texting is something needed in the market.  Most phones allow this ability natively.  (Yes you must specify everyone each time, but it is there).  Even Blackberry with the new Messenger version has groups that allows chat, pictures, calendars and more.

Does the relationship that Foursquare and Gowalla share with businesses impact the promotion?  Definitely!  It was something that Brightkite never went after.  Some inherent form of business relationship to drive a larger userbase while still having media appeal.  Brightkite was first, in my eyes, with pictures, walls to track check-ins by location (not jsut person) and more features.  They still have the underlying technology that many of these other players should be interested in.

I bid a fond farewell to the check-in service portion of Brightkite and wish them the best in the group texting market.

Connect with me on Foursquare or Gowalla for now.  I hope to soon add Tri-Out to that list..

Note: You can go back and see how often I write about location services, I believe they have a place in marketing, consumers and social media.  I hope they continue to evolve and compete.

UnSocial, available on iPhone and Android take the alternate approach in trying to connect you with who you should know in your current proximity.  The very alternate approach to other social networks connecting you to who you already know.

The application authenticated you via your LinkedIn account.  It then draws information from there to populate their profile for you.  Tags are especially important according to the website.  it helps find others around those tags in the geographic area.

More device support, including Blackberry (heavy business users) and Windows Mobile are under development.  It seems they built this fast if you peek at their About page, showing development to launch was seven months.

I asked myself, where I see this company monetizing.  Ad support based on your location and business was the first thing to cross my mind.  UnSocial has an alternate idea in the works.

Unsocial is a powerful event application that not only allows attendees to connect with the people they need, and the people who need them, but also offers crucial information such as Agendas, Speaker Bios, Event layouts & Maps, Event Surveys and Raffles.

If your looking for additional revenue for your event at no costs, contact the unsocial event sponsorship team for sponsorship advertising space in your app.

There are not many conference applications focused on meeting new people.  Most are based on finding those you know and information about the event itself.

I am looking forward to testing this out when they expand locations and cities.

Courtesy: Telegraph

What does this mean for your privacy?  Your habits, places of preference and more leave your immediate control.  Sure, you can remove the tag of you in that location, but aggregators and Facebook themselves have already seen it.  Advertising dollars are built around it.  Even the ACLU in California has stepped in to write an article on the topic:

Places allows your friends to tag you when they check in somewhere, and Facebook makes it very easy to say “yes” to allowing your friends to check in for you. But when it comes to opting out of that feature, you  are only given a “not now” option (aka ask me again later). “No” isn’t one of the easy options.

One of the other factors invading on your privacy is the controls around “Here Now”.  Many of the added applications you have nejoyed have been authorized full access to you profile data.  So as soon as someone tags you in a Place, or you do it yourself, that information may be passed along to the other applications.  You will need to review the apps to see what data access they have as well.

So what do you do?

• Use the service carefully
• Set the privacy controls before anyone starts tagging you in Places
• Limit who can see your Places
• Tag yourself only in public arenas and maybe when you are leaving in most instances (not arrival unless it is a meeting)
• Read the tutorial written by DotRights.org on this topic of the steps you need to take

Location services are a constant topic I write about and Facebook exploding the ability to 500 million users without granular privacy controls could change the landscape.

Also, catch up on the recent podcasts from TheSocialGeeks where you get to hear a roundtable of the top social media minds go after these topics.

The idea is simple.  Pull together your social army (oh so close to Mafia Wars).  There is:

• levels
• experience points
• attack points
• battles
• wins
• losses
• weapons
• and more …

To start a war, either use one of your mayorship locations, or just pick something.

# How do I attack an opponent?
# You can select a target from nearby venues or friends’ venues. After you select a target, you choose a weapon from your arsenal and tap “Attack” button to attack. Your attack may hit or miss, depending on the accuracy of the weapon and the distance to the target. For every attack, there is always a counter-attack from your opponent. The counter attack may hit or miss as well.

From there you just battle.  Now you do not get mayor rights to their location, but I think this is more virtual turf wars.  To gain supporters they must click a link in Twitter.  So the more followers that click your links the better.  this becomes more of who will click over how many followers.

So if you just cannot spend enough time checking in and need to protect your fiefdom, this might be the game for you.

I saw the Passport as a page with my information, connections and bio.  All additional pages would be a city and what you did, or maybe even each page was a history I could flip through.  I eagerly clicked the link.

Instead, I was presented with the simple ability to change the background, color scheme and possible upload my own custom image.  This immediately struck me as odd.  You cannot see the background due to the layout of the Gowalla pages.  It is basically useless on any person.  I browsed multiple friends profile pages and could never see more than a small percentage of pixels from the background.

So will Gowalla give the flexibility to change the page layout, flow and displayed information at some point?  Odds are it will never matter since the whole purpose of the application is the mobile portion.  Not the web.

Foursquare is trying the game approach coupled with specials from advertisers that show based on your location.  The ads are tiny, in the upper right as green icons, but it is monetization.  Gaming the system to be mayor is harder than before.  As I stay mayor or a location, do I really gain anything?  Has anyone made business connections?  Has anyone gained followers you can reach by being mayor? Does the number of tokens I receive get me business?

Google Latitude just shows where you are.  Plain and simple. It works across Google Maps on all the platforms and makes no promise to do anything more for you.  I appreciate the simplicity, but know Google has much more planned around Google Ads based on my location soon enough.

Brightkite, one of my longtime favorites, offers a linking of pictures, posts and comments around a place.  But, they seemingly have gotten lost in all the Foursquare buzz recently.  The service is running strong, but I wait for the monetization to kick in as well.

It goes on from there. The point I am getting at (lengthy as I sit down at World Cup with time to think) is how all of these benefit me.  What have I gained by sharing my location?  Is the effort put into broadcasting my location measurable with any return?  or does it drive revenue for the location service itself to sell ads based on the number of subscribers geographically?

So I am asking the location services, new and old.  Show me yours (plan to assist me) and I will continue to show you mine.

There is no quality control in making, duplicating and creating locations.  This is derived from individuals not wasting the time to correctly search and match a location, to network failures that don’t show results with prompts to create even more.  Seriously, do you really, really think no one has even been to that airport and checked in?  No one?

Then we move into the micro-location placements.  I read an article where Denny, of Foursquare, was paraphrased in saying that it is part of the fun when referring to creating these new micro-locations.

A micro-location (by my new definition) is small places within large check in points.  For example gates at an airport.  I can buy in the to the idea of doing that after you check into the airport itself due to the airport size and letting people know exactly where you sit.  However, which of the 5 airport listings did you get back in your result and how many variations of the gate are there now?  Shouldn’t “gate A7 at Stl” be matched and forced somehow into a single listing of “STL – gate A7″ and the other “A7 gate at Lambert” and maybe “Lambert gate A7″.  Oh the list goes on.  So much more.

A location service basing monetization needs controls of the data itself before moving ahead.  How can you guarantee people are using the one where you offer the free drinks or discounts?  What if two exist?  Who won?  How do I advertise?  How do I track results?

This adds to the overall complexity in the sheer number of location services fighting to be on top.  Or to get purchased and sucked into some major network.  I still use the service, for no other reason that people look there to find people.  However, I am losing value in the visits myself as the user base grows.  Even being a Level 1 Super User has me spending far too much time cleaning up others mistakes to simplify my later check-in experience.

1. location service wars
2. privacy statements

Yes, they are both important items, but I feel that the press is forcing me to believe that location services are the big news.  ReadWriteWeb(with over 30 articles on location at SxSW) tried to break the news on CheckIn, (from the makers of Brightkite) to no avail.  Humorously I wrote about this very idea Saturday before seeing the article they wrote.

What I have gathered from all of the news is the sheer madness in the number of checkins, the number of friend requests and the limited consumer side usability of the data. Sites like Vicarious.ly perform a Google mashup of checkins overlayed on the map in Austin.  In about 10 minutes you can’t see the city blocks through all the checkin icons popping up.  Great, people are tweeting like mad and checking in wherever they walk.  What does it do for me?  Will the forthcoming firehouse approach to all this location data give me anything more than a headache?

Should we fall into the trap of helping predict a winner from all of the great, and varied, location services out there?  Do we trust badges? Events? More locations? Games? Better descriptors? More friends that are also users?  I don’t quite know where to begin on any of these options.

With the hundreds of panels down there, where the heck is the rest of the news?

I have no groupings, easy search or other feature for locating just the user I want.  Not everyone broadcasts or has a widget.  Not everyone uses the same service so interoperability is non-existent.

So how do I best query where you might be?  What if you check in when you leave somewhere for privacy?  I am now at a loss to whittle through what are considered close friends, social friends and just followers.  As well as what service any one person might be on.  Could this be the birth of a winner or the death of many of the services?

How well does it really work for conferences like SXSW or Lotusphere back in January?  Everyone is very fluid during the day, moving at a constant pace.  By the time you check in and I check for you, you have moved and checked in again.  Latitude gets the closest in providing accurate and real-time updating as compared to the others.

Where is the value in this form of activity?  Is it in my ability to trace my own movements?  How long should I plan on being at a location before I get the urge to check in?  is there a rule on being in place?  Is there a rule on time before moving?

How do we bridge the location services into something more than an advertising platform for restaurants, bars and vendors to a service we need as people?  Is utilizing the service about a discount or socializing and locating?