The Future of Geolocation: What is Coming?

Since location-based check-in app Foursquare was launched at South by Southwest in 2009, the app has seen exponential growth, reaching over 7.5 million users this year.

Other apps have been popping up as well, as geolocation takes center stage in the mobile arena and users flock to apps that create games from typical situations and offer rewards for users.

Two years later, check-ins are old news and the still-young area of geolocation is evolving to keep users interested. Apart from gamification through leaderboards and badges (or stickers, or pins), the motivation for users to participate in location-based networks is severely lacking.

Foursquare rewards users with badges for checking in.

Obviously the gaming aspect is a huge draw, as evidenced by the millions of users checking in across the globe, but developers continue to chase after our elusive social graph to make geolocation as indispensable as microblogging and photo sharing.

If there are any golden rules when it comes to geolocation, I would say they are 1)make it easy and 2) create value. Users want to put in less effort and receive more value. It’s up to both developers and businesses to do what they can to ensure these services have as few boundaries and as much value as possible.

In this article I’ve highlighted some of the ways developers are pushing toward these goals and what we can expect from the future of geolocation.

Recommendations

Possibly one of the most obvious and expected developments is the integration of recommended places to check in to. Foursquare’s most recent version includes a section called Explore, designed to recommend places around you based on your friends’ favorite places and your own check-in history.

Tell us what you're looking for and we'll help you find something nearby.

Scoville integrates with your Foursquare check-ins and collects your favorite places on a weekly basis. As more users sign up, these recommendations will create a ranking of places in each city, allowing Scoville to recommend check-ins based on popularity.

Scoville brings location and bookmarking together to help you keep track of favorite places.

Bizzy is trying a different angle, collecting place ratings and reviews as users leave a venue, through the check-out feature.

Bizzy recommends local businesses based on user ratings.

Some newer apps are focusing more on adding valuable content to recommendations, such as special offers or information. Lowffer recommends nearby deals and special offers based on user recommendations and your location, acting somewhat like a mobile Groupon app. Like Foursquare, a game-like leaderboard is emphasized to motivate user participation.

Deals and special offers with a local twist from Lowffer.

Groupon founder Andrew Mason has his own ideas about taking the popular deals site mobile, with the upcoming release of Groupon Now. Using Groupon’s successful deals focus, the new mobile app offers users two options: I’m hungry or I’m bored. Each option, combined with the user’s current location, returns special offers nearby.

The age-old human conundrum—where to eat lunch.

Like any other location-based app, the take-off will be slow until enough users get involved to make it worthwhile, but with Groupon’s proven success in the daily deals space, this could be the end of that all-too-common question, “What will I have for lunch today?”

Spot, another soon-to-launch app, is hoping to fill a gap some other apps have opened up by offering an easy way to collect location recommendations from friends and save them for later. Alan Danzis’ Wish List for Foursquare 4 suggests similar features that could be added to Foursquare’s next version, allowing users to recommend deals to friends and save their favorites, and providing check-in reminders.

Social Connections

Connecting with those who are already part of your social graph is pretty much expected when using geolocation apps, but connecting with strangers is a whole new game. Unlike recommendations, this is a feature that’s seeing somewhat unexpected traction in location-based apps. Following the success of sites like Chatroulette (for web-based conversations) and social networks like Twitter, it may not come as a surprise that meeting new people is a popular activity online, but using geolocation takes this much closer to crossing the cool-or-creepy line.

Randomized video conversations create new connections on Chatroulette.

Yobongo is one such app that’s slowly rolling out across the U.S. The premise of Yobongo is to create connections with strangers nearby, using your location to show other users around you. By setting up a room of 10 to 15 users, the app aims to help you break the ice and create new friendships. Founder Caleb Elston told GigaOM that offering up your location data to the app (but not other users) is a worthwhile trade for the value you get back.

Yobongo offers a location-based way to meet new people.

Taking this idea a step further is the Situationist app, which aims to bring strangers together to participate in random situations. Although the app is based on a political agenda, it offers simple tasks to complete to bring users together in a more casual way as well. Using your location data, the app alerts you to users nearby who have predetermined which situations they are comfortable with; for instance, hug me for 5 seconds, or let me inspect the contents of your bag for bombs and such.

Situationist app helps you create spontaneous connections.

Location-Based Info

Moving away from discovery and meeting new people, Glympse is designed to enable sharing location data with people you know. Using SMS or email, you can send a Glympse to any of your contacts, showing them a map of where you are, and where you’re going. The map updates using real-time GPS data to show when you’ve reached your destination and how long you will be there.

Glympse offers an easy solution for privately sharing your location.

This idea is taken a step further with Geoloqi, a mobile and web platform that works in the same way, but adds functions like Geonotes, layers and automatic Foursquare check-ins.

Geoloqi adds new functionality to sharing location data.

Automatic Foursquare check-ins is an impressive feature that we will likely see more of this year in various geolocation apps. By choosing your favorite Foursquare venues, you can set Geoloqi to automatically check you in 10 minutes after arriving, taking the effort out of check-ins without removing the reward.

A lesser-known feature of some of the more popular check-in apps, Geonotes is front-and-center in Geoloqi as a way to use location data to make your life easier. Using Geonotes, you can leave notes for your friends, which will show up when they arrive at a specified location. You can create reminders for yourself as well; for instance, reminding yourself to get milk when you arrive at the supermarket.

Task Ave is an iPhone app focused exclusively on this idea, but with future versions of Geoloqi (which is free to download) integrating with popular to-do app, Remember the Milk, I would be surprised to see anyone paying $2.99 for Task Ave.

Location-based tasks from Task Ave make your to-do list more manageable.

Push notifications and SMS alerts are proving to be popular for other purposes, as well. Location-based question-and-answer apps like LOCQL and LocalMind connect users to share information by asking and answering questions based on their location. Push notifications are used to alert users who have agreed to answer questions about a place when someone has a question, promoting both a social connection and the sharing of information.

The mobile advertising company Chalkboard publishes ads from local businesses inside supported apps when the user is within 1 mile of the store. Although this is a similar idea to previously mentioned Groupon Now, the focus of Chalkboard is taking the user action out of the equation, providing ads to users automatically, based on their location.

Mobile advertising goes local with Chalkboard.

Automatic Check-Ins

Chalkboard is not the only app taking the manual action out of geolocation. Geoloqi, as mentioned before, offers automatic check-ins for your favorite Foursquare venues, and will most likely add support for other popular check-in apps in the future.

RFID (radio-frequency identification) and NFC (near field communication) technologies are going to become much more popular as geolocation apps continue to evolve and developers look for ways to make sending and receiving location-based data easier. Both of these technologies allow communication (such as sending a post or completing a check-in) with a specified tag by just swiping a device, such as an NFC-enabled phone.

Foursquare has already begun testing NFC check-ins and Coca-Cola used RFID at last year’s Coca-Cola Village teen camp to enable Facebook Likes and status updates to be sent with wristbands.

Teenagers were given a plastic bracelet adorned with what resembled a Coke bottle cap. The cap was embedded with a 125 kHz passive RFID tag.

What Else Can We Expect?

There are some exciting innovations emerging in geolocation already, but there’s surely much more value to be had from this technology. Some of the developments I’m most interested to see are:

• A collection of user-generated information about a place, like a location-based Wikipedia


• Mobile check-in for flights, bypassing the long check-in counter queues


• Mobile check-in at doctors’ offices, sending the secretary an automatic notification of your arrival


• Mobile identification, providing entry to adult-only venues like nightclubs (our phones are already replacing cash, so why not our photo IDs?)


• Digital, geotagged nightclub stamps to prove you’ve paid to get in


• Bookmarking for places with push notifications, so you’ll finally remember to check out that café your friend keeps recommending


• Interactive maps attached to promotional material (with QR codes?) so you can easily find the new pizza place that sent you coupons in the mail

Weigh In

What do you expect to see in the future of location-based services and what would you like to see? What tools or services would benefit your business most? Leave your comments in the box below.

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Ignore SEO, just produce good content

Ignore SEO, just produce good content "

Producing content just to satisfy SEO targets and pressures is dangerous because that’s when you get into the realms of publishing content for content’s sake and clearly, Google doesn’t like that given its recent Farmer Update.

More importantly, your website users don’t like that. While SEO clearly has its place, it shouldn't get in the way of producing great content... 

I was going to start this blog writing about why having quality content is so important and I’m still going to do that, I just hope I don’t eat my words in a few weeks time.

My opinion on content is and always will be this: if you’re in the content publishing business, always have content that you genuinely believe is interesting, that is useful, that is informative. It has to have a purpose, else why are you doing it?

Don't publish content for content’s sake

No-one can deny it’s easy to get pushed along by ideas that get chucked at you from within a business but sometimes you have to push back.I completely believe you shouldn’t be producing content for SEO; you should be producing it because it adds something to users of your website.

For example, say you’ve dropped in the rankings for one of your target keywords; the business’ automatic reaction is to want more content around that keyword. But, I’d fight against that, unless there is some relevance in producing content around said keyword. 

Producing content just to satisfy SEO targets and pressures is dangerous because that’s when you get into the realms of publishing content for content’s sake and clearly, Google doesn’t like that given its recent Farmer Update. More importantly, your website users don’t like that.

Google is obviously punishing content farms, so don’t be one. If you feel you’ve strayed into this way of publishing content then seriously think twice about what you’re doing and why.

Put yourself in your customer’s or reader’s shoes

For me it’s simple. What is it you want to see when you visit a website? And are you doing that?

For example, if you sell car insurance then have a 30 second video on how to cut the cost of car insurance. That’s useful isn’t it? Don’t send customers an email with content they can read in a thousand other websites, that’s just insulting. Give them something they can’t get elsewhere. Give them quality.

Whatever you do when deciding what content to generate, don’t just do it for SEO. Don’t write an article and stuff it full of keywords because you have keyword targets to hit or have committed to producing x amount of articles about your products.

Some SEO agencies believe this is the way forward, I don’t. I believe this forces you to produce content that’s not necessarily relevant or interesting. Dreaming up ideas just to tick SEO targets isn’t how content is supposed to be produced. That’s not how the best publishers do it, and it’s not how you should do it either.

Getting the right people to help you produce content is also part of getting the content production process right, but that’s a discussion all in its own and one for another blog.

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Another Facebook infographic, and how the world is obsessed with Facebook

The World Is Obsessed With Facebook from Alex Trimpe on Vimeo.

Online Schools has created an infographic showing the far-reaching hands/tentacles of Facebook, and how the social networking website has become more than just a website. Some of these facts are quite an eye opener. Inspired by the infographic, Alex Trimpe created the video you can see above, while the infographic itself is embedded after the jump.

Via: Online Schools, LaughingSquid

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User-Friendly SEO basics.

12 sure-fire ways to spot a dirty Twitter spammer

In recent weeks I have seen a definite increase in Twitter spam, and it's something that I think Twitter needs to get on top of and smother. Make no mistake: spam is always a threat to the user experience.

Sometimes spammers will follow you. Other times they’ll just send you a tweet. All of the time they totally suck.

It’s not at all difficult to spot a spammer... here are 12 ways to identify one of these timewasting losers on Twitter. Spam, be damned.

They have no avatar

If you can’t be bothered to upload a picture of any kind then it sends a bad message. My brain instantly tunes out to all tweets that I see that are not accompanied by an avatar.

They have a sexy avatar

A common tactic among spammers is to grab a picture of a nubile girl and use that as their avatar. Hotpants and cleavage are trending in this area.

They have a ridiculous following-to-follower ratio

A tried and tested way of spotting a spam account is to look at the following to follower ratio. Following 2,000 accounts in the hope of a few autofollows back is the name of the game. It’s a sucky game. More often than not you'll see accounts with zero followers. Quite the giveaway.

They have posted no tweets

Nobody in their right mind follows hundreds or thousands of people but fails to use Twitter to tweet! That said, spammers are wrong-minded…

They post the same tweet over and over and over and over and over again

Spammers love repetition. They can’t get enough of saying the same thing. CTRL+V is the spammer’s favourite weapon of choice.

They use the same link in all of their tweets

Sometimes the messaging will be mixed up, but the links will all look the same. In an age of URL shorteners it's a telltale sign that the account owner is playing the numbers game. And that's what spammers do.

They aren’t followed by any lists

Automated – or low-rent - accounts tend not to be added to Twitter lists created by other users.

They include a random number string in their user name

You see this a lot. Numbers in user names set off alarm bells in my head. More often than not they are an indicator of spam.

They don’t bother with conversational tweets

Most human-powered Twitter accounts will mix things up a bit. There will be tweets with links, and tweets without links. There will be retweets. There will be @replies and conversational tweets. If you don’t see enough variety in a user’s tweetstream then it could be that the account is powered by rules and built on feeds. Never a good sign.

They don’t have a bio

Some genuine people don’t do bios, but most do. Many spammers don’t bother.

They have a dodgy bio

Alternatively, some spammers include a bio that will often include the phrase “make money”. Run away, as fast as you can!

They camouflage their bio link

I’m always a little nervous when I see a Bit.ly (or other URL shortener) used for a bio link. However I’ve used one in the past, simply to track click activity, so it’s not always a sign of a spammer (I use an about.me now, which has a great stats dashboard). If you are ever unsure of a Bit.ly link just add a ‘+’ onto the end of the link and you’ll access the stats page, where you’ll also see the long link.

What did I miss? How else can you spot a shyster?

How to Measure the Effectiveness of Web Designs

At the end of the day, the quality of a web design can only really be measured quantitatively in the results it brings a site. As they say, results speak for themselves.

Being a web analyst for more than four years now and regularly working side-by-side with a designer, the biggest thing I have learned is Data identifies the problem and Design solves it.

This article looks at web design from a web analytics perspective. We will focus around the questions that a web designer should answer using metrics and tools to measure the impact and effectiveness of a web design.

Stages of Visitor Engagement

At any time, website visitors are in one of the following stages:

1. Attention


2. Interest


3. Desire


4. Action


5. Satisfaction

At each stage, a visitor has different expectations, and it’s the design that leads the way to making sure those expectations are met.

Designing for Grabbing Visitor Attention

Questions to ask: Does the design grab the attention of your visitors in just a few seconds? Does the design help visitors quickly find the information they are looking for?

While different approaches need to be applied to landing pages and inner pages of a website, one thing is sure: If you don’t manage to garner the user’s attention quickly, she is gone to the next website.

Headings are known to have a strong impact in grabbing user attention.

What to measure: Bounce rates and exit rates.

Solution: Most web analytics tools out there will tell you how many times you failed to grab the attention of your users.

Exit rates will tell you how many people left the website through a particular page, while bounce rates tell you how many people left the website without visiting a second page.

You can go a step further and measure the bounce rate as being the rate of people spending less than 10 seconds on your website. The more people are bouncing off your page, the less your design and content have helped them spot the information they were looking for.

Designing for Raising Visitor Interest

Questions to ask: Do visitors think they are in the right place? Can you convince them that the information on your website is (or might be) right for them?

If you manage to get the visitor interested in your site, he will spend more time reading and engaging with it. In such cases, design should make it really easy to scan, read and engage in interactive actions on a page.

How long does it take to read an article versus how much time do most visitors spend reading that article? For example, according to some sources, the average reading speed of college students is between 250 to 350 words per minute. If your article has 1,000 words, it could take between 2.8–4 minutes to read the article fully. If the average time on the article web page is only 5 seconds (in other words, only 4–8% of the time required to read the entire article), it means most of the content isn’t being read and isn’t engaging enough to keep the visitor’s interest. This problem can be pointing to web copy issues, design issues, or both.

Other examples: How many people click the Play button for a video, or check the other product images of a certain product? While content is what generates interest, design is what makes the content easy to spot and engage with.

Web analysts call these interactions and events micro conversions. The more such micro conversions happen, the larger the number of people that will eventually engage in buying, signing up or filling in a lead web form (macro conversions).

The way people interact with a website denotes their interest for what the website has to offer.

What to measure: Number of interactions with a design. Time spent on web pages.

Solution: One way to go about measuring how well web designs keep visitors interested is to dive into advanced features of Google Analytics by tracking events of every action that can be interpreted as the user becoming more interested in the web page (such as clicks, scrolls, comments, video plays or anything else you can think of).

You could also give ClickTale a try, a tool that records entire sessions of website visits and allows you to play them back. It can offer great insights about how visitors interact with a web page. Six Revisions uses ClickTale on the front page of the site.

Designing for Increasing Desire and Taking Action

Questions to ask: Does the design explicitly engage the imagination of your visitors and make them feel they will get value from what you’re offering? Do visitors click on the call-to-action buttons?

Every product or service out there on the web is unique, and it’s the web design’s job to point out what makes it different and why the visitor should choose this one instead of another.

If the design does its job well, the path to a user clicking on call-to-actions is a short one. In the very moment the user decides to sign up or buy the product, it’s crucial for the call to action to be within quick reach.

A heat map displaying mouse clicks on a call-to-action button.

What to measure: Call to action clicks.

Solution: Click-tracking offered by solutions like Crazy Egg will give you the answer about how people interact with your call-to-action buttons.

As for increasing visitors’ desire, multivariate testing and A/B split testing will help you test different designs and find the one that’s most effective.

Designing for Visitor Satisfaction

Question to ask: After they’ve clicked, does the next page satisfy your visitors by providing exactly what they wanted?

The design of what comes after the click is crucial for getting what site owners are looking for: a conversion. You have already managed to get the visitor’s attention, interest and desire so, from now on, design should only have two main roles.

The first role is making the conversion process as easy as possible (e.g. optimizing the checkout process and optimizing the web form submission process).

The other role of the web design is making sure that any question a user might have about the process is answered right there on the spot so that she doesn’t have to abandon the process to search the site looking for her answer.

It would truly be a pity to lose visitors at this stage because of a design flaw.

Funnels give a clear image on conversion success rates.

What to measure: Funnels and/or paths taken.

Solution: If you have the budget for it, I would go with Kissmetrics, MixPanel or Performable for tracking funnels and paths to conversion.

Otherwise, you can stick with Google Analytics goal- and funnel-tracking, or use PadiTrack, a free Google Analytics app for building funnels on the fly. (Disclosure: PadiTrack is developed by the company I work for).

Conclusion

In the end, what matters is the impact of every element of a website on reaching its goals. Data-driven, informed design, in all of its forms, has a strong say and quite a big responsibility when it comes to a website’s performance.

New Facebook Deals Page Offers Promotion Locator for Users and a Guide for Admins

Facebook’s new introduction site for Deals, its location-based promotions service, helps users discover nearby Deals and teaches business owners how to offer them. The locator displays a list and Bing map of local promotions, while the instructional videos and downloadable Deals Guide for Businesses .pdf explain best practices for creating Deals campaigns.

By facilitating the business on-boarding process, and allowing users to purposefully search for promotions, the site should help Deals become a more popular way for businesses to incentivize foot traffic.

Facebook originally launched Deals with a handful of brands in November, but it was only available in the U.S. for iPhone and touch.facebook.com users. Though a powerful way for businesses to court customers, a lack of understanding amongst both business and users led relatively few to implement or use it.

In the months since, Facebook has rolled out its location service Places to Europe, Japan, Canada, and Australia, added access for Android devices, and today launched Deals in Europe. Now that it has expanded the potential user base and gotten feedback from businesses who’ve tried it, Facebook is prepared for a more aggressive push.

Deals Locator

Facebook.com/deals starts with a quick overview video and a Facepile of friends who’ve claimed Deals. Below, visitors see Your Local Deals — a dynamic Bing map displaying nearby Deals based on a user’s IP address. Mousing over a Places icon reveals a hovercard with the business’ address, and links to directions and the current Deal on the location’s Places page.

To the right is a list the actual promotions offered, along with their associated Likes and comments. Users can use a search bar to view Deals in other cities, refreshing the map and list.

Previously, there was no aggregated list of Deals, making discovery cumbersome. Users could only see if any of the closest businesses offered Deals. This meant they’d often miss Deals that were in their city, some within a mile of them. The Deals locator will help those specifically hunting for promotions to find and claim them, exposing their network to the Deals feature as a whole. This exposure could snowball into widespread awareness, which would inspire more businesses to offer Deals.

Educating User and Business Owners

Under the How to Claim Deals tab, users can find a more detailed introduction to determining which businesses offer Deals and how to redeem them. The video tells users to look for yellow stickers on storefronts, which Facebook has mailed out to some businesses running Deals. Images walk users through the Deal redemption flow and illustrate the four types of Deals they’ll encounter: Individual, Friend, Loyalty, and Charity.

Users will also find links to the Help Center FAQ about Deals as well as a panel citing the devices and countries with access. Currently, this list is outdated, as it doesn’t mention Android devices.

The For Business Owners tab includes a “How Deals Work” video describing the value of incentivizing check-ins, and a “Creating a Deal” video tutorial for admins. The site also links to a downloadable .pdf ”Deals Guide for Businesses” hosted by Box.net. The .pdf and videos outline the three core benefits of using Deals:

• Acquire customers


• Spread the word


• Build customer loyalty

The guide also includes a detailed breakdown of the differences between the four Deal types, the creation flow, and best practices. Some of the tips include:

• Offering at least a 10% to 50% discount


• Providing clear and succinct Deal summaries and redemption instruction copy


• Monitoring campaign progress to avoid Deal fatigue and opportunism


• Training employees to redeem Deals


• Ensuring sufficient supply of offered gifts and staff to administer them


• Setting up policies for handing issues with customers


• Working with Facebook’s account managers to set up Deals across hundreds of locations if necessary


• Buying Facebook ads to promote Deals

By providing these best practices, Facebook can reduce the likelihood that businesses will have an unsuccessful or stressful experience with Deals. The last point is the real motive behind the otherwise free feature. As with the recently launched Sponsored Stories ad unit, businesses can pay Facebook to increase the distribution of their Deals. If Facebook can demonstrate that Deals are simple to create and generate a solid return on investment, businesses will be eager to buy ads for them.

Facebook calls Deals “A new way to connect with customers”. While other location services like Foursquare have local promotions, Deals has greater potential because it’s self-serve and free for admins, and incentivizes users to expose or even bring their friends to a business. The educational and discovery resources on Facebook.com/deals will help the feature approach the tipping point to rapid growth.