reDesign

June 24, 2010

Checking in with foursquare at SFO

Filed under: audio,foursquare,geotagging,lbs,local search,maps,mobile,social networking,twitter — Rocky Agrawal @ 12:57 pm
SFO is a hotbed of foursquare activity

SFO is a hotbed of foursquare activity. Creative Commons image by Håkan Dahlström.

With the increasing use of mobile applications such as Yelp and foursquare, it’s becoming possible to pull ideas from thin air. Users of these apps can leave tips for others to find that are linked to a specific location.

In most places there aren’t enough tips yet to make filtering an issue. San Francisco International Airport, with more than 57,000 checkins on foursquare, is an exception. It offers a glimpse of what we can expect as these services become more popular. The airport is the perfect petri dish for tips: it serves a technically savvy audience and people often find themselves there with plenty of time on their hands.

The SFO tips page contains dozens of notes including places to eat, complaints, ground transportation, wifi and power availability. Mixed in to all of this are ads, other spam and random observations. Some examples:

have a corned beef sandwich at max’s if you’re flying southwest. the best! well, really good

When you enter short term parking do it as far to the right as you can (lvl 2) & then immediately head to lvl 1. There is always parking next to gate and that is the lvl that connects to the terminal

Free wifi at the Continental lounge in Terminal 1- be warned, it’s located outside Security

Smoking hot brunette woman at gate 20. Stop by and smile at her. She is so lovely!

Bart to Millbrae gets you within 1 block of an in n out burger. Great for 3+ hour layover!

Heading to wine country? Take a moment to stop by St. Supery in the heart of Napa on Hwy 29. Mention this to get a 2 for 1 tasting.

Sorting through the volume of tips can be overwhelming. As the volume increases, we’ll need ways to filter them. Among the ways to filter:

  • Timeliness. Some of the tips, such as wifi at the Continental lounge, are evergreen. Others, like the smoking hot brunette are very timely. Tipsters should be able to flag their tips to self destruct. As I wrote earlier, being able to identify tips by timeliness would allow for new applications, such as sharing rides. (“Anyone want to split a cab to Moscone?”)
  • Social network. Among the tips were tips from people I follow on Twitter, including Danny Sullivan and Adam Lasnik. Being able to surface these would increase relevance.
  • Ads vs. not ads. Sometimes people want ads, especially if it can save them money.
  • Keyword search.

Places like airports are especially complex because they’re really collections of places, sometimes with other groupings and physical restrictions. Being able to filter tips by terminal would also be useful. But then maybe that’s best left to GateGuru.

June 16, 2010

Now we’re going Places

Filed under: geotagging,gps,lbs,local search,maps,mobile,social networking,twitter — Rocky Agrawal @ 1:59 pm

I’ve been writing about Twitter and location since my first post about Twitter in 2007. This week, Twitter launched Places, which allows users to add their location to a tweet.

Here’s a screenshot from 2007:

Twitter location 2007

Embedding location in a tweet the hard way in 2007

and today:

Embedding location in a tweet in 2010

In 2007, I used a third-party application from Where to include my location. Clicking on that link would take you to a map on Where’s site showing the address. (The link in the original post no longer works.)

With the launch of Twitter Places, the search is done within the Web browser (and soon in Twitter’s mobile applications). You can select where you are from a list of nearby places. Clicking on the place name brings up the map above and the option to view tweets about that place.

Although the difference between the two may seem subtle, they are significant:

  • Because the place is metadata, it doesn’t count toward the 140 character limit.
  • Place names are human readable, unlike addresses and latitude/longitude. Knowing the name of a place makes it much easier to find than just a street address, especially in dense metropolitan areas.
  • Places are unique to a specific venue. Doing a pure location-based search would return tweets from surrounding businesses or businesses that have since disappeared.
  • Integration in to the main Twitter experience means broad exposure and eventual standardization of place identifiers. That has been a longstanding challenge in the local space.

Twitter’s geo APIs have been available for several months and third parties like bing have created interesting applications like Twitter Maps. With the availability of places across the Twitter platform, we can expect to see more interesting applications including both real-time applications (ride sharing and ticket exchanges) and historical (restaurant reviews, past events).

Once Twitter allows owners to claim their Place and associate it with a Twitter account, we could see official tweets of announcements and offers incorporated into a Place’s search results.

When pictures are tagged to a Place (instead of a lat/long), we’ll have the ability to visually browse a venue in Twitter.

May 11, 2010

Geo-enabled Twitter comes alive on Twitter Maps

Filed under: bing,geotagging,lbs,local search,maps,mobile,social networking,twitter — Rocky Agrawal @ 8:56 am
Bing's Twitter Maps show you what's going on

Bing's Twitter Maps show you what's going on

I’ve been playing with Bing’s Twitter Maps lately and it’s one of the better implementations of Twitter’s geo APIs that were introduced last fall. It shows tweets within the last 7 days plotted on the map. Google Maps recently introduced a similar feature, but it seems to only show items that are fed through Google Buzz (including tweets that people have configured to send to Buzz).

Some future applications of geo-enabled Tweets:

  • Events. For last-minute party goers, a real time view of what’s going on around town, complete with pictures and real-time reactions.
  • Ticket scalping. Rather than walk around for blocks talking to scalpers about what they have, glance at a list of tickets posted. The information transparency would result in a higher price to sellers and a lower price to buyers than what scalpers typically offer. (In my experience at baseball games, scalpers usually ask at least 3x what they paid.)
  • Finding a place to go. When in new cities, it’s often hard to figure out where to go — what are the lively neighborhoods at night. By looking at a map of recent tweets, you could quickly discover where people are still awake.
  • Read reviews from friends. Geo-enabled tweets filtered by those you follow would provide socially relevant recommendations.
  • Offers from local businesses. These could be persistent or distressed inventory. Slow night? Tweet an offer to draw in customers.
  • News. Twitter has long been used for user-generated breaking news. With geo-enabled tweets, breaking news could be aggregated by location in addition to hashtags. The biggest stories could be identified by an increase of tweets from a location (versus normal) and retweet frequency. News from media outlets could also be plotted.
  • Construction and accident information. Avoid bottlenecks by seeing tweets from fellow drivers, DOTs and news sites.
  • Trip sharing. Find others at the airport headed your way, cutting costs and reducing pollution.

And, of course, there’s friend finding, which is the most talked about use of geo-enabled tweets.

So far, the percentage of tweets I see with geo information is tiny (>1% of those I follow). But as more and more geotagged data is put into Twitter, the key will be applications providing the right tools to filter all of that data. At a minimum, we’ll need the ability to filter by time of tweet, people we’re following, hashtag and application (e.g. foursquare).

Unfortunately, bing’s Twitter Maps doesn’t seem to be available where real-time information would be most useful — on mobile devices.

More on: geotagging, social networking, Twitter

September 10, 2008

You too can be Rand McNally

Filed under: city guides,flickr,geotagging,google,gps,iphone,lbs,local search,maps,satellite navigation — Rocky Agrawal @ 9:01 pm

How long does it take to get from Pike Place Market to Mount Rainier National Park? According to Google Maps, it’s a 5 minute walk; less than 1/3 of a mile. Pretty easy, huh?

Mount Rainier looks an awful lot like an office tower to me.

Mount Rainier looks an awful lot like an office tower to me. That'll be one steep climb!

In reality it’s a 2 1/2 hour drive.

This error is the result of a fundamental challenge in how data is collected for online navigation and local search products: all of the major services use data that weren’t originally collected for navigation. The typical source is phone books listings, which were originally compiled by companies like InfoUSA to sell mailing lists. In this particular case, the national park likely has a business office in Downtown Seattle.

Einstein monumentThe data have a distinct bias: toward places with phone numbers. While you can get exact driving directions to a local ball bearing distributor, look for a park, landmark or trailhead and you’ll often get erroneous data or no results at all. Occasionally, you’ll luck out and there will be business names nearby that incorporate the place name.

Just for fun, try finding the Albert Einstein statue in Washington, DC using an online mapping service. (If you can’t find it, click on the image to see the answer.)

On Sunday, I was looking for Hippie Hill in Golden Gate Park. Yahoo! Maps struck out entirely. Mapquest delivered a bunch of unrelated results.

An answer lies in another Yahoo! property: flickr’s database of geotagged photos. Although flickr’s search tools aren’t optimized for local search, it’s content is a great data source. The first search result in Google Maps for Hippie Hill is spot on; it came from Google indexing flickr’s geodata. The commercial results on the same map (the red markers) are mostly garbage.

Flickr is just one tool. As more people adopt GPS-enabled phones like the iPhone, we’ll see more and more user generated data. Enabling mobile data collection is reason enough to build an iPhone app.

Developing countries have the potential to leapfrog the developed world in data quality. Google’s Map Maker allows anyone to populate data in countries without large commercial data providers. You can pull up a satellite view and trace roads. Zoom into buildings and add local businesses. Find a park and add in key features. Because the content is user generated, the places that people look for the most will be added first, as opposed to the local ball bearing distributor. Places with colloquial names will become findable.

User-generated content has its challenges, of course. In the initial stages, tools like Map Maker will attract the community organizers who are passionate about their neighborhoods. Once the data start getting even modest usage, spammers will attack. But many of the standard spam fighting techniques can be used to deter them.

OpenStreetMap and Wikimapia offer similar functionality. OpenStreetMap is focused on creating and editing roads; Wikimapia is focused on places of interest.

Google Map Maker’s user interface is more intuitive than OpenStreetMap and Wikimapia. Unfortunately, Google is being hypocritical in how it treats the data. While Google Maps combines data from other sources, such as indexing geodata from flickr,  it is keeping content generated by Map Maker users locked up. Users can’t even download the data they create.

More on: geotagging, local search, maps

August 27, 2008

The Russians are coming! The Russians are coming!

Filed under: geotagging,google,journalism,local search,maps,media,newspapers,web 2.0 — Rocky Agrawal @ 10:52 pm

I’ve long advocated that news organizations geotag the news. But I’ve been skeptical of automated systems for doing this. Google News recently provided a terrific example of what can happen when you use entity extraction for such a task:

Where in the world is Georgia?

Where in the world is Georgia?

In this case, reported by Valleywag, Google is comically wrong. But even when Google is roughly right, the map is often there just for the sake of having a map. The location information is often not very precise or isn’t really relevant.

For example, this story about a Yankees game puts Yankee Stadium somewhere near City Hall. Stories about national issues are often datelined New York or Washington because the reporter happens to be sitting in one of those two cities.

For individual story pages, an inaccurate map isn’t the worst thing in the world. But when you plot many of these stories on a map, they become worthless. In Google Earth, you can get a layer that provides geotagged news from The New York Times. I’ve seen pointless geotagging such as a story titled “U.S. Moves Toward International Accounting Rule” geotagged as being in the “USA”. (Which Google Earth plots in Oklahoma.)

There are many cases where geocoding makes sense and provides users a real service:

  • Restaurant reviews
  • Crime stories
  • Event listings
  • Travel stories

In each of these cases, the location is a critical part of the story. The minimal extra effort involved in geotagging these stories would significantly increase their shelf life and usability.

August 20, 2008

How’s the weather out there?

Filed under: geotagging,google,maps,social networking,twitter,web 2.0 — Rocky Agrawal @ 3:20 pm

One of the things that takes getting used to living in the Bay Area is the many microclimates. Temperatures and conditions can vary dramatically within a few miles.

I was deciding whether to head out to the Beach Chalet, a microbrewery and restaurant on the Pacific Ocean, on Sunday. They’ve got a great back yard with Adirondack chairs and live music. It’s a gorgeous place — on a sunny day. Unfortunately, it’s located in one of the foggiest parts of San Francisco.

Before trekking all the way to the other side of the city I wanted to know whether it was sunny there. Could social networking help?

I decided to post the question — to noone in particular — on Twitter:

Wonder if it is sunny there. My question posed on Twitter.

Within 10 minutes, I had my answer:

Its Not.

Of course, this particular experiment is likely only to work this well this quickly in the Bay Area, where it’s easier to find a Twitter user than a newspaper reader.

How else could I find the answer? Google now has geo-coded Webcams in Google Earth. Find where you want to be and check to see if there’s a camera. Click and you’ll get your answer. In the case of the Beach Chalet, it’s often this:

No, I didn't just paste in a white image. This is a view from a webcam near Ocean Beach.

No, I didn't take a picture of a white wall. This is a view from the Cliff House webcam near Ocean Beach.

July 14, 2008

Unlocking the creativity of the masses

Filed under: apple,apple tv,facebook,flickr,geotagging,gps,iphone,ipod,lbs,local search,mobile,mobile search,photography,social networking,twitter,where,wireless,wireless data,yelp — Rocky Agrawal @ 9:26 pm

With the launch of the iPhone last year (and the millions of dollars in ad spend around it), Apple did more for wireless data adoption than wireless carriers had in the last 10 years. With Thursday’s launch of the App Store, they’re doing it again by unlocking the creativity of the masses.

Wireless carriers had long held on to core cellphone features with an iron grip. Want access to the camera, GPS, microphone or address book? Good luck. It usually involved spending a year or more negotiating with a carrier and then writing and (rewriting) your app to work on dozens of phone models. And when you were all done, you brought it to a market with little distribution support at a price few people would pay.

In the last couple of days, I’ve downloaded more apps than I had in my entire history of cell phone usage (dating back to 1996). There’s one big reason: once developers had access to features like GPS and the camera, they created compelling applications.

The most compelling apps have come from independent developers or startups. Some have used public APIs for other products; although there isn’t an official flickr app, there are several apps that interact with flickr. AOL is the lone exception among large companies, with apps for AIM and AOL Radio.

Here are some of the apps that caught my eye. With the exception of iMilk, all are free. That’s another refreshing change: Apple is making it easy for application developers who want to distribute free applications. Even paid apps can be relatively cheap, with a one time price of $3-$10 being common. (Versus the previous $3-$5 per month.)

All is not perfect in app land, of course. Much like when Facebook launched their app platform, some developers are having a hard time keeping up with the demand. I’ve also had my phone reboot at least half a dozen times when using various apps.

The functionality in some of these apps is limited compared with their other incarnations. For example, in Jott, you can’t send Jotts to others. As these apps are revved, they’ll become even more compelling.

Jott

Jott allows you to record a voice “note to self”. The note is then transcribed and put in your Jott account, which is available by phone or Web. It isn’t as robust as Jott’s

Where

A mobile social network that lets you plot friends on a map, look for restaurant reviews, find and reserve Zipcars and even look at a map of the night sky where you are with the constellations plotted. (Video of the app.)

There are a number of players looking to create mobile social networks. Whrrl, Loopt and Limbo offer somewhat similar apps. Where offers a range of features beyond social, while Limbo is the most social.

(Disclosure: I did some consulting for Where last year.)

Facebook

Facebook took an early lead with the iPhone 1.0 by having one of the best iPhone optimized sites. The lead developer released a toolkit that was used by other developers. The application version adds the ability to upload photos and IM, but lacks some of the features found in the browser version.

AirMe

Upload pictures to flickr (or an AirMe account). The pictures are automatically geotagged with your location. AirMe also tags you pictures with the current weather conditions.

NearMe

See pictures from Panoramio of places around where you are.

Twittelator

See and update Twitter. Post pictures and location updates. Twitterific has less functionality and also has ads.

Urbanspoon

Kind of like a Magic 8 ball to decide where to eat. Uses GPS to find where you are. Shake your iPhone and it will select a place for you.

iMilk  ($2.99)

“Drink” virtual milk. Uses the iPhone’s accelerometer to empty the glass. If you prefer, you can pour it into a glass before drinking.

Remote

Control your Apple TV or iTunes. Play songs, see album art and search your iTunes library. Works over Wifi, so you don’t have to be in line of sight. Much better than the flimsy remote that ships with Apple TV.

Pandora

The world’s greatest music discovery service now streams to iPhone. The app is beautifully simple. Add in an aux in jack or FM transmitter for your car and say goodbye to the $14 a month you’re paying to XM or Sirius.

Yelp

Why settle for the hand-picked (usually glowing) reviews displayed in the restaurant window? Pull out your iPhone and check Yelp. My favorite feature is a filter that limits the search to restaurants that are open now. Very helpful for those midnight cravings.

June 3, 2008

Google offers fresh perspectives on travel photography

Filed under: flickr,fun,geotagging,google,microsoft,photography,travel,web 2.0 — Rocky Agrawal @ 11:15 pm

Google’s Panoramio has launched one of the most exciting advances in online pictures since flickr added geotagging. A new “Look around” feature shows you when pictures are available from other angles.

In the screenshot below, you can see the dome of the Taj Mahal highlighted. Clicking on that takes you to a picture of the dome. (Shown in red on the right.)

The UI is a bit confusing. For example, in the screenshot there is a blank image in the middle. I assume that means something, but I haven’t been able to figure out what. The same goes for the overall arrangement of thumbnails. Regardless, it’s a lot of fun to play with.

The feature is only available for sites with lots of pictures. Try the Brooklyn Bridge, Eiffel Tower, Statue of Liberty, Tower of London and the Ponte Rialto. I had an easier time finding places to explore in Europe than in the United States. (This could reflect the fact that Panoramio is based in Spain.)

Microsoft’s Live Labs has been demoing similar technology called Photosynth for more than a year, using images of the Basilica di San Marco. Photosynth offers a spectacular 3D overview. I’d love to see it out of the labs.

Until then, I’ll be playing with Panoramio. Check out their take on the Basilica.

Read more on Panoramio’s blog.

Disclosure: I work for a Microsoft subsidiary.

May 3, 2008

3D maps meet geotagged pictures

Filed under: flickr,geotagging,maps,mashups,microsoft,photography,web 2,web 2.0 — Rocky Agrawal @ 11:32 pm

Microsoft’s Virtual Earth has a phenomenal addition to Live Search Maps that allows users to create virtual aerial tours. Here’s an example using pictures from my trip to Kauai:

The tours can be exported as a video file and uploaded to a video sharing site (as above) or shared by link to Live Search Maps. Like many such links on AJAX sites, it doesn’t preserve the correct state. Click “Tour in 3D” in the upper left and “aerial” above the map for best effect.

Tours can be created manually by pushing pins into a map. The service also plays nicely with GeoRSS, GPX, KML or KMZ files. The above tour was imported from my flickr pictures. (Unfortunately, flickr caps geo exports to the most recent 20 pictures per search.)

The 3d map tours can be generated from GPS tracklogs. Here’s a tour based on the tracklog from a recent bike trip through San Francisco, taking the ferry back from Sausalito:

Major cities, like San Francisco, benefit from 3D models of key buildings. The blue line in the video is the tracklog.

Both of these tours were created using the default settings. You can also customize the view shown at each location by rotating, tilting or zooming. I don’t see an option to playback the full tracklog.

Disclosure: I work for a Microsoft subsidiary.

March 31, 2008

Picking the wrong default path

Filed under: consumer electronics,geotagging,gps,product management,ui,usability — Rocky Agrawal @ 10:09 pm

I’ve been using my Garmin eTrex Vista Cx GPS for six months. I use it when hiking and to geotag pictures. I noticed that I haven’t been getting the advertised accuracy level; the accuracy has ranged from 25 to 150 feet.

The Garmin Web site touts the benefits of WAAS:

A WAAS-capable receiver can give you a position accuracy of better than three meters 95 percent of the time. And you don’t have to purchase additional receiving equipment or pay service fees to utilize WAAS.

What a deal! You just don’t get that out of the box — Garmin defaults WAAS to off. Once I turned it on, accuracy improved to 8 to 10 feet.

Garmin isn’t alone in shipping crippled products; many of the products and services we use come to us less than advertised. There are a number of reasons for this:

  • Money. Computer manufacturers such as SONY and Dell lard up PCs with crapware like toolbars, trial versions of antivirus software and offers for broadband access. Companies like AOL, Google and McAfee pay for this distribution. It’s the price of cheap PCs. SONY recently received a lot of bad press for offering a “Fresh Start” option, which allowed consumers to buy select laptops without crapware for a $50 premium.
  • Shelf appeal. TV sets are preset to look good on the big, bright showroom floor. These settings aren’t optimal in a smaller, darker environment.
  • Support costs. Despite the fact that they all touted security as a key feature on the box, every wireless router I’ve had has come with security turned off. This isn’t the right choice for most users, but it is the one that will work out of the box and is least likely to trigger expensive customer support calls.
  • Server capacity and operational costs. Gmail offers all users the ability to use a secure version of email, but defaults to insecure. Just go to “https://mail.google.com” and your entire session will be encrypted. Or use the Better Gmail extension to always force an encrypted session.
  • The right choice for the user. Sometimes default decisions are actually based on what most users would want. Things like language, time display format and currency symbols frequently fall into this category.

It’s hard to tell which of these apply in the Garmin case. Clearly, users wouldn’t prefer data that is more inaccurate, unless there was some downside to having more accurate data. I might take less accurate data if it meant I got more battery life in exchange. The Garmin owner’s manual is silent on this topic, although it does mention other factors that affect battery life such as backlight usage.

WAAS requires more computation, so maybe it makes the unit slower? Again, the owner’s manual is silent on this.

Garmin ignores the fundamental question I always ask when giving users a choice: does the user have the information necessary to make that choice? In this case, clearly not. There’s plenty of space on the Garmin’s screen (see picture below) to explain the impact of turning on WAAS.

Judging from a GPS-fan Web site, it looks like there’s no reason to turn it off:

On the current generation Garmins, there is no discernible impact on speed or battery life with WAAS on.

Which begs the question: if there’s no negative impact, why not have it always on and remove the option?

Disclosure: I was part of the team responsible for AOL Toolbar distribution on SONY PCs.

Garmin eTrex Visa Cx setup screen
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