January – 2010 – Steffan Antonas

Here Come The GeoWeb Wars

One of the very first apps I downloaded on the iPhone was Around Me, and it’s still one of my go-to’s. It’s simple and it does exactly what the name implies – it finds your location and shows you all the critical services around you — banks, coffee shops, bars, gas stations, hospitals, movie theaters, restaurants and so on. It comes through in the clutch whenever I’m in an area that I don’t know well, which makes it an indispensable travel tool. It makes you a local expert in less than a few minutes. At a conference in a new city and want coffee? Instead of wasting time asking strangers, you’re already on your way to the Starbucks that’s around the corner, exactly 119 yards away. Need an ATM? Gas? Medication at a pharmacy? Hungry and want to know what your meal options are in a 2-3 block radius? You get the picture. The app orders the services by their proximity to you and gives you quick access to mapped directions, and touch-to-call phone info. The latest release also includes Twitter and Facebook integration so you can share the location of meeting spots or recommendations etc with your friends. Enough said. For this app alone, it’s worth moving to an iPhone.

Here’s a quick video overview of what the app does.

Expect Competition For Geolocation Services To Heat Up This Year

There have been a lot of apps like Around Me to hit mobile devices over the past 12 months. Google (of course) is the sleeping giant for geoweb services and they’ve started to release location based offerings this week that will start to challenge the space and put the squeeze on smaller players. Last week Google announced a mobile search service called “Near Me Now” that makes their mobile search page location aware, giving mobile users access to a lot of the same type of information that apps like Around Me do.

Yesterday, Google also announced Place Pages targeting local businesses, which many believe is another maneuver meant to dethrone Yelp as the de facto resource for local venue information and customer review data. We’ll see how this one plays out. You can expect a lot of me-too players to show up very soon, so it’ll be interesting to see how (if at all) Google innovates and sets the pace. As the web gets denser and geo tagging scales up to put all the data into context, there’s going to be a lot of opportunity for innovation across the board, so we can only hope for startups to think way outside the box and give us all things we’ve never seen before. I know one thing – access to location information and maps on my iPhone has turned me into a heavy user of geoweb services in my daily life and I’m itching to see what’s coming. The war is on.

When There Is No Manual

It’s not always easy to tell who’s really leading when an entire team is just going through the motions and following procedures in a manual that they’ve all used before for similar projects. When all the variables for a project are known and the expectations and plan are clear to everyone from the very beginning, all it really takes to move things forward is keeping people motivated and on task. If everyone knows their role, and team members direct themselves to get their part done, you really only need someone to organize and report, which isn’t necessarily leading. It’s managing.

Effective leaders are the ones who take charge in a group when a task or problem is completely new, the next step isn’t obvious and there is no manual. When others hesitate and look to their peers for answers, the leaders are the ones who are busy breaking the problem down, creating structure where there is none and developing a plan that they can communicate and act on. When new problems that require novel solutions come your team’s way, take a moment and observe who everyone looks to when someone asks “what do we do now?”. Those are the people who are really leading.

BART Teams up with Foursquare to Add Some Fun For Commuters

Foursquare’s thinking outside the box. They’ve teamed up with BART to spice up the ride for commuters. This is the first example I’ve seen of a transit agency using social media.

Simple Touch Points Of Loyalty

Julie got this card in the mail the other day from our dry cleaner. It probably took them only a few minutes to write and send it. I think the card speaks for itself. Simple, personal, perfect. Handwritten notes still go a long way.

thank you note

Hacking The Flip – A Quick Lesson In Community Building

I’ve been an Flip Camera owner for about a year now. I’m actually on my second one. I started with a 60 minute Flip Mino and then sold it and upgraded to a 120 minute Ultra HD a few months ago. The great thing about The Flip cameras is the simplicity. Fits in your pocket, simple interface, drag and drop video files, easy upload to the web. The simplicity in a few minor areas, though, is also a pain. The 2x zoom is limiting and when you hold it at arms length (which is exactly what you want to do when you want to be in the shot) and it crops tight on your mug. There’s no Flip Camera yet that allows you to attach a wide angle lens. Fortunately, people on the web are quickly finding their own solutions to the problem and helping each other out by uploading YouTube videos and writing blog posts etc about how to make the camera do what they want. Do a quick Google search for “Flip Wide Angle Lens” to see what I mean. There are tons of people out there who are happily duct taping and super gluing wide angle lenses on their cameras to get what they want.

Brian Shaler‘s come up with a particularly elegant solution using a cheap magnetic lens converter…

What strikes me as odd here is that Cisco hasn’t seemed to have caught on. They might be listening, but they certainly haven’t made changes to their product based on the huge volume of “hack your flip” YouTube videos out there that tell a consistent story about what people want from their cameras. Why the hell wouldn’t you just slap a cheap lens adapter attachment on the front of one of the higher priced models and sell cheap wide-angle lenses on your site?

There’s a great lesson here about listening to the web and building community around products the right way. Connecting with your customers and building strong, loyal communities starts with understanding how people are actually using your product, not about getting them to conform to the way you want them to use it. If people want your product to do something that it doesn’t already, they will find work-arounds and share them on the web, which expose the short comings of your design AND connect your users in places where you can’t control the conversation. If I were Cisco, I’d seriously consider creating social spaces online for their hacker community to share their content. There’s obviously a large segment of people who are so happy with their Flips that they’re willing to SUPER GLUE bits and pieces on the front and keep on shooting away. If you give those individuals a place to find each other, they all find the best hack, and they’ll be happier customers for it. And guess what…if Cisco joined in the conversation in these spaces and reached out to their hackers, empathized and told them that they’re working on the issue, they could direct those individuals to sign up for a free email notification list where they could find out about new product releases and Cisco would suddenly have a hyper targeted group of loyal customers to tap on launch days that they could easily please with special launch day offers etc etc.

Smart companies treat feedback groups (like the Flip Hackers) as an asset that can be nurtured, developed and used to their advantage. Strong, loyal communities don’t have to start out as die hard fans.

Three Themes For 2010

I’ve decided to ditch the idea of new years resolutions this year and focus instead on three key themes. Here they are:

Limiting Myself To The Essential

I read Leo Babauta’s book The Power of Less late last year and it had a surprisingly profound affect on me. I didn’t have any major “ah-ha!” moments while getting through the book. It’s all pretty intuitive stuff. What did happen was that in the weeks after I read the book I started noticing some of my…let’s say, “sub optimal” habits repeat themselves while I was doing the hum-drum, day-to-day stuff that I normally don’t think much about – little things like checking my email first thing in the morning or before I sit down to work. I realized that the little stuff can have a big impact on my work flow and that I spend more time than I should on some activities that break my momentum, distract me when I’m focusing, drain my energy and don’t help move my important projects forward. In 2010 I want to work on blocking out clutter and distractions, and focusing on just the activities and habits that help me achieve my goals, improve my relationships and keep me on track. Optimization is what 2010 is going to be about. Wish me luck with this one. ;-)

Deep practice

There are a number of things I’ve always wanted to be really good at that I’m “just OK” at right now because I haven’t made achieving expertise in those areas a priority (yet). There are a few core skills that I want to actively develop in 2010. In a few cases it may take over 10,000 hours of effort to get me to the level of proficiency that I’ve always wanted, which is why I never really committed myself in the first place. I’m shifting my approach and putting some long term learning goals on the high priority list. The marathon towards expertise starts now.

Shipping

I’ve always had an insatiable desire to learn. The problem is that my free time is limited these days, and my curiosity isn’t, so I spend more time than I should Googling, reading blogs, taking on new projects that get half done, or buying books that don’t get finished. Doing 80% of 10 things isn’t progress. It just means that nothing got 100% done. Time to put more time into fewer projects and focus on the essential activities that help me wrap up projects and ship content. And there you go…we’ve gone full circle.

What are your themes for 2010?

Best of 2009

2009 2009 was a great year for me and this blog. I had a ton of fun writing, I learned a lot and I got the opportunity to meet and work with a whole host of really smart, engaging people who opened my eyes and inspired me. In this post I’d like to take a moment to reflect on 2009, share some links and thank the people who really made an impact on me this year. Here’s my best of 2009:

My Top 10 Posts of 2009:

#1. Did Mark Zuckerberg’s Inspiration for Facebook Come Before Harvard? – A special thank you to Richard MacManus for giving me the opportunity to guest post on ReadWriteWeb earlier this year. The Facebook back story has become a growing obsession of mine since the release of Ben Mezrich’s book Accidental Billionaires: The Founding Of Facebook A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal. I did a considerable amount of journalistic research before the release of Ben’s book digging at where the idea for Facebook originated that lead to the article that went up on ReadWriteWeb. Fortunately, the syndication of the article onto the NYTimes (that my Mom was particularly proud of ;-)) surfaced a whole network of people who were around Mark Zuckerberg at the very beginning, before Harvard. There’s still some non-trivial elements of the Facebook story that run the risk of not make it into the history books, so my research is on-going. Stay tuned for some exciting stuff in 2010 on that front.

#2 Focusing On Value: How I’m Changing How I Use Twitter : By far the most popular article on this blog this year by measure of Tweets and comments. Thanks to everyone who contributed to the discussion and a special shout out to Nate Ritter, who started the conversation that led to the post.

#3 100+ Killer WordPress Resources: Even though I wrote this in late 2008, it was still the most heavily traffic’d post on my blog in 2009. Chalk that up to some good SEO that get’s me in the top 3 positions for the term “WordPress Resources” on Google.

#4 The Best Techniques For Building Your Tribe On Twitter The Right Way: A lot has changed with Twitter since I wrote this article, but much of it is still useful. I still use most of these tools and methods regularly.

#5 Emergence: What Developers and Entrepreneurs Can Learn From The Evolution Of The Retweet: What matters is not what your software can do, but how people use it. Culture on the web is constantly shifting. Entrepreneurs should watch changes in usage patterns to maximize value for users.

#6 How To Say Thank You On The Social Web: There’s an ingrained culture of reciprocity out there on the web that has it’s own currency. This post offers you some tips on the unwritten rules for participating.

#7 Status Culture – Public vs Private and Why It Matters – Discusses the difference between how we use different platforms to share our content, and how those differences shape online culture, the way we behave, and the evolution of systems and who plays.

#8 The Cookie Jar Principle – a short post with a useful metaphor on how we should approach relationships. I was happy this caught on and got handed around.

#9 Built It, Then Make Them Experts – Principals and best practices we can take from the video gaming industry that startups and software developers can use to accelerate adoption and customer happiness.

#10 How To Use Google Trends Like A Pro – A few great tips on how to take your Googling to the next level.

Giving Thanks – People Who Made A Big Difference To My Life in 2009:

This isn’t an exhaustive list by any means, but here are a few people who deserve a tip of the hat.

Alex Iskold and Fraser Kelton – I met Alex and Fraser when I sent their startup AdaptiveBlue a harmless feedback email back in 2007. That single email has (arguably) had a greater impact on my life than any single piece of web writing I’ve done to date. It started a string of online conversations that has turned into two friendships. Both Alex and Fraser have individually gone out of their way to help me out on several occasions when I needed it and I owe them each a debt of gratitude for coming through for me in the clutch. I wish both of you (together and individually) great success in 2010.

Nate Ritter – I met Nate at a Tweetup at the beginning of the year in San Diego after reading about him in Wired the year before. He’s genuine, brilliant and he’s become a great friend. He is also the best person to have in the room when someone says “Anyone up for Guitar Hero?”.

Mark Lovett – At the beginning of this year, Mark and I met for lunch. He told me he was starting a blog. I had no idea how committed he was or how much he would inspire me. This year I’ve enjoyed joining others in having important discussions on his site GlobalPatriot and watched Mark rapidly grow his online presence, run ultra-successful fundraisers and meetups. He’s a person to watch in 2010.

Angie Swartz – In between running her new company SquareMartinimedia, her blog SixFigureMomsClub and speaking at events around the country, she was kind enough to invite me as a guest a few times on to her radio show TwitterTalk radio. I had a blast. Special thanks to Angie for great times at the meetups that I attended this year. She always goes out of her way to say hello and strike up great conversation.

Clay Hebert – Clay is the founder of Tribes Win and co-founder of Fear.less online magazine. He’s great to chat and share ideas with. He writes a great blog and has a unique way of looking at the world that I totally appreciate. I expect to see a lot more from him in 2010.

Ryan Graves – Ryan’s become somewhat of a partner in crime on the web. His stamina for writing and producing content consistently impresses me. He’s always up to something. We started out blogging at almost exactly the same time in 2007 and I’m on his blog a lot – his stuff is full of energy and he writes almost daily.

Vada Dean & Matthew Clower – Expect these two gentlemen to make waves in 2010. It’s been great getting to know you both. Matthew, thank you for making important connections happen at the precise moment I needed them. Vada, thank you for the many insights you consistently add here on this blog.

Alex Rainert – Alex writes a great blog called EveryDayUX.com that I frequent. Damn good stuff. Recommended reading for any design junky.

Christian Messer – I’ve been aware of Christian on Twitter since 2007. From the very beginning I singled him out because he was posting things that I found useful. I learned more from his links in terms of design than almost any other person on Twitter. Check him out @whiplashdesign.

That’s it from me for now. Many thanks to all the people online who helped me learn this year and who’ve taken the time to leave thoughtful comments on this blog and connect over the web. I’ve reached out to most of you individually to express my gratitude, but I haven’t gotten to you all yet, but don’t worry, I’ll get to you soon enough. That’s something I’m going to do much more of in 2010. Happy new year, everyone.

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Month January 2010