VentureBeat has a decent rundown of the news that Facebook is opening up their status APIs which prompted a lot of “ultimate social gesture. But so far the big players, FriendFeed, Twitter, and Facebook have failed because what’s missing is the geo aspect.
We’ve gotten to the point where people consider photos almost incomplete without some kind of geotagging. Most of the major sites support it and devices with cameras and GPSes, like the iPhone, support it by default. So why aren’t we there with status? Brightkite shows the value this can have. Take a look at a place and you can get a history of everything that’s happened there. But location associated with status is important because status is so real time. Don’t I also want to know what my friend is doing and where they’re doing it? (privacy controls enabled of course) Part of the brilliance of Twitter is that it’s so simple, but geotagging could be very easily done almost invisibly to the users who want to use it.
I think everything on Facebook should be “geoized” – I think they should buy Brightkite – because by adding the location dimension you open up new ways to advertise, new ways to visualize, and more importantly, new ways to connect. See what your friends had to say about where you are now, see what they’re doing right now and whether or not they’re close. Find out if there’s someone in your network at the same restaurant you’re in. Status providers need to embrace location for it to move to the next level.
A couple of weeks ago Mindjet released an online version of their mind mapping software built entirely on the Flash Platform. It’s a pretty slick app but I also like how they’ve made it part of their core offering and added features like real-time collaboration and web conferencing/chat inside the app. One of the things about Flash is that it makes it really easy to incorporate those into your application and mind mapping is a great use case.
