social network | Smojo Speaks

Missing the Killer App in Location Networks

Check in and let your friends and followers know where you are at and what you are doing. Location-based social networks have gained popularity over the past year. Lots of different sites to choose from in the mobile check-in space. With all the various networks out there it is becoming harder to keep up with your friends on each network. 3 of the major location networks are foursquare, gowalla, and brightkite. All great networks and all have distinguishing features. Foursquare which just past 1 million users has mayors, badges and to-do lists. Gowalla has items and trips. Brightkite has the location feeds with photos and notes. If you are a user of all 3 it is a pain to go into each one individually to check yourself in and also keep up on what your friends are doing.

What is missing from the mobile check-in world is an application that brings all the services together and lets you see what is going on with ALL your friends. Most people are only going to check into 1 network. Creating some sort of mash-up app would lead to more usage of these sites. So listing where your friends are currently would be feature numero uno. The ability to check into the different sites would also be a no brainer to have in this application. Most of these networks also have tons of city data that can be pulled in to show where the hot spots are currently in a certain area. That is what I want. Someone build it and make location-based social networking easier on myself and the world.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Digg gets Social, Adds Facebook Type Features

Digg has to be my 2nd most visited on the net right now and it came as a surprise to come across this article in BusinessWeek which gives details about Digg adding social networking tools. BusinessWeek is reporting that the changes are to be made to Digg today. Here are a few excerpts from the article detailing some of the changes.

Instead of submitting stories for review by the larger Digg community, users will be able to send—”shout” in Digg terms—story links along with messages to particular Digg friends. – Catherine Holahan, BusinessWeek

Digg’s new emphasis on user profile pages is also designed to let users better define their presence on the site by posting multiple photos, personal interests, biographical information, and even links to a member’s personal blog, social network profile, or Web page.

As a Digg user I don’t particularly want any of these features. We really don’t need more social networking. Digg can already be used in Facebook and stories added to your Myspace page. Stories can already be shared in all the social networking sites very easiy. I’m foreseeing lots of abuse of the new system. One annoyance I can see is that people and maybe even companies will be spamming friend requests. So I’m hoping that Digg will not be emailing me every time someone wants to friend me. One thing to look forward to is the amount of messages you will receive in your Digg inbox that will all read “DIGG THIS STORY!!!”.

BusinessWeek also reported that the Pictures section will be added to Digg sometime in October. So all those people who have been asking for it will now get their wish. The reason I’m a fan of adding the pictures section is based on the fact that I hate when images make it too the frontpage of Digg. Digg’s frontpage should have actual articles on it.

I’ll be checking up on Digg all day to see when these new features come out.

Click for the BusinessWeek article

Popularity: 24% [?]