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"Tell the chef, the beer is on me."
About 10 years ago, "geo" and "local" were two very distinct product verticals in most Internet companies. This was in part because what we now think of as local arose out of a Yellow Pages market, while the mapping use case arose from more enterprise, maps-and-navigation origins.
At the time, most Internet businesses were keen to perpetuate extant geo-local user experiences, rather than seeing them as crude, if profitable, interim steps to something better. Nowhere was this more evident than at my former employer, Yahoo: as late as 2006, investment cases were still being pitched for either maps or local; the bulk of Yahoo's geo engineering team resided in an entirely different country; and the mobile group had its own building with few, if any, connections to the rest of the company.
Today, entrepreneurs and execs know that local, geo, and mobile are not distinct product groups and technology stacks, but rather essential components of a unified toolset that better connects people with the world around them.
Nothing better reflects the diversity of this geo toolkit than the products on display at the recent Where 2.0 conference. The three-day event embraced the full spectrum of all things spatial: coding, licensing, marketing, daily deals, 3D visualization, and a bit of mapping thrown in for the traditionalists in the audience.
In this context I gave a short presentation on "Big Data, Big Local." I've embedded the slides below. Although I anticipate receiving an award for including Borat, Homer Simpson, Bender, Winston Churchill, porn shops, kittens, surfing, and unicorns coherently in a single presentation on geo — the deck does not stand well on its own. Go figure.
I wanted therefore to provide a brief overview here, and perhaps tackle it more fully in subsequent posts. This is not intended to be a detailed argument, simply an accompanying narrative to the deck.
The general tenor of the discussion focuses upon how we have traditionally employed coordinates as the final word in how we position things and people in the physical world. The problem with this approach is that a coordinate pair lacks context — they are regular and orderly, which is great for machines, but are entirely ambiguous when used to represent more conceptual places like states, cities, stores and neighborhoods. That's not so good for people. In fact, a single coordinate pair can be used to represent all these places, and their different associations, concurrently.
Social location has moved us toward a new form of positioning: by business or points of interest (POI). These geo-referenced entities exist across the world in an irregular and poorly typed graph, but they are rich with context. People exist and events happen at places, not coordinates — social location applications "snap" us to these nodes, and their context becomes ours.
We are stretching the traditional use of business listings beyond their limits. Looking back, however, you can see how they've been continuously extended to fit new models of bringing consumers and businesses closer together. You'll soon see listings data act as hooks in the mobile payments space, and they will become increasingly pivotal in creating rich topological graphs among people, brands, and physical places.
We can do great things with business listings and POI as geo-commercial beacons, but they come with their own problems, two of which I cover in the deck. The first is a more pedestrian example of name canonicalization: stores in the same retail / restaurant chain are represented today in too many forms. The evidence presented by variants on "Subway Sandwiches" in slide 12 (below) would suggest that current data providers expend comparatively little effort normalizing this content. The problem may exist because this information is currently intended to serve an extant, limited use case — make the name discoverable using free text search and present to users — rather than drive new, data-driven markets.
The second, more important issue is that we are faced on the Internet with a multitude of electronic incarnations of one physical entity. While intended to enhance discoverability across properties, the current situation effects a near-complete inability to understand how users engage electronically with a physical place outside a single caisson such as Facebook, Twitter, or Yelp. This need is increasingly important, because URLs are now often employed as surrogates for a place — they can be resolved to machine-readable attributes and in fact act exactly like nodes in a graph of linked data.
This is a problem that requires solving, and we are tackling it at Factual. I include some topical commentaries from Chris Dixon and Albert Wenger as artillery support in slide 18:
So the problem is that we are collectively going to need this normalization, very soon. I conclude noting that Factual's duty does not end with the creation of tab-delineated files. Instead, we are looking to create data-centric platforms that instill order on an increasingly chaotic Internet, and ensure that the result is meeting the future business needs of our contemporaries in the local space.
Related:
Three significant trends in the local sector -- deals, check-ins, and place pages -- are on a bender and headed for an exciting convergence. When they meet we will see one of three things: a train wreck of incompatibility, an awkward confluence, or a very powerful alignment. I'm hoping for the latter, a sort of local syzygy, because a well-conceived orchestration of these trends will benefit the consumer and it has real potential to take us entirely out of the Yellow Pages era and into exciting, unexplored territory.
This is a two-part post: here I look in more detail at check-ins, deals, and place products (including, briefly, the adventurously named Facebook Places) with an eye to what might follow. In a following post I will discuss how we may more actively ease their convergence with linked data and some basic adherence to extant standards, specifically how these efforts will affect the local consumer.
The check-in is hardly the apogee of the local consumer experience but it works, and this is what is most important about any product. However successful it is now, the check-in will remain an interim solution for identifying long-term customer/business affinities and physical point of presence. So what's next?
I've written about check-ins previously: since then, Facebook has thrown its hat into the ring with their own place/check-in product, offering little feature distinction outside the problematic ability to check-in your friends on their behalf . Thanks to Facebook, the "Ferris Bueller Problem" -- in which a friend checks you into (say) the Von Steuben Day Parade when you are officially at home, ill -- may soon find its way into mainstream parlance. Expect a rise in just-for-larks in absentia check-ins to the local "gentlemen's club" and similar places of sophomoric amusement.
More interestingly, casual requests for a similar product from LinkedIn, and the introduction of a third-party check-in offering for Twitter demonstrate that geo and social products are becoming more integrated in the mind of the consumer, and corporate product strategies: Greg Sterling remarked on this trend recently in yp.com's new eat, play, live marketing campaign which attempts to transform the brand from its staid origins into "a lifestyle guide that also happens to feature contractors and plumbers." He is spot-on: some lines of business will not fit within the check-in model, but they nonetheless must be accommodated in any successful business-to-consumer product.
I have no desire to see another check-in clone arrive anytime soon. Jeff Holden, the founder of Whrrl, recently noted that the check-in will shortly be a commodity, and Foursquare's Dennis Crowley believes it already is. If you are an entrepreneur or developer thinking of building a new check-in service, please don't. Instead, consider some of the more exciting challenges that provide real consumer benefit:
Advances along these tracks should obviate the check-in as we know it today. This is a good thing -- check-ins are something to get over, an intermediate solution to tolerate until we have something that works better. Foursquare certainly knows this. The excitement -- for Foursquare's business and users -- lies wholly in their ability to deliver utility, novelty, and serendipity beyond the check-in.
Groupon's $134 million series C funding in April and its estimated $1.34 billion valuation woke investors and entrepreneurs to the monetary value of group buying, and local deals more generally. There are now hundreds of variants and multiple aggregators, while "Groupon clone scripts" can be purchased (caveat emptor) from any number of freelance developer sites.
Groupon and its ilk tend to get bundled under the "group buying" or less-apt "social couponing" monikers, but -- in regards to Groupon certainly -- there's little that's actively social about the products. The less charitable may argue that Groupon's success is due as much to the severity of discounts on offer. However, Groupon and others have raised awareness that advertising is no longer the only solution. Specifically, SMBs are slowly gaining access to tools to engage their customers on mutually favorable terms. Examples:
Local is huge and only getting bigger. As a litmus, Borrell's recent ad forecast notes that "local online advertising should grow by almost 18% [...] to $16.1 billion, in 2011." Money follows money: we can expect further me-too products around deals, check-ins, and place products, but there is huge scope for investment into products that contribute genuine value to the consumer experience and enhance SMBs' ability to connect to their customers.
Much of this will take place at the data and platform levels. In my next post I'll take a look at how linked data might help cross-platform integration, and join deals, check-ins and place pages to the benefit of the consumer.
Related:
There's plenty of enthusiasm for local / hyperlocal projects, but the sweepstakes has yet to be won. PaperG CEO Victor Wong digs in to some of the missed opportunities in a paidContent.org guest column.
I found this excerpt intriguing:
How useful would it be to know when local used-car dealerships have a large increase in inventory (and thus are probably more willing to sell at a lower price)? Other data like new-car listings could show what the local population is buying by examining what is posted and taken down by the dealers. Publishers can even create new content by encouraging users to input data about what sorts of deals and treatment they got, which would be useful for other local buyers and could be turned into a local car-buying guide.
Wong has a stake in the local game -- PaperG focuses on local advertising -- but that doesn't diminish the point he alludes to in the excerpt: feedback and analysis are the missing parameters in the local equation.
So many of these local efforts rely on traditional information delivery through news articles or databases. That material has use, no doubt. Yet few projects take the extra step and put that data into context. They don't explain why the information is important. They don't connect the dots.
A lot of this reminds me of web analytics. It's easy to grant access to traffic data, and the access itself has a low level of value. But the insight that guides decisions comes from deeper analysis. You need to know why a particular keyword or topic is resonating.
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