With the new year just started, we can see that many predictions involve location based services, again. After my last post about visualizations I got some mails and other messages, asking what location based services could mean for the future. Most questions referred to which services were actually out there, so to start for 2011 let´s have a quick look at the playing field as it is today. Here is a quick description of the most important services in the, ever changing, field today.

Google Latitude

Google’s service has been around for quite some time already, basically a web application that lets you share your current location with friends. Google quickly introduced a badge to make your location visible to others beyond your usual friends as well, for example by putting it on your blog. While the service works great, I’ve never been really enthusiastic about it, because somehow it feels too unintuitive in its use. Sharing your location is done somewhat on in the background of your current activities, which does make sense in theory but makes you feel disconnected from the service in practice. With the recent introduction of dedicated mobile application Google could get it right this time, if they’re using their muscle to introduce new and better deals than their competitors.

Yelp

Yelp is originally a review service, that added location based features later on to provide extra credibility to reviews people would put up. As such is it perhaps a location based mashup avant la lettre, even though the process with them was the other way around. While others are just coming up with extra services besides just providing location information just now, or are relying more on third parties, Yelp even offered Augmented Reality features quite early on. A weak spot for Yelp could be that they’re not that well known outside the Unites States. Their site is still quite US focused and the service is only fully available in just a few other countries anyway. On the other hand, their hardly seems to be any competition anyway for review-integrated location services, so you might say the rest of the world is still within close reach for Yelp

Facebook Places

Being originally very US focused it is of no surprise that Facebook has started its Places service in just a limited part of our globe. Along with Google Latitude, Places seems to bet on integration with it’s host service, in this case Facebook, though they do offer a separate (iPhone) app and a dedicated Places page that makes it more intuitive to use. With Facebook’s influence spreading more and more, one can only assume that Places will have a bright future. It being part of the larges social network will give Places an advantage in offering deals, both in the partners involved as well as in offering potential rewards to be used within Facebook itself.

Foursquare

Foursquare are they guys to beat in the game, while not having as many users as either Google of Facebook as a whole, they are the leading company in the location based game. Although they offer the possibility to shops and companies to offer their customers deals when checking in to a location, my personal feeling is that this won’t be enough. Foursquare and it’s competitors will have to more actively pursue deals or other services that they can offer their users. And unlike Google or Facebook, Foursquare is a separate service which would need to add extra use for sharing your location besides earning badges if they want to go really mainstream.

Gowalla

Gowalla is the runner up, or are they..? While having less users than Foursquare, Gowalla users are said to be more involved and as for a setup of the service they offer a more solid looking interface. They recently struck a deal with Disney showing that they’re willing to actively pursue new offers for their users. Just like Facebook and Foursquare (’4SQ’) they’re still quite US focused, despite offering their basic service, like 4SQ, basically just everywhere.

SCVNGR

SCVNGR might not be that well known, not even in their ‘homeland’ the US. They do have quite a lot of support from a variety of different organizations, making this a very interesting service to watch in the future indeed.  Slowly but surely expanding their userbase abroad, SCVNGR is especially interesting because they are interesting for they other side of location based services: the venues.

Besides aiming for basic customer loyalty they offer business owners the opportunity to set up challenges for their visitors. Interesting is the additional fact that they offer anyone the opportunity to set up tracks, where you can earn points by following clues and directions from location to location, possibly accompanied by separate challenges.

Out of the game: Brightkite

Brightkite was in on the game quite early on and now they’re out of it again just at what seems to be the real start for location based services. Instead Brightkite is now aiming for grouptext functionalities as their core business. In an interesting move, the founders of the service that might have started it all are now pursueing a new location based offer, Forkly, offering location services around restaurants etcetera.

I had this excellent post by Tim Phillips on Research-Live bookmarked for quite some time, and actually there is not too much that I can add to it. His notion that ‘game changing’ has been rapidly on the rise was something that I noticed as well. I hope he doesn’t want to slap me for the title I’m using for this article (must be really good SEO for me) but I was reminded about his article when I was using Google trends to review some hype words.

It’s actually quite hard to do that because most word combinations like ‘pro active’ have been in use for quite some time, sometimes in a different context as well. A methodology like scrum, on the other hand, is mostly used in rugby to describe something different and doesn’t show up on the radar as clear as ‘game changer’. As Tim showed is has been rapidly on the rise, thus raising the question if there is really anything game changing or if it’s maybe just good old marketing.

Using ‘game changing’ in your bingo game at works seems to have been pretty pointless before 2005, and game changers themselves only appeared in 2007. What is interesting is the ‘game changing’ rapid way these words seemed to have spread.

Images are screenshots taken from Google Trends

Nothing new, walk along! Because you should have noticed already that Google announced as early as April this year that they will start ranking your websites based on the site speed as well. If you think you’ve heard this one before: I’ve written about this before on my blog. This means you’re probably already aware of the fact that Google is trying to adjust it’s search more and more to the ideal of relevance and speed. Google’s mantra will be ‘Make the web faster’ this year and to ensure you’re helping as well they’ve published a blog post in May about some helpful tools you can use.

One of the tools to determine your site speed, and thus if this will help your ranking, is Google Page Speed, which you can find here.

Nothing new here, but worth to note anyway; the new ranking system Google has started to use earlier this month. I wrote about SEO earlier and have been talking about it quite a lot, it still seems to be the hottest thing on web promotion. Not saying a good ranking is not important, but that is actually exactly the point why SEO sometimes bothers me:  the ranking has to mean something to the end user, not to the site owner.

Google has (of course) the same sort of idea about what good ranking sgould be; ranking the content that the user actually wants to find as high as possible and not the content that a site owner wants to be found. In my article about the ‘end of SEO’  I went on about the importance of your content, Google has now started to add a long awaited other variable to the mix: speed.

Eduard Blacquière was kind enough to remind me of this in his (Dutch) article here. He is rightfully pointing to the fact that Google is trying to adjust it’s search more and more to the ideal of relevance and speed. ‘Make the web faster’ is one of Google’s new mantra’s and the reason seems obvious; don’t you just hate it when you have seemingly found the best resource for something and it loads forever? (Of course only to find out it wasn’t so brilliant anyway…) Site speed is not a very important factor yet, but combined with the fact that users will move away from your site if it’s really slow the curtain may have finally fallen for those overly slow loading websites.

A more detailed overview about the changes can be found here on Google’s own blog, and I just want to add something I’ve been using a lot recently: you can go on about SEO tricks, if your site is really that slow, it’s hard to use SEO against it.

Think about how you present your data to your readers, consumers and customers first. Raving on about the upcoming semantic web is useless if you like to catch your visitors in a non-semantic web of tricks and clicks. (Because spent-time is one of your KPI’s?)

Is Google Internet Stats a peek at the near future of the Web?
Yes, Google Internet Stats has been live for quite some time, albeit only in the .co.uk domain. However, due to some recent discussions I had with people about the future of presenting information on the web I think it might be useful to have a look at this website anyway. Moreover, this seems to be a good moment to look at this, now attention for Google’s bigger new toy, Wave, is fading. This is because the way that this site is presenting the information might just be part of the next step in publishing, blogging or whatever it is you do on the web.

Short, easy to read snippets of information is the way that Google Internet stats tries to represent the latest research data on just about any topic. Yes, the site looks awfully simple and sometimes it’s just really a tiny bit of information, but at least it’s live. With corporations like TNS, GfK and Nielsen involved in this project it does not use the most obscure sources of data either.

These tiny bits of information are part of what I see as a trend in at least blogging; the miniaturization of source information. Meaning; giving basic news, data, information, or any of those things and moving from articles towards conversation. Tools like (microblog) Twitter facilitate this process. Yes, the information Google Internet Stats is often without backlink to the source, a bit too minimalistic for my taste. But we might find ourselves pretty soon in a world where newswebsites, blogs and any other site like that get’s replaced by basic feeds where the article is shaped by the readers in the discussion that follows…

This short article is loosely based on a longer article (in Dutch) that I’ve written for marketing blog Bijgepijkerd.