Are you ready for the place graph? ~By JD Lasica

For years, entrepreneurs, tech observers and funders have known two things about the geolocation space: It holds an enormous amount of promise, and it’s taking an awfully long time to get there.
Geolocation startups are hot in Silicon Valley right now, from Zkatter, a San Francisco-based startup from British young gun Matt Hagger that wants you to capture and share moments in real time through mobile video, to Findery, the venture-backed San Francisco startup from Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake that wants you to leave notes, media and digital objects for others at specific locations.
What’s my connection with geoloco? For the past half year I’ve been working on a geolocation startup called Placely (register for the beta here). We’re still early in development, so I’ll talk more about our plans for Placely in a future post. But today I think it’s worth doing a quick survey of how far we’ve come (not very) and how far we still have to go as geolocation gets ready for its closeup.

Platial: Giving us an early understanding of what a ‘place’ means

In 2005, the same year I co-founded Ourmedia, the world’s first free video hosting and sharing service (a month before a little startup called YouTube came along), up in Portland another venture was just getting underway. Platial (tagline: “your collaborative atlas”) described itself on its pre-launch website as “a rapidly developing application and community pivoting on the anchors of user annotation, layerability, collaborative mapping, social networking and real world publishing.” Heady times for those of us out to remake the world!
I first heard of Platial when I gave a guest lecture at UC Berkeley six years ago this week (and wrote about it on this blog). Instructor Bill Gannon, former editorial director of Yahoo! News, flashed Platial on the screen as an example of mapping and Web 2.0 collaboration tools. Just after Hurricane Katrina, people had spontaneously begun using Platial to create maps and visualizations of damaged neighborhoods, complete with embedded media.

Di-Ann Eisnor at We Media 2007.

The very next week, I met Platial CEO Di-Ann Eisnor at the We Media conference in Miami, which I attended after my work editing the seminal We Media report by Shane Bowman and Chris Willis. When Platial closed down in 2005, Di-Ann moved on to a key role at Waze, the real-time traffic app that went out and invented Esther Dyson’s vision of “the ultimate killer app.” Waze’s combination of geolocation, passive collective actions and game elements has made it one of the premier examples of geoloco done right. Last year Di-Ann and I sat down and discussed writing a book about geoloco, but I could never pull her away from Waze to devote enough time to the project.
My involvement with the legacy of Platial came full circle last week when I sat down at La Boheme, a cafe in San Francisco’s Mission District, with Jason Wilson, who co-founded Platial with Di-Ann and CTO Jake Olsen. The word “platial,” in case you were wondering, was a mashup of places and spatial. I expected Jason to describe it as as a social mapping site, but he called it “the first social network around places.”

It started out, he said, as a kind of art project. But when they saw lots of early traction, Meetup.com co-founder and CEO Scott Heiferman convinced Jason to pursue it as a business, and Platial landed funding from Kleiner Perkins, the Omidyar Network, Ron Conway, Tim O’Reilly (of Where 2.0 fame) and adviser Clay Shirky, among others.

“What is a place? It could be as small as a corner of a table or as large as a skyscraper or neighborhood.”
— Jason Wilson

To this day, most geoloco startups are focused entirely on commercial businesses — restaurants, hotels — but Jason looks at geolocation in more profound terms. “We began thinking about, What is a place? It could be as small as a corner of a table or as large as a skyscraper or neighborhood.” A wall mural on the side of a building in the Mission could hold as much meaning to someone as an art gallery.
In the end, the mobile ad services needed to sustain a business like Platial turned out to be very slow in the making. (Muses Jason: “Why isn’t Yelp or Foursquare an ad network today? They have all those relationships with local businesses.”) Platial donated its location data to GeoCommons and closed up shop in 2010, with more than 5 million embedded maps being serviced by the site. Jason (@fekaylius on Twitter — born in 2006, by the way) is now working as founder and Experience Designer at OuterBody Labs.
Platial may have been ahead of the market, but it was on to something.
Facebook pioneered the social graph and the not-so-open graph. There’s buzz about the interest graph. And today a new graph is emerging: the place graph. What interesting things will unfold when we layer the social graph on top of the place graph, or the interest graph on top of the place graph?
Imagine meeting new people and making new friends based on similar interests that you discover because they were in the same place as you at a different time, or they shared the same experience as you in the same place at the same time. Imagine a new set of social interactions whose rules have yet to be written around forging new relationships, tracking your digital footprints, defining our own identities based on places we’ve been or aspire to visit.
“That potential is still untapped,” Jason said simply. Yes, a lot of startups are attacking the geolocation space, but no one has cracked that particular nut.
Six years ago this week, Facebook and Yelp were just getting underway, Foursquare and Instagram hadn’t come along yet and the practice of geotagging images through smartphones was just being invented. A revolution lay in wait. Platial used mapping tools as its chief metaphor in helping people ascribe meaning to the places around them. Foursquare would use check-ins. Instagram, feeds of photos. Today dozens of other startups have jumped into the fray. We’re driving the vehicles even while the roadways are still being paved a half mile ahead.
I’ll be chronicling the geolocation scene — I hope with your help — in the weeks and months ahead. It’s still early days, but we owe a hat tip to Platial for helping to chart the way forward.
What do you think holds the greatest promise for geolocation services

Read More:

11 digital marketing resolution ideas for ’13~By Chris Abraham

I am in the midst of setting up my New Year’s resolutions for 2013. I know not everyone does the resolution thing, but almost half of all Americans do. If you’re one of them and you can’t come up with some digital markeing resolutions for 2013, I have some suggested resolutions for you. Take what you want and leave the rest.
Start a Blog — I know what you’re thinking: blogging’s dead. However, if you’ll notice, most of what folks are sharing online via Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Tumblr, and Google+ are articles via links. The only real way of creating and providing content that can easily be shared everywhere is via a blog or some other kind of bloggish platform. With a blog-based platform, be it your personal or professional site, sharing your content from a web application you own and control is a no-brainer. A blog offers built-in RSS and the ability to easily hook right in to Google Webmaster tools via a dynamically-created sitemap. You can add plugins that automagically optimize your site for search as well reduce the friction associated with sharing by dropping share buttons into your content from Pinterest, Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and even Google’s +1. And as each of your favorite “forever for now” social networking service fades and dies, you won’t lose any of your best content but will be able to maintain your own database of everything you have ever written.
Listen More Online — in our mad rush to create content every day, every day, and with all of our impending blog post due-dates rushing in, it’s hard to spend some time reading the tweets of your followers, the posts of your Facebook friends, the blogs of people in your space, and their latest videos and memes or YouTube, Slideshare, Pinterest, and Flickr. But you need to spend some of that time. I was overwhelmed until I adopted Flipboard (see below). It’s worth it, and I will tell you why below.
Become Way More Visual — The biggest changes over the last year, 2012, were in how people consume new content and new posts online. More and more platforms search for an illustrative photo or graphic. Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon have always done this; however, now it’s even in the way we view our content on Facebook, Google+, Pinterest, and especially Flipboard (see below). So, you need to make sure every post, every article, and every column you publish always has a “cover shot” because in the content war, the spoils too often go to the book with the prettiest cover.
Start a Meme — while you cannot honestly make a viral video — we all know that — you can start thinking in memes. Not every meme will become a Meme to say nothing of reaching MEME status; however, there are several things you can do to pre-package a bit of visual, informational, or video in such a way that you’ll maximize its change of going viral and becoming a proper meme: 1) keep it short 2) choose one thing, one message 3) use both image and text 4) make sure each meme is 100% self-referential and self-contained: to misquote Jacques Derrida, “il n’y a pas de hors-MEME” — there’s nothing beyond the meme. By their very nature, memes want to mutate and as in poetry, you cannot control how your reader interprets your poem — so you had better make it as explicit and clear as possible. Make sure it includes source(s), creator(s), and its home URL. Make sure you don’t put all that stuff in a description because memes always leave the original platform behind. If you don’t make completely certain you have done everything you possibly can to not leave anything to chance then your meme will surely mutate most grotesquely a la The Island of Doctor Moreau. Even if your meme is completely self-referential, the more successful your meme is, the more it will want to mutate — however, if the Internet has decided your meme is popular enough to copy, corrupt, or mock, then you’ve batted-a-thousand.
Explore Flipboard — If you think the idea of reading all the banal and self-indulgent chaff your sundry followers, friends, and fans churn into the world, day and night, then you need to try out Flipboard. Flipboard is the best-in-breed social newsreader. It allows you to plug in your credentials for all of your social platforms, including Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Instagram, and Google Reader, and then it allows you to browse through other content based on category and subject — and, when you’re sorted out, it lets you browse, read, and share! all of that content seamlessly using a very beautiful, visual, and easy-to-navigate interface from your iPhone, iPad, Android phone or tablet. I have basically replaced all the content sources on my phone with Flipboard as al the best of them are being fed through the News portion of Flipboard already — if they know what’s good for them.
Engage a Blog — I was going to write Read a Blog but reading is only one part — commenting, counter-blogging, reblogging, and befriending the bloggers is maybe even more important than keeping tabs and reading. Bloggers and most journalists are no longer untouchable; rather, we’re very accessible and quite amazingly stoked by any and all attention that we receive based on our writing and insights. The best way to become a colleague, acquaintance, and then friend of the people who are writing, blogging, and influencing in your space is to engage with them — with us — online in the comments, via email, or on the social networks we haunt. Internalize it — every single one of the folks listed in the AdAge Power 150 are completely accessible to you right now — go git ‘em!
Listen to a Podcast — the best thing about Flipboard is that you can listen to podcasts and watch videos through it too, though I don’t. I am not that good at listening to “real” podcasts but I surely do get all my content from the CBC and NPR via podcast. However, though I am being quite a hypocrite here, but I do know that there are loads of podcasters out there who act as industry aggregators, reporters, and curators. The best example is For Immediate Release: The Hobson and Holtz Report. Listening to relevant podcasts is a good way of passively keeping in-the-loop, especially if you’re not ravenously curious as to what’s going on every day online in your space. Listening to podcasts is similar to reading blogs: consider them your very own industry journals. The most modern of interpretations of the professional journal.
Finally Figure out Pinterest — it’s not rocket science and I am certain that I don’t use it well enough. I often forget even to share stuff to Pinterest. All I know is that whenever I share something from any one of my blogs via a nice image to my Pinterest, along with a cross-post to Twitter, a compelling image, and a link back to the blogs (happens by default) I get the most traffic back to my post out of any of my platforms. I don’t know why that is but there’s something amazing going on there. Again, I am a hypocrite here as well. I don’t spend much time at all on there except to always share everything I can there. Please make sure that your sites and blogs always include a Pinterest share button in addition to your typical +1s, Like, and Retweets. And I think I will take my own advice and spend more time both listening to industry-focused podcasts, blogs, and surely get to know Pinterest a lot better.
Give FourSquare Another Try — It seems like folks are trying to call time of death on FourSquare but I believe they’re premature. Unlike Blackberry’s RIM, the reports of FourSquare’s death is greatly exaggerated. Although it has taken a while, I am seeing more incentives for checking in to FourSquare outside of just bragvertising your amazing life. My local Mexican restaurant offers 50% off my food bill every time I check in — every time (excepting happy hour and adult beverages). Over the last three years, since its inception, restaurants and stores have not rewarded everyone who checks in well enough to be enough of an incentive to encourage doing it every time; and, the badges have gotten stale and are harder to get. Restaurants and stores haven’t really even offered their Mayors very nice rewards — it was pretty pathetic. The only reason I still check in to FourSquare is because FS does a darn good job of linking up with other applications such as GetGlue and Instagram — so I tend to only use FourSquare via GetGlue and Instagram these days — until I realized that I am missing out, especially when it comes to checking in to restaurants and other venues where there may very well be worthwhile perks — such as the 50% discount I get at Taqueria el Poblano on Columbia Pike.
Check-in to Movies and TV — I must admit that I watch too much TV and love movies. And I must further admit that there’s a lot going on in the world of the second screen where the first screen is the TV and the second screen is the PC, tablet, or smart phone. I have been using GetGlue for movies and Yahoo’s IntoNow for TV whenever I am watching. IntoNow’s pretty interesting because it allows you to do two interesting things: 1) is allows you to let your device to listen to and identify a show and the episode — sort of like Shazam does with music and 2) it allows you to create visual memes through application-aided and time-stamped screen captures directly from television that you’re encouraged to share on your social media stream. It’s all very interesting and very compelling and also a very good way to create content to your social media stream even when you’re kicking back and relaxing. Give it a whirl, it’s surely worth a couple evenings of prime time.
Figure Out Why Instagram is So Hot — There are three reasons I use Instagram, in order of importance: 1) Instagram is a gorgeous photographic community all on its own, even better than Flickr ever was 2) Instagram shares directly and seamlessly with other platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr and 3) Instagram has the second best filters beneath Hipstamatic’s — and while Hipstamatic may well have better filters, the resulting images are small and it doesn’t have Instagram’s gorgeous community — and there’s the rub: technology is one thing but community is another and in 2013, technology is not nearly enough.
I surely hope that’s a good list for you to start with — like I said, take what you like and leave the rest. This is all just off the top of my head. Please let me know what you think and what I missed. And, please do engage me as I am very keen to help you in any way I can to embrace social media in 2013! Good luck and Godspeed!
Oh, and In case you’re curious, my personal resolutions include 1) spend time on my Concept II rowing ergometer every day and log every row 2) focus on my nutrition by improving the quality and reducing the quantity and log it all on LoseIt 3) use my Mizuno running shoes for what they were made for, running, and log it all on RunKeeper. Yes, my new years resolutions are all health and fitness-based. While banal, I need to drop another 50-pounds and it all has to do with cardio and nutrition as I have been awesome when it comes to strength-training. Wish me luck! Happy New Year!

READ MORE: