commbasics

Last week I started a series on the importance and future of geolocal (also called geosocial) apps and outlined a few of the roadblocks to success including the lack of widespread adoption of the underlying technology (smart phones), holding the interest of the audience, and the lack of community building inherent in the current options.  Today I want to look more into that last problem and how some players are overcoming it. As I said last week, the big benefit of social media is its ability to build communities through the web.  But those communities are, for the most part, virtual.  If you are in Facebook or any other platform, you have a large group of people in your network that you have never actually met face to face.  Yet, you are in contact with them regularly no matter where they are in the world.  you know a lot about them and you have several common interests.  However, try to do that on a local level with social media and you run into a p...

Recently, Dan Holden did a series on how apps are changing the face of the web which came right at the time I was considering a series on that very thing, but a bit more focused.  He's right and we need to consider how these technologies are going to affect our lives because in the modern world, the user has a greater stake in the outcome than ever.  So today we start looking at  on geolocal, or geosocial apps. These platforms are the latest darlings of the tech world.  VCs are throwing money at them like frat boys throw at strippers, the press can’t stop writing about them and, at this writing, there are more than 100 of them launched worldwide.  The biggest name, at the moment, is Foursquare , but Gowalla and Booya are making inroads and Twitter , Google and Facebook -- the gorillas of social media -- have launched their own initiatives. It’s not really a new phenomenon.  Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley launched a primitive version in Dodg...