Socialight / blog+news

Riding high on the news of their acquisition by Nokia for $8.1 billion, NAVTEQ is explaining the future of the location services industry with more clarity than I’ve ever heard from them before. I’ve been attending NAVTEQ-sponsored events for 3 years now, but this morning at their NAVTEQ Connections 2007 meeting in San Francisco, I’m finally hearing a vision that truly resonates, and I’m hearing it loud and clear.

Here’s what caught my attention during Winston Guillory’s (SVP, Consumer and Enterprise Sales) keynote:

• The end-user will have an important role as a source of data. It’s no longer just about getting content to the consumer; users collecting location-based content is an important piece of the puzzle and that’s a big part of why the Nokia marriage makes sense.
• Valuable content changes over time. This isn’t by any means a new realization, but today, it’s finally realistic to build products incorporating live location-based content streams.
• Pedestrian consumption is a huge growth area. Last year, NAVTEQ announced a renewed focus on pedestrian routing. Now they’re starting to talk seriously about pedestrian consumption of content not just for routing, but live content, filtered through the sources you trust, delivered to you when you’re in the city. I think that with the growing growing proportion of the world’s population that’s urban and the growing mobile youth market, this sector will continue to gain in importance.

Yahoo’s Pipes is a visual mashup tool for RSS, GeoRSS and now KML feeds. Pipes has a super slick interface that lets you drag and drop feeds onto each other and their latest release from today adds support for extracting location from GeoRSS or KML feeds. What this means is that any Pipe that contains GeoData is automatically displayed using a Yahoo Map and that you can also get the output for any pipe as KML - which lets anyone make mashups with geographical and then view them in Google Earth. I made a pipe that searches for pictures on Flickr based on the content of Sticky Notes from Socialight. If you want to, you can even check out what it looks like in Google Earth.

We’re really excited that the Pipes team used Socialight in one of their examples - but the others rock too - check them out on the official Pipes blog or in Brady Forrest’s post on the O’Reilly Radar.

I love hearing about the innovative ways people are using social software. Humans are, by nature, social beings so when we hook up special software to enhance our social proclivities, we can work together to do amazing things. While we’re here at Socialight using social software to connect messages and pictures to place, people to place, people to people, and sometimes even place to place, there are people out there using social software for all kinds of new stuff.

Recently, I listened to this podcast about an initiative out of New York Law School called The Peer to Patent Project aiming to fix the US patent office review process. Many consider the process broken since there are multi-year backlogs of applications pending review. As a result many patents that shouldn’t be granted are, and those that should usually take years to get through the process. Peer to Patent, which has financial backing from the likes of GE and IBM, seems like a brilliant use of social software. It also could have huge positive effects on innovation and business. Essentially, the project’s aim is to design and pilot an online system for peer review of patents with integrated social reputation, collaborative filtering, and information visualization tools.

At Socialight, we’re harnessing the power of social software, and using some of the same social tools, for another new application: location-based communication. Our goal is to give people a tool for learning and communicating about, and through, place. Social software makes this work since we inhabit the same spaces as many other people but often care more about what the people we trust, like our friends and people with common interests, have to say about those places. It helps us figure out what gets shown to different people in different places. Without the filter, you’d be inundated with lots of stuff, much of which likely uninteresting to you. On Socialight, especially on our mobile interfaces, we first show you the content that’s coming from the Contacts you’ve made and the Channels you’ve joined. We also use the feedback - like ratings and comments - that you add to Sticky Notes to help figure out what others might like to see. If you haven’t already signed up and invited some Contacts to join you, we hope you give it a whirl soon and explore. Then let us know what you think.

As an early holiday gift, we’ve launched an all-new version of Socialight!

During the past few months, we’ve explored the dreams we have for Socialight and the suggestions and comments you’ve made and have done a comprehensive overhaul that we’re quite excited about. Here’s a quick overview of some of the changes:

• a brand new logo and web site design, and even a new name for our place-based messages - Sticky Notes. StickyShadows, RIP. Word.
• more ways to access Socialight while mobile - new mobile web (WAP) and text messaging (SMS) interfaces let you find and create Sticky Notes anytime, anywhere. http://socialight.com/help/mobile
• more ways to connect with other people – message users directly, post on users’ pages and invite contacts through easy address book importing.
• enhance the networks and content you’ve already got by importing GeoRSS feeds from sites like Flickr to share content from specific places. If you have your own site like a blog or a MySpace page, you can also embed Socialight widgets right there.
• tools for publishers (even you!) to create opt-in channels. WCities and Movie Locations Guide are already programming Socialight channels, with many more coming soon.

As always, we’d love to hear your feedback on anything, positive or negative. Don’t hesitate to reach out.

We hope you enjoy the upgrade!

With our happily provided permission Penelope from London Metropolitan University created this wonderful animation on Socialight: The Future of Conversation. <blush> Thanks, Penelope!

Brady Forrest just posted a podcast on O’Reilly Radar with me in which we discuss where some of the ideas for Socialight originated (23centstories shoutout!), as well as what we’re working on now and what you can look forward to in the next version. (MP3)

If you’re anywhere near San Jose next week - come say hi and meet me at the Where 2.0 Conference.

Sometimes it’s not all about mobile phones and maps for the Socialight team. Our own superstar intern, Jury Hahn, shows off The Seven Deadly Meals, her latest project at NYU’s ITP Spring Show, featured first on the latest Cool Hunting video. Congratulations, jury!