With the world of location based services, including Foursquare and Gowalla, getting a lot of discussion of late, especially as news comes that Facebook will soon check in with its own offering, Louis Gray and Chris Saad discuss the purpose today's services serve, and how we both leverage Foursquare - the current app of choice.

Are these services here to stay, and should they be used to show all of one's comings and goings, or just major points of interest? Chris argues Foursquare should be used in a social way, while Louis is enjoying checking in from the mundane places in life. Meanwhile, we debate the true nature of "cheating", and whether it is acceptable or not.

Much of this discussion stems my recent post: Are You Filtering Checkins to Enhance Your Image?

Referenced in addition to Foursquare, Gowalla and Facebook are Twitter, Stalqer and The Cadmus. Chris is an advisor to Stalqer.

This and all other EdgeTheory conversations can be found on the dedicated ET Conversations site.

Listen to the full recording below:

The Internet is a big place, and there are a lot of opportunities for me to find places to spend time. But I am increasingly spending my time in Google Buzz. Google Buzz made sense to me from the first day it was launched, and it continues to improve. This is not a surprise to those of you who have been using the service in the last few months, but I thought I would explain why I am choosing to devote more of my social networking activity there, and why I think it is critical that the product succeed.

I often hear people call me a "power user" of Buzz, if there is such a thing. I've been called an active power user of other great products, including Google Reader and FriendFeed for a few years now, so I can't fight the label. What this does mean is that I get an opportunity to engage with a greater number of people than most, and I get more feedback on data that I share than most. But I hope this also means that I am working to make the experience I help provide in Buzz a better one, not just for me, but for all those people who are impacted by my activity there - whether you are reading the shared content provided, whether you run into my comments from various others, or even if you are a content provider who has seen visitors to your site come from Buzz thanks to my recommendations.

As social networkers, solicitations for our attention and time from various networks are constant. Various friends of ours may participate in one network, and some in others. Some Web services may make it easy to provide short updates, and other platforms make it easy to share longer thoughts. Some Web services are dedicated to specific use cases for rich media - be it videos, photos or audio. Each of us has to choose where we spend our time - and whether we think that our actions are being seen by the right people at the right time in the right context. We also need to think about whether our participating in a specific place is an endorsement of the platform, the community or the company providing the service.

For me, it is important that a social network where I want to spend time:

1. Doesn't try to limit what I can share, in terms of content type or length.
2. Makes the content that I share open and discoverable by anyone.
3. Has a community of similar people interested in similar things.
4. Has an intelligent community willing to discuss new ideas and technology.
5. Is led by a sharp team committed to improving the platform.

Given the above, I am also separating what I see as "tools" and "communities".

For example: I think Twitter is a fantastic tool, and it is one of the best tools for sending short updates as a broadcast medium to share links and to communicate with others, in public. But it is not a community where I want to spend a lot of time. Its very limits in terms of characters, and the inability to share rich media in line are severe limitations. I believe Twitter is much like a dial tone for short-message social networking, and is as necessary as an e-mail address, but it is not a platform where I want to spend a lot of time.

Similarly, Facebook is a necessary evil. The vast network is not a place where I want to spend a lot of time. It is, however, a place where my family and other close friends choose to operate, so I can quickly glance at their activity there and be updated. But my visits there are brief and superficial, as I do not participate in their viral gaming platform, and do not rally around events, causes, and fan pages.

In 2008 especially, and through the first half of 2009, I thought that answer was FriendFeed. FriendFeed offered a major alternative to limited social networking. The ability to grab all my updates in one place, and follow my friends' updates in the same network, was a game changer. It was the first to get aggregation right, add smart filters, intelligent search, lists, real-time and much more. The community on FriendFeed, was fantastic, and many good people still use it. But momentum on the site dragged, and the sale to Facebook pretty much confirmed what many thought - that it would never achieve its potential. Still a fantastic site with great features, it's practically been abandoned by its core development team and left to coast.

Google Buzz offers the same potential FriendFeed once had, but is driven by a company that appears committed to making it succeed. There are regular updates to Buzz. I have seen some of the sharpest engineers on Google working to make this a success, and the community regularly has interesting discussions on a wide variety of topics. Rather than take potshots at the Buzz team for missing features I once enjoyed at FriendFeed, I trust they know of the current product gaps, and are pushing them through a rigorous development cycle.

Meanwhile, the other major players in this space aren't going the way I want. Twitter is becoming a more robust and extensible platform, but they seem married to their limitations in terms of content. Facebook has added many FriendFeed-like features, but they have also acted in a way that makes me uncomfortable in terms of changing the rules of privacy in the middle of the game, while also locking away other pieces of content that should, in my mind, be public. In my position as somebody who manages Facebook pages for multiple clients, I could never delete my account (and leave them rudderless), but simply expect that all my data there will be discoverable and public and searchable, despite their promises to the contrary.

The world of social networking is not a zero-sum game. For Buzz to succeed does not mean that either of the other networks have to fail. In fact, it doesn't even mean that Buzz has to be the biggest network on the planet. But it does mean that it should have the potential to be the best. I need a powerful aggregation tool that watches my activity on Google Reader and native blogs, but also offers the option to share photos and videos in a public way. Buzz does that. I need a powerful tool that lets me find friends' updates from around the Web and engage with them in a central location. Buzz does that.

Many people have voiced concern about Google being a large company that has an incredible amount of our data already, or is a platform for many of the applications and Web services we use every day. While this is true, the tremendous amount of openness I have seen from the company and its employees on this network and on others is something unparalleled by any of its competitors. These employees, many of whom I consider acquaintances and friends now, share the same ideals I do - working to expand open standards and keep us in control of our data.

I do not want a world where the only social networks available are Facebook and Twitter. I don't trust Microsoft or Yahoo! to do a good enough job to provide a real alternative, and I don't think Apple wants to. LinkedIn won't transform overnight, and Plaxo is not a candidate. Cisco and other companies aren't even close. So Google provides us the only real alternative to these two networks, and looks to be on the right path, talking openly about privacy, data security, and openness.

I am committed to using the best tools for the job. I am not paid by any of the companies I mentioned, and don't expect to be. I am increasingly using Buzz instead of FriendFeed, and have not been attracted to use Facebook more in the ensuing months. Yes, I have many ideas for Buzz to improve, and I have shared with them some of those ideas. But even as they continue to slave away at their code and make the product place better and better, I will keep sharing and discussing solid content there. You can find me at http://www.google.com/profiles/louisgray.

Social media measurement and tracking firm Scout Labs is set to be acquired by Lithium, a provider of social CRM and community solutions. The deal, first mentioned by Mike Arrington on TechCrunch, is confirmed and will be announced officially on Tuesday of next week. I spoke with the company's vice president of product, Margaret Francis (@margaretfrancis), tonight, and she said the companies will be working together to combine Scout Labs' social monitoring capabilities with Lithium's more community-oriented tools. In addition, the combined company, which will have approximately 140 employees, will be better resourced to serve larger customers - something Scout Labs has been straining to do with its small team.

While terms of the deal were not disclosed, TechCrunch's estimated range of $20-$25 million was said to be in the ballpark, and Francis termed the buy as "pretty much the biggest deal that has happened in the social media space," adding "as a multiple on revenue, this is pretty great." She added that Scout Labs had spoken with other potential acquirers in the first quarter of 2010, and some were taken aback at the company's relatively high valuation when compared to their revenue. "Some of their jaws dropped to the floor," she said.

As I mentioned last night, when discussing SocialPing, Scout Labs is one of a small list of enterprise quality providers of social media measurement, in the same breath as Alterian and Radian6. But the company had just short of 20 employees, and the product, while very robust, did not have enough resources behind it to serve larger customers. While Lithium, started by former Gamers.com co-founder Lyle Fong, had a smaller customer base than Scout Labs, they were better positioned for big clients, including HP and Barnes & Noble - which led to them being a lot more profitable than Scout Labs as well.

Scout Labs' offerings served to give a solid picture in aggregate of what people say about your brand, "but it is a lot cooler to tie it to your Web data and your CRM," Francis said.

The price tag for Scout Labs is nice, but not one that looks to see the company's employees taking extended vacations any time soon - and it doesn't sound like they want to, if today's call was any indication.

"Every employee is sticking around for this, and we are highly incentivized to do so," Francis said. "They knew they needed us, and it feels like that."

While there are other players, like Radian6 and Alterian, in this space, Scout Labs believes that marketers are extremely underserved in terms of applications and true business intelligence. One wrinkle that could help going forward for the new company, which will be housed in a new office on Market Street in San Francisco, is that Lithium shares a common board member with Twitter, in Peter Fenton of Benchmark Capital. This could potentially help the company gain access to the valuable Twitter stream in full for data mining.

"We have been negotiating with Twitter for access to data for some time," Francis said. "We want what Google has, and we are pretty happy about the board relationships with Twitter."

More details should be made available this upcoming Tuesday. Until then, you can find Scout Labs at http://scoutlabs.com/ and Lithium at http://www.lithium.com/.

The LDS (or Mormon) church and its nearly 14 million members worldwide, including myself and my family, has been among the most active and forward-thinking religions in terms of utilizing technology and the World Wide Web to share information about their beliefs, materials and news. The church's twice-annual worldwide meetings are streamed live on the Web and played on a dedicated cable channel, and church materials, including scriptures and religious magazines, are indexed and searchable - and its dedication to genealogy and family history is legendary. Now, the church is taking an even greater step into social networking, by opening up its Mormon.org Web property for church members to post their own user profiles, including links to personal social sites, including Facebook, Twitter and blogs.

The church's growth now extends to members in approximately 176 countries worldwide, and the majority of "Mormons" are now outside of the United States. This has no doubt been a contributing element to the church's planned relaunch of Mormon.org and the inclusion of member profiles, that should highlight members "diverse backgrounds and experiences", as the site says in a quick description, which says the new features will launch this summer in English, with other languages following soon after.


The new profiles, which can be created today by registered LDS members, highlight personal backgrounds and encourage users to share their religious foundation - including answering frequently asked questions about the often mis-understood religion and the option to share personal stories about why they are members of the church. And once posted, the profiles look to link to other similar members, and can be searchable by a number of criteria, including gender, age and location.


While the profiles themselves look much like Facebook and other social networks, and contain links to third party social sites, including Twitter, Facebook and personal blogs, the new Mormon.org doesn't look like a new social network. It doesn't appear to have a race for friend connections, or a public wall for status updates - but it does present a new platform for personal stories and testimonies.

The site's introduction says they have a goal for 1,000 Mormon profiles by the end of May, 2010. It's a very interesting move for a church that has relied so much on its members to help spread the word and help to evangelize its message, and taps into people's willingness to increasingly share their lives online.