Open up your mind and say, ahh...

Foursquare tells people where you are. A new mobile app called Forecast, which is opening to Facebook users on Tuesday, instead tells them where you will be.

Here’s how the free app for iPhone and Android works: Users make “Forecasts” that include what they plan to do and what time. Those Forecasts are broadcast to their friends, and can serve as informal invitations to join.

Friends can accept them by clicking a “me too” button, and when they arrive, they can check in the same way that they do on Foursquare. Pinnell says more than 80% of forecasts are followed through to the check-in.

“The special thing about the future is that it hasn’t happened yet,” explains CEO René J. Pinnell, “which means you can change it.”

This thing is especially special to advertisers.

It’s the reason that Google makes so much money off of search ads. When advertisers can reach people at a time they are making a decision, like searching for a dentist or declaring their desire to go out for pizza, they can influence that decision. Targeted deals and suggestions for complementary activities are both business models that work nicely with the future checkin.

For this reason, Forecast isn’t alone in its pursuit of what I call the “preemptive checkin”. Ditto, Hotlist and Crowdbeacon are just a few others.

None of these, however, dominates the concept in the same way Foursquare dominates the real-time checkin.

 

 

Guest post by Francisco Dao. Follow him on Twitter @TheMan.

My rich friends are good people. They work hard, give generously to charity and invest their money in the ideas of entrepreneurs. They are in the 1% and their work creates jobs and fuels innovation. Surely they are not to blame for the problems that we face.

My friends who are less than financially secure are also good people. They work hard to provide for their families and make a better life for their children. They are in the 99% and their work forms the backbone of America. Surely they are not to blame for the problems that we face.

And yet here we stand – a nation at the brink – each accusing the other for the ills that befall us. How did we get here? Could one group be right and the other is simply evil? If so, then which group? For I know many in both circles and I see malice in none. Perhaps I am blind. Or perhaps we have become so disconnected from one another that the absence of malice in our hearts is surpassed by the absence of empathy.

Most of us believe that people can be categorized as good or evil but the truth is we are an amalgam of both. Our founding fathers created a land of freedom while they owned slaves. Our enemies plot our downfall while they care for their mothers and children. There is neither absolute good nor absolute evil. We are both and neither. And while it may be difficult to admit it to ourselves, who we are and what we do are largely a matter of circumstance.

As the right and left have pulled us apart, Tea Party vs. Occupy Wall Street, weʼve been conditioned to view the other side as less. It starts as less industrious or less moral, but soon it becomes less worthy, less valuable and finally less human. When this happens it becomes far too easy to subjugate each other as a matter of “right.” Like the pigs in Animal Farm we become indistinguishable from the oppressors that we despise.

I am no Pollyanna and the Bernie Madoffʼs and Octomomʼs who take advantage of the system on both ends of the spectrum deserve no favor. But itʼs time to end this categorization that now strips us of our empathy. No more blaming the rich. No more blaming the poor. No more blaming anyone by any other label. For when all of these labels are washed away we are just people. People who share dreams and values that are far more similar than weʼve been led to believe. Itʼs time to look at the faces of those weʼve blamed for Americaʼs woes and see them for who they are: mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters and children. We are they and they are us. I fear we have already lost our empathy and if we donʼt find a way, we may find ourselves a nation stripped of our humanity.

Please share your thoughts. Where are we and where are we going?

Francisco Dao is the founder of 50Kings, a private community for technology and media innovators. He is a former leadership columnist for Inc.com, a lifelong entrepreneur, author and former stand-up comic.

Max Jeffrey is a serial entrepreneur, podcaster and novelist. He co-founded ThisWeekIn.com, ZeroDegrees, SuperSig and The Palace and is currently writing the sequel to Max Quick: The Pocket and the Pendant (HarperCollins, 2011).

The last few months have seen an explosive resurgence in real-time environments, last popular in the late ’90s. The interesting thing is that this new zeitgeist seems to have taken root in multiple places within the space of a few short weeks.

I’ve seen this all before: I was one of the founders of an avatar chat company called The Palace, Inc. back in 1995. Although quite popular (10 million users at its peak in 1998), The Palace never found a revenue stream that worked. As Jake Winebaum once told me, Palace was a phenomenon, not a business. He was right. But that was then, and this is now.

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The New Real-Time Landscape

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Let’s examine a few examples. Avatar-based chat room Shaker took the gold two weeks ago at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference. Created as a Facebook app, Shaker lets users enter an isometric environment that resembles a bar. You can see and interact with other fully articulated avatars that look like mannequins. Users can chat, dance, give other users virtual drinks, see which of your Facebook friends are nearby and invite them to join the party. There is no “point” to Shaker interaction; it’s simply fun and engaging.

Then, there’s the twin phenomenon of Turntable.fm and Chill.com. Turntable lets you enter a virtual room (again with an avatar) and either DJ yourself or listen to other users select music. Chill is much the same idea, only it showcases YouTube videos or real-time streamed events. The idea behind both is shared media consumption while chatting with friends as you watch or listen together. If you recall the ’90s show Mystery Science Theatre 3000, you’ll know what I mean.

Worlize.com is perhaps the most Palace-like of the real-time spaces. Allowing for custom avatar uploads and creation of user-owned spaces, Worlize has the expressiveness, color and “aliveness” that made the Palace tick. You can invite your friends to join from Facebook or via a tweeted link. Worlize also allows for a few tricks: embedded YouTube windows and a live feed from your webcam as an avatar option.

Google Hangouts mostly centered on video party-lines wherein users could watch YouTube videos together. And with the most recent upgrade to Google+, shared whiteboards and shared desktops were added. Clearly, Google felt that the real-time environment is where the action is.

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Real-Time Tech Has Come of Age

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So what’s going on here? Why now, and not back then?

One of the largest challenges we faced back in the ‘90s with these environments was getting people to show up at the same time. I can’t tell you how many times I saw a Palace avatar materialize, look around at the empty room and dematerialize — only to have someone else materialize minutes later. There was no way to synchronize people’s participation.

But now, Turntable.fm sends me email whenever one of the DJ’s I follow starts spinning virtual vinyl. And with the Facebook and Twitter integration of all these environments, rallying up an online party is not all that difficult anymore — they’re virtual flashmobs.

We also faced significant technical challenges back then. The Palace and its competitors required hefty standalone clients or huge Netscape plugins crowbarred into the browser. The frequent changing of avatars, room art and real-time games meant a central server needed to coordinate a large flow of information. The “lag,” as it came to be known, destroyed the illusion of being in a space with other people. Now bandwidth is cheap, content delivery networks deliver art assets quickly, and Twitter and Facebook newsfeeds have pointed the way to solutions once unimaginable.

Lastly, real-time business models have changed significantly over the years. We had three choices with the Palace: charge for the software (nobody wanted to pay because “everything’s free on the Internet!”), charge for registration codes and “extras” (same objection) or charge for advertising. In the ‘90s, however, successful advertising on webpages was akin to sorcery, let alone advertising inside this weird little universe of speech balloons and downloadable clients. We couldn’t convince anyone to advertise at volume.

But again: that was then, and this is now. Zynga and others have shown that the purchase of in-world virtual products to “pimp” your farm, castle, mafia hideout or avatar is a highly lucrative business. Chill is already experimenting with “appointment viewing” of real-time net shows. Recently, the company experimented with This Week In Venture Capital. Finally, I profess that I’ve increased my iTunes purchases thanks to all the new music I’ve discovered within Turntable.fm rooms.

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Why Now?

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Back to the original question: Why is now the right time for real-time? Why has it grabbed the collective imagination at this exact moment? Simply, it is the last great frontier in social media. It is the logical extension of an already powerful trend.

We’ve been heading this way for some time. First we had Geocities — basically static shrines to this or that topic. Then we had static profiles in Ryze and Friendster and MySpace. Better, but still stale over time. Then Facebook and Twitter materialized, making near-synchronous feeds ubiquitous. It wasn’t quite real-time, but edging in that direction.

Now we’ve finally arrived — real-time is the latest social space. The technology is there and, at last, the right psychology is in place that will make these services explode. And I, for one, welcome our new avatar overlords.

Streaming music service Songza launched apps for Android and iOS on Tuesday that are designed to make it easy for music fans to find and share digital playlists for practically any occasion.

Think of Songza as curated, hand-picked Internet radio. Like Pandora, Songza is not a stream-on-demand service (meaning, you can’t request to play a certain track or album). Unlike Pandora, Songza doesn’t impose any limitations on how much music you can listen to and it doesn’t serve any audio advertisements. Additionally, Songza doesn’t focus on creating artist based radio stations — although you can do that — instead, it focuses on connecting users with curated or peer-created mix tapes.

These playlists are organized around activities (like “Cocktail Party” or “Coding”), genres (“’70s NYC Punk” or “Math Rock”), Moods and even Culture. For instance, there is a whole playlist category dedicated to Cover Songs, featuring playlists like “More Popular Than the Original” and “Covering Cash.” The playlists are designed to capture a certain mood, event or activity.

Using the free Songza mobile app for iPhone iTunes link and Android Android Market link, users can search and browse through Songza’s expertly curated playlists, save their favorites to their phone and share what they are listening to with friends on Facebook and Twitter.

The Songza team’s previous venture, Amie Street, was acquired by Amazon.com last fall. Songza just closed a financing round led by the same investors that were previously involved in Amie Street. The company clearly has big plans for enhancing its social offerings by allowing users to share their playlists or favorites via social networks.

As it stands, Songza sees itself as a “music concierge” and a better, smarter way of handling social music discovery.

After using the iPhone app over the last 24 hours, we agree. Without a doubt, Songza has the smartest, most well thought out collection of playlists of any of the subscription music services. What we really appreciate is that it is clear that a lot of vetting has gone into creating the officially sanctioned lists. If your friends are on Songza, you can also use the app to follow the playlists they share or like and vice versa.

The one downside to Songza and its mobile app is that right now, users can only create playlists at the Songza.com website. Moreover, Songza’s licensing restrictions prevent users from listening to the playlists they create themselves.

Your friends can listen to your custom mix of ultimate Fall in New York City tunes, but you, the creator can’t. Songza’s co-founder and CEO Elias Roman told us that the company is looking at either partnering with existing on-demand subscription services such as Spotify or working out its own on-demand licensing agreement so that users can listen to their own selections.

If Songza can nail that last loop and provide users who are willing to pay with on-demand access to their own playlists, we could easily see Songza taking off in a huge way.

Still, even with the self-playlist limitations, Songza for iPhone and Android is one of the most promising mobile music apps we’ve seen all year.

Guest post by Dan Zarrella (@DanZarrella), social media scientist at HubSpot

One of the easiest ways to explain social media to newcomers is to liken it to a networking or cocktail party. The behaviors that will make you the life of the party (or a pariah) will have the same effect in social media. And we all know how painful it is to listen to someone at an event just talk about themselves all night long.

I analyzed a number of Twitter accounts and found that as the amount of Tweets containing self-referential remarks increased, the number of followers an account had decreased. Talking about yourself constantly doesn’t make you the hit of an offline cocktail party, nor does it work on Twitter.

And when I looked at ReTweets, I found that they tend to contain a much lower percentage of self-reference than Tweets over all do. Talking about yourself is not only going to reduce the amount of followers you have, it’s also un-retweetable.

When I did a survey and asked people why they chose to read specific blogs, I was told that they’re looking for bloggers specific points of view. They don’t want to hear you talk about yourself, they want to hear you talk as yourself.

If you’re launching a new product, service or feature, don’t talk only about your company and your offering. Talk about how your customers are using it, or can use it to increase their bottom line. Talk about your audience, not about yourself.

For more social media data and mythbusting, be sure to register for the Science of Social Media webinar on August 23rd

Republicans are taking to social media in an attempt to curb the Democrats’ digital momentum. Facebook is courting the red states. And a study shows that Republicans are more cohesive and effective on social networks. That’s the news from this GOP-themed edition of our weekly series looking at stories in the intersection of digital technology and politics.

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Republicans Beat Democrats on Twitter

Despite President Barack Obama’s prowess on social networks, Republicans came out ahead of Democrats when it comes to effective use of Twitter, at least in the 2010 race. That’s according to a study from the U-M School of Information and the College of Engineering. The study looked at more than 460,000 tweets — that’s three years worth of tweets from 687 candidates running for House, Senate and guberntorial seats during the 2010 midterm elections.

Republican tweets were more cohesive, covering a single basic topic. Top terms included “spending,” “bills,” “budget,” and “deficit.” Democrats sent an average of 172 fewer tweets, and they covered more diverse topics, including terms like “education,” “jobs,” “oil_spill,” “clean_energy,” “Afghanistan” and “reform.”

Tea Party Members showed more cohesion than either Democrats or Republicans. They retweeted a colleague’s message an average of 82.6 times compared with 52.3 retweets for Republicans and 40 for Democrats. Tea partiers also used hashtags an average of 753 times, while Republicans averaged 404 times and Democrats were at 196, the study said.

Facebook Courts Top Republican Candidates

The worlds most popular social network has historically leaned towards the Democrats. President Obama has 22 million fans, which is 10 times more support than the 10 declared GOP presidential candidates combined, says the Atlantic Wire. Now Facebook is working to close that huge number disparity.

“The color of the site is blue, but the color of the company is purple,” Joel Kaplan, former deputy chief of staff in the George W. Bush administration and Facebook’s current vice president of U.S. public policy, told RCP. Facebook has recruited five high-profile GOP strategists to join its outreach team in recent months.

Republican’s Hold a Twitter Debate

Following on the heels of President Obama’s Twitter town hall, Republican presidential candidates will be holding a Twitter debate on July 27 sponosored by TheTeaParty.net, reported the Washington Post.

The forum will include former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, former Sen. Rick Santorum (R,-Pa), former Gov. Gary Johnson (R,-NM), Rep. Michele Bachmann (R,-Minn), Rep. Thaddeus McCotter (R,-MIch) and Georgia businessman Herman Cain.

Images courtesy of Flickr, outtacontext, Combined Media, Truthout.org, http://www.flickr.com/photos/donkeyhotey/

What are the places and who are the people around you right now? With a new Android app called ToothTag, you should be able to get a lot more useful answers to that question.

Not only will this app find nearby restaurants, it can also tell you whether your friends are at the same party — without having to check-in. It knows where the heck you left your car. Most importantly, it is able to do all this without battery-sucking technologies like GPS.

ToothTag is a treasure trove of proximity-based information. It goes beyond regular location services and novel-but-worthless check-ins, showing you what’s in your immediate surroundings and giving you multiple options for how to make that information truly useful. Instead of GPS, it relies on Bluetooth, Near-Field-Communication (NFC), and WiFi. Power management — long the bane of innovative mobile apps — has been ToothTag’s plan from the start.

The app lets you tag Bluetooth and WiFi devices — such as headsets, laptops, mobile phones, and access points. Once these are tagged, you can set up automated actions when you’re within a given distance from them. Automated actions, such as mobile alerts or emails, can occur without your ever having to think about the app.

Here are a few examples:

• You’ve planned a night out on the town. You drive your car and street park it, using ToothTag to drop a Google Maps pin at your car’s location. When you’re ready to drive home, ToothTag lets you find your car with ease.
• You walk into an event at your favorite nightclub. You’ve tagged the joint in the app and told ToothTag to automatically check you into that location on Foursquare any time you’re there for more than 10 minutes. Hello, Mr. Mayor!
• Once you’re in the event, you open ToothTag again to find out which of your friends are already there and how you’re connected. The app shows you a Facebook friend you know well, a LinkedIn connection that you wanted to meet in person, and a Match.com prospect with a high percentage of compatibility with you — all in a single, scrollable list on your mobile.
• You’ve been trying to connect with a special someone for a while, and you’ve tagged her mobile in ToothTag. Unbeknownst to you — but knownst to ToothTag — she’s at the same event as you. ToothTag automatically rings your phone to alert you that Ms. Right has entered the building. The app also tells your phone to fire up Iron Maiden’s “Run to the Hills” when your ex walks into the party, a clever alert you set up to avoid drama.

ToothTag is free for consumers, and it’s available right now in the Android Market. Creator Dave “Gadget Guy” Mathews says his company, NeuAer will be working on an iPhone version, but ToothTag’s system requirements aren’t entirely met by the iPhone 4.

The app is built on a unique proximity platform called, interestingly enough, ProxPlatform. This platform will allow devs to add “presence events” to their applications.

ToothTag, as a free consumer app, is meant to serve as a use case for what ProxPlatform is capable of doing. The possibilities are exciting as they are lucrative. ToothTag’s features could be tweaked for AR mobile gaming, mobile commerce and other types of mobile apps. Mathews and team hope to make money from the proximity platform rather than the consumer app. They plan to introduce a MySQL-style freemium model soon.

Android users, let us know whether or not you like it, and what features or functions you’d like to see in upcoming versions.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, sjlocke

I receive a lot of questions about various points of etiquette with regards to social media. I also observe instances where I wish people knew some of the more common etiquette, because they seem like wonderful people, who maybe have made a mistake because they didn’t know better. To that end, I thought I’d give a brief set of ideas around social media etiquette. You’re very welcome to add to these in the comments. There will be a mix of do’s and don’ts, and remember this above all else: you’re doing it wrong.

Social Media Etiquette: Your Appearance

• Your avatar picture shouldn’t be a logo. We don’t meet logos at parties, do we? You can include a logo, but make it you.
• Unless you’re a fictional character, more often than not, your avatar should be you. Amazing Simpson-like renditions of you are interesting for about four hours.
• Your Facebook profile pic can be not you, but it often means that others might not accept your friend request. It feels creepy friending a four year old kid (avatar).
• Your picture can be you from 10 or 15 years ago, but that first face to face meeting is going to be jarring.
• It doesn’t take a lot of work to take a decent pic. Why use those “me cut out from posing with someone while I have red eyes” photos?

Social Media Etiquette: Friending

• You’re not obligated to follow/friend anyone. No matter what. Not even your mother. (I follow my mother, btw).
• If you decide to unfollow someone, don’t make a big stink and announce why. Just leave.
• It’s okay to let the competition follow you. It’s okay to follow the competition.
• Famous people don’t always want to follow back. I’m looking at you, Justin Bieber!
• You can set your own rules on Facebook. I’m in the process of moving everyone to a fan page and just keeping VERY close family and friends.

Social Media Etiquette: Conversation

Commenting about other people’s stuff and promoting other people’s stuff is very nice.

Retweeting people’s praise of you comes off as jerky. Just thank them.

If you retweet something interesting, always give credit for who found it first.

Facebook wall comment streams can get long. Don’t grumble. If you’re along for the ride, it’ll end some day.

Promote others more often than you promote yourself. My long-standing measure is 12:1. (If it doesn’t work at first, it’s because maybe you’re not sincere in your promoting of others).

Listening is important and commenting is important. Be the #1 commenter on your blog. (See next one)

It’s okay to NOT comment back for every single comment you receive. It’s nice when you can respond, but don’t litter the comments with a bunch of “Thanks, Judy.” People know you care, if you’re doing it right.

If you are talking about someone in a blog post, link to them. Steve Garfield is a pro at this.

If you’re really nice, you’ll think about link text and help them even more by linking to Internet video expert Steve Garfield. Make sense?

Links do matter to Google and to the people you care about. When you can, give them a link.

Social Media Etiquette: Disclosure

(Note: I’ve written about disclosure before).

• If you’re writing about a client, add (client) to the tweet/post/update.
• If you’re selling me something with an affiliate link, disclose that in the tweet/post/update.
• If there’s a material reason (or perception of such) that you want me to take an action or click a link, tell me.
• Tell me once in the post, and once again on a disclosure page. I use part of my about page for disclosures. See also: one of my other favorite disclosure pages (for cheekiness).
• Make sure your audience comfortably knows your motives, and everything goes better.

Social Media Etiquette: Promoting

• Promote as if you’re at a cocktail party. It’s not the same as your email blast list.
• Promote others, and it’s much more likely people will help promote you when it’s your turn.
• Leave room for retweets. Writing 139 characters won’t get you anywhere.
• Promoting on Facebook is MUCH nicer on my wall than in my private messages. (Do you agree?)
• It’s probably okay to promote something 4x a day on a social network, so that you hit all the time zones appropriately. In the last hour, you can always give it a couple more pushes, but that’s about it.
• Direct messaging people for promotion help is often annoying. It happens much more than you know.
• Your cause isn’t always our cause. If we don’t want to help, don’t badger.
• Things where you have to get 1,000 tweets to raise money are litter on Twitter. Things to get 1,000 “likes” on Facebook are fine. (Remember, however, that a “like” gives your demographic data to the thing that you’ve liked, plus permission for that page to message you privately.)

Social Media Etiquette: Content Production

• You can post as often as you want on your blog. It’s your blog. Monthly will probably fade from our memory. Weekly could work. Daily is my favorite. Some people post many times a day. It’s up to you.
• You can tweet as often as you want, but people unfollow “noisy” tweeters (I get unfollowed often).
• You can update Facebook often, and if you’re running pages, you might want to update 3-4 times a day, I’m starting to observe.
• Depending on your blog’s purpose, be wary of over-selling. (I ran into this personally.) Make sure you’re still providing great community value.
• If you find great content from other places, use it only after you understand whether you have permission to do so, and under the terms that the people have set.
• If you’re linking and sharing someone else’s blog post (which is good to do), it’s also wonderful when you add something to it. Add some commentary. Add a thought or two as to why it matters to your community.
• If someone’s work inspires your own post, it’s a nice thing to “hat tip” them with a link to the post that inspired you, somewhere in the post (usually down at the bottom).
• If you go a long time between blog updates, don’t write a “sorry I haven’t written lately” post. No one cares. Just publish something good.

Social Media Etiquette: Sharing is Caring

Every blog I know has a share/like/tweet/stumble button at the bottom or somewhere. They’re there for a reason. If you like the article, pushing those buttons is a “tip jar” for the artist. Push it. It doesn’t take long.

If you’re reading in Google Reader, sharing is as simple as “SHIFT S” and that goes to everyone who reads your shared items.

Tell the blogger when you love something they’ve done. People’s #1 complaint to me when they’re starting out blogging is that they lack any feedback. It’d take you 30 seconds to do, and would change a person’s perspective for a whole day.

Comments in Twitter are temporary moments in a stream. Comments on the blog post itself are forever, in the best (and worst) of ways.

The web thrives on links and social sharing. The more YOU do to participate, the more people will create material for free for you to enjoy.

Your Mileage Will Vary

For every idea above, there’s an exception. For every idea above, there’s a great reason to do the opposite. If you’re doing it differently than above, you’re not wrong. You’re doing it your way. Okay, I lied: you’re doing it wrong.

I look forward to your thoughts, disagreements, counter-posts, additional thoughts, sharing, and more.

Prop 19, California’s controversial bid to legalize marijuana, lost at the polls on Tuesday by a slim margin: Just 53.9% of voters said “No” to the proposal.

However, if that vote had been up to the wider web of Internet users, Prop 19 would have passed with a 55% majority.

According to data gathered by Yahoo during the company’s Ask America online survey, more than 8 million responses were recorded overall. With regard to Prop 19, 133,000 online “votes” were cast on the question of whether marijuana should be legal. In Yahoo’s survey, a slightly higher number of responses favored marijuana legalization.

Clearly, this is one of the more controversial topics that arose around the midterm elections. But Yahoo also tracked other popular issues from the American political landscape — from Tea Party antics to immigration and healthcare.

When it comes to right wing-left wing bickering, 72% of Yahoo’s respondents said the political discourse had reached an unnatural level of animosity. However, 61% said they were not too worried about Tea Partiers steering Congress in a radically right direction.

Around 75% of respondents actually favored Arizona’s controversial and conservative new immigration laws, saying they’d approve of such measures in their home states. And 65% said they wanted the U.S.’s newly passed healthcare laws to remain in effect.

To see other issues and results, check out this inforgraphic based on survey data, created by JESS3:

Click image for larger version.

Of course, Yahoo’s data was gathered from a wide range of Internet users, not all of whom were eligible to vote.

This infographic is the fourth and final installment in the Ask America series based on Yahoo’s data. Images were created by interactive agency JESS3.

Header image courtesy of Flickr, GUS314159.