Seeing Forests

I just took a bike ride but before I left I thought I’d get a GPS app for my iPhone (which took about 5 minutes from formal need recognition to cognitive dissonance resolution).  I opted for the most downloaded app from MotionX.  I was just looking for something to track my route around the lower southwestern quadrant of Metropolitan Denver.  I wasn’t quite banking on all I found on this app, notably my ability to login with Facebook and to follow the company on Twitter.  I mean, come on.  I’m just riding a bicycle.  But it does point up how applications are being deconstructed into focused, value-added services and kind of “websourcing” all the other needed services for identity (Facebook), status (Twitter), and images (Flickr).  It’s the theme of Gluecon (which I think use to be Defrag).   Pretty soon 9 year olds are going to be able to build apps.

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I know this was a typo, Turing YP Sites into Recommendations Engines at Screenwerk but I wouldn’t hesitate to say Greg is not only purposefully but accidentally prescient.  His post was precipitated by Sebastien’s post I Have Seen the Future of Local Media (and it is us, if I might say, with a little nod to Pogo - we have met the enemy and he is us).  Yep, no doubt the time is coming where it is as easy to ask for recommendations from friends online as it is in person.  As we go online we have the benefit of asking progressively larger and proportionately more socially distant groups of people for their opinions.  What you gain in numbers you lose in relevancy as the larger and further you go the less people know about you and the particular relevance of recommendations to you personally.  This is why I do agree that building a recommendation framework within YP sites is the way to go.  I see the future distinction between YP and Search Engines like Google in much the same way I see the distinction between Google and WolframAlpha.  One does text search through documents the other does query resolution through databases.  A simplification, for sure, but it points in the direction of how YP needs to move from business name lookup (already lost to Google) and simple category perusal (rapidly losing to Google and verticals) to more of an on-going problem-solving partner.  In that case, YP has an advantage if it’s able to leverage more knowledge of its users, to become one of their trusted partners, to become the hub of the recommendation network for consumers.  I see a combination of a social recommendation network and a problem-solving recommendation engine that can support word-of-mouth, facilitate merchant participation and provide a place for an intelligent third-party broker.  I doubt such a thing would pass the Turing Test, but it would be an intelligent step forward.

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It’s reassuring to know that the U.S. Army Blue Team at the cyberwar games being held at West Point are using Linux.  If they were using Windows I would be recommending most of us North Americans brush up on Sino-Slavic languages.

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Now, THIS is Microlocal (I refuse the term Hyperlocal).  I think this is hysterical and wonderful at the same time.  An ex-colleague @shaderlab tweeted about this (brilliant graphic designer AND extraordinary hacker).  I personally relate because I am looking forward to my neighbors cherry tree coming into fruit and lament the fact that I can’t scale this wall to get at this huge peach tree I know about.  But you have to love finding fruit trees by ZIP code.  Presume they’ll be geo-coded soon.  This may fall into that class of communication where you don’t want everyone to find your secret stash though (read that as cool bar, cozy restaurant, local club).  Still, I think this is great.

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As Seb and Greg have pointed out, YellowPages CA is on Twitter.  I know others are tracking this and related memes, such as coupons on Twitter for food, computers and random pig crap.  I do want to follow-up on tracking coupons on Twitter later.  As for tracking directories, first, kudos for getting out there and diving in, of course.  Seems like you’re feeling your way around on this and that’s the kind of approach I’d advocate.  Still, it feels the mix of industry and computer tweets is confusing.  I like knowing AutoTrader has a new look or Taxi Canada got an award but that’s sure different from voting on the best brunch restaurant in Montreal or how to ask your social network for recommendations on Canadian businesses.  Assume at some point will start tracking different tweeters, one for industry and one for consumers (and one for the SME presumably).  Do like the consumer use focused on recommendations (and voting).  More machinery there is going to be interesting.  One thing that seems really useful would be simply a stream announcing new businesses - like restaurants specifically.  As the definitive source for such information (well, maybe the telcos themselves) this must be in the pipeline.  Looking forward to it.

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I was ruminating as to why skype never became twitter (or facebook for that matter) earlier today.  It’s communication vs community, I understand.   I am more interested in why one takes an existing paradigm to a new medium while the other creates a new paradigm in the new medium.  I was carrying out this rumination on my wall in facebook wondering why I didn’t have a wall in skype to do the same thing.  It seems like it might be easier for skype to build more of the features of facebook than for facebook to build more of the features of skype.  It may be too late for skype to do that though (although re-creating yelp in skype does seem to have some promise).  It’s just that so many of our behaviors have been segmented by isolated technologies for so long that we don’t quite know what to do when these technologies merge.  Although it does seem like the behaviors are somewhat invariant.  Sebastien turned me onto an old NY Times article about the growth of the telephone around 1917.  That got me to digging a bit more and I found this article on the growth of the telephone service.  I thought the descriptions of how the phone seemed to “used unnecessarily” and even “abused” as well as that its “sharp alarm jars on the nerves” and its “insistent demands” are “very wearing”.  Sounds like a twitter morning.

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I occasionally rant about unforeseen substitutes and new entrants into the competitive local mix (have to get some value out of my 20 year-old Porter book). Although out for a while, OmniFocus, the GTD tool from the OmniGroup (maker of fine Mac drawing, outlining and planning tools) has the capability to do business search embedded within its iPhone application.  What’s useful is that it will re-issue the search given your current location and find the nearest set of locations matching your search.  I’ve kind of cheated here and insured that the searches were for “can’t miss” business names (where did King Soopers come from?).  What’s difficult here is that things have to fit into the Getting Things Done paradigm so getting this kind of behavior to happen takes some work (locations only go with contexts, each business has to be a context, each of those contexts needs locations associated with them, etc.)  Do believe this is on a correct tangent.  It’s just that I can’t imagine many people are using it this way as it takes a GED in GTD to get er done.  More to come…

Local Search in the Getting Things Done framework.

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I just got turned onto Ruba by Bowman.  Wow.  Nice work.  It’s Yet-Another-Travel-Guide creation tool but they got one thing down - FAST.  And I mean speed of guide creation.  Basic Step-by-Step process but what I really loved at first was my trying to create a guide for Amsterdam and added the Dylan Hotel.  Immediately geo-coded the hotel accurately and then presented a set of pictures for me to add - all of which were obviously the Dylan Hotel.  Then, in order to save the guide, I was required to setup an account - or, naturally, login with Facebook.  One-click (finally Single Sign On?!?) and I was done.  Had to be less than 60 seconds start-to-finish.  Now, THAT’S fresh.

And as an update I just tried to find “Five Flies” in Amsterdam.  Frakking thing translated that correctly to the top choice - d’Vijff Vlieghen - one of most expensive taste-free meals I’ve ever had.

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I really liked Sebastien’s summary of Malcolm Gladwell’s presentation at YPA.  The three principle themes of framing, connectors and mavens are clearly worth contemplation.  My first reaction is normally, yeah, yeah, people who know a lot and/or know a lot of people are important.  We know that.  But when it’s put into this context (and with this kind of story-telling) it give things a needed freshness.  I agree with Seb about the importance of connectors and mavens and their clear relevance to social networking.   I’m not quite ready to concede the re-framing though.  Malcolm’s admonition that YP’s framing is “we buy from people we trust” just doesn’t seem to be on par with the analogy in his story, that Sarnoff changed the frame of reference of radio from “reporting news” to “bringing the world live into your living room”.  To me, this kind of “global impact” is the kind of re-framing that YP needs.  It’s a vibrancy, and immediacy, and an authenticity that’s at the heart of this opportunity.  And it’s nothing that giant iron robot that is Google has any concern over.  

(As an aside, I think it’s a little bit of synchronicity here that I just posted personally about outdated phrases in our language caused by fading technologies like radio).

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Sebastien quotes Seth Godin: “Google is the Yellow Pages” and I’m thinking not-so-much and not-quite-yet.  Although that’s a good quote, I think the arguments behind it are a bit specious, particularly his “completeness of data” argument.  I don’t know about you, Seth, but I’ve driven around with my iPhone open to Google Maps trying to find a FedEx (taken to the corporate shipping facility), any Camera store (taken to home photography studios), or home movers (taken to a company that literally moves entire houses by putting them on frakking trucks).  So, no, completeness of data (really the reliance upon syntax rather than semantics) doesn’t quite cut it to derive Google = Yellow Pages.  Yellow should be all about understanding and acting upon intent.   Simply having a database of intentions doesn’t mean you know what to do with them. 

Don’t get me wrong.  Google is getting it done when it comes to straight-up business name lookups.  That’s an ecosystem that YP has to live with and leverage effectively.  I just think there are going to be a lot more opportunities for intelligent applications that the YP industry (or its derivative) can supply.   Whatever happens, I do feel confident that I’m not going to exist in a “private network based around ZIP codes” in the future though.  ZIP Codes?  ZIP Codes?  Talk about dinosaurs, print directories, and daily general newspapers…ZIP Codes?  Where’s Jim Sterne when you need him?  B)

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