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| Leave a mark: Geotag |
July 1, 2007 |
Know a good restaurant or bookstore? Geotag it for cellphone-toting friends
By Gail Balfour
From carving your initials into your wooden desk as a kid to writing rude limericks on public bathroom walls, the urge to say “I was here” is a universal and time-tested human compulsion. Now a New York-based company is feeding this tendency with a location-based service called Socialight.
This free service allows subscribers to post virtual sticky notes at places they have visited, so other users can find them and read their comments. Using a cellphone or a Web browser, users place virtual notes on an interactive map.
Socialight, a platform created by a company called Kamida, was the brainchild of two graduate students at New York University in 2004. Far from the immediate and invasive daily contacts of e-mail, cellphones and texting, the message-in-a-bottle randomness of virtual sticky notes appealed to Kamida’s CEO and co-founder Dan Melinger.
“Socialight actually started as an academic project. What we wanted to create was something we termed ‘light touch’ communications—something that’s lighter than a phone call and, in some ways, lighter than a text message,” he said. “It’s not calling people and bothering them or interrupting them. It’s more like a tap on the shoulder.”
Socialight uses a technology known as geocaching or geotagging, a concept that is gaining in popularity now that GPS-enabled cellphones are becoming more common.
How it works
The geotagging element was initially called sticky shadows, with the idea that people would step onto them when visiting tagged locations. However, consumers had a hard time grasping that concept, so the description was changed to sticky notes.
“It’s like a Post-it Note that people virtually place in space. It gets applied to the front of a restaurant (for example) but it’s invisible. Only people with Socialight on their phone can see it,” Melinger said. Currently, users can place pictures and text on their tags. Future editions will allow audio and video.
“It’s asynchronous, so someone may have placed something an hour ago, a week ago or a month ago. Maybe it wasn’t interesting to me right then. But later, if I am nearby, maybe now I do care.”
It’s a worldwide platform, so it works in Canada, although the user base here is still pretty sparse, he said. “New York is probably the city with the most sticky notes, and after that it’s probably London (England), then maybe San Francisco. But certainly it works anywhere,” Melinger said.
Visitors to www.socialight.com are presented with a map of the world dotted with small green icons. (Socialight has partnerships with Google Maps, dotMobi and Yahoo! Maps.) Each of these represents a sticky note. Clicking an icon reveals a message plus who left it and when. Users can zoom in to street level in a particular city to see exactly where the notes are placed or can search channels of interest to see where all the sushi restaurants are, for example. They can also search the members area, read profiles or post messages.
“Anybody can say anything about any place. And it’s the social filter, the social network at its heart, that helps define the stuff you are interested in. You typically would read stuff from your friends first because you are more likely to trust them. And then there are the channels you subscribe to. And based on comments and so forth, the stuff that is approved by the community is the stuff that rises to the top,” he said.
A Channel can range from a virtual road trip across the country that you want to recreate for someone to a breadcrumb trail of all the best cupcakes in Manhattan. It doesn’t have to be about a restaurant or a bar, though the majority of them are. (Some are just random, and simply say “My house,” for example.)
Finding tags when you are in a certain area depends on your profile, which channels you belong to and who is on your friends list. It is always an opt-in process, Melinger said, calling it an “antidote” to the kind of location-based service people have grown cynical about: the type where companies will ping you constantly with coupons. “We know that if people have a bad experience and it’s out of their control, or if they are having their privacy invaded, they are going to turn it off and never use it again.”
In an ideal world, the location tracking and tagging would be a seamless process using GPS, and your phone would automatically know where you are.
This technology has not yet reached critical mass, however, so today you have to manually identify your location and the system will then highlight tags relevant to your profile in that neighbourhood. “Since it is a social application, we saw it as crucial that everyone can use it. First, get lowest common denominator working. We want to enable friends to talk about places. And if two or three of your 10 best friends can’t use it, then it just loses tons of usefulness.”
A future release will work automatically and passively with GPS-enabled phones, making it simpler and more seamless to use.
But will it make money?
One challenge is the business case. The company wants to keep Socialight a free service so it is looking to use unobtrusive Google-style ads along the right of the screen. “We will never push an ad to your phone,” Melinger said.
Not having a solid business case is something Carmi Levy sees as one of Socialite’s biggest hurdles. “The revenue model for the service itself is not clear,” said the research analyst at Info-Tech Research in London, Ont.
“How is Socialight itself going to generate money from the traffic going across its site? At some point, Socialight needs to convert that audience into revenue—and that’s not happening yet.”
Also, manually keying in your coordinates is cumbersome, he said. “They are throwing a bone to the less technologically capable members of the audience, but…every time you add a manual step to a process you reduce the take-up rate. The key to success is to make it as simple as possible for everyone involved. Just ‘bake it in’ so it’s automated, and you exponentially increase the likelihood they will use the service.”
Another issue is critical mass. “These services are largely dependent on the size and activity level of the community that uses them. Until that richness grows and deepens, there are going to be limitations to the rate of growth or pickup,” Levy said.
“Nobody wants to go to a party that nobody’s attending.”
One user, who calls himself “Lithiumstatic” on the network, knows some of the frustrations of being an early adopter. He lives in the small town of Tyler, Tx., and admits so far he is the only one in his town using the service.
“I just think it’s really cool just leaving your opinion about places and things. I was also thinking, too, that if I got some friends in from out of town I could put some sticky notes out just for them,” he said.
He has tried to convince his buddies to join, so far with no success. “I was talking to my friends saying, ‘You guys gotta get in on this.’ But even in Dallas, there are only about 18 sticky notes. And you are talking about a city with 10 million people.”
SIDEBAR
Getting it to work
Socialight can work through a simple SMS text message, although using a mobile Web browser or the Socialight Web page is a better experience. Cellphone users must first download some free software.
Once at a place you wish to tag:
1 call up the Socialight screen on the cellphone and click “Create Sticky Note”
2 give the site a name, enter a comment and type in the address
3 specify if this tag is just for your friends or if it’s open to everyone on the network
Your tag is then posted to a network map where people can see it.
Think of it as a platform, and there are a bunch of ways of interfacing with this platform,” said Kamida CEO and co-founder Dan Melinger. “With mobile Web, you get this really rich map experience.”
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