Joe Stump is the CTO of SimpleGeo, a company that could be described as a S3 for location services.

A few stats: Lat-long timestamp per user id: every 30 seconds users update their location which amounts to 1,6 petabytes per year. Location-based services amount to about 128.000 dollar a month in S3 costs: No wonder Twitter has problems scaling! 500m Facebook users produce about 37,2GB per minute.

As the production of data increases, its inherent value decreases. Content is no longer king, context is king.

Apple has sold 50m iPhones and each iPhone 3GS has 6 sensors. If we tie those sensors to location, what interesting things can we do with these sensors? What other types of sensors would be interesting? For example a thermometer, to measure the weather. Now, for the first time we have a realtime-based population density that can be a powerful dataset.

The guy who caught the MIT Blackjack Team (casino scammers) has 20 years of experience in studying how to merge multiple identities. His main strategy is cross-referencing enormous databases. He found that the two most important pieces of information to give away an identity are time and location. People cannot be in two places at a given time.

How do we make money from location? It is not a war (Foursquare versus Gowalla) but it is a goldrush. You know it is “the next big thing” when an old company applies the following: old company + x (where x is social/location).

There is money in managing contacts but also in tagging things. We can tag things that are not in the physical world with a physical location (lat-long). This is what Gowalla is doing with its items.

A comparison between FourSquare and MyTown:
Foursquare signs up 100.000 users per 10 days and has accumulated 22m check-ins per inception. MyTown signs up 100.000 users per day, does 25m check-ins a day, and averages 64 minutes per day of engagement. MyTown has more engagement, because virtual experience is following users where they go and there is interaction with other players.

It shows that we need to move beyond the check-in which is just a broadcast of presence. We need to start building on a cohesive experience on top of that.

Last month Google announced the launch of their Real Time Search engine. By including real time search results Google has now officially embraced the updatesphere as a subsphere of “The Web,” as may be seen in the following figures.

Fig. 1: Part of the main index

Fig. 2: Updates as a subcategory of index results

Fig. 3: The updatesphere

In my real time web results Google is indexing updates performed within the three popular micro-blogging platforms: Twitter, FriendFeed and Identi.ca. Notably absent are the status updates from the social networking site Facebook because of its partial walled garden structure. However, it may not be long before these updates will be included as well because Google recently made a deal with Facebook¹. However, it is interesting to note that Google will only receive Facebook updates from public updates on pages (such as fan pages) while competing search engine Bing will receive updates from public profile pages (personal profiles) that are marked as visible for everyone.

Already in 2008 Google started expanding its indexing focus to actions within social networks but the indexed actions were quite messy, for example:

• silvertje has started 0 topics. silvertje has made 1 reply. … silvertje replied on May 13, 2009 06:25 to the question “We want all …”
• Anteek added a contact: Anne Helmond. MyBlogLog Action submitted by Anteek -
• Uploads from Anne Helmond, tagged… – http://www.flickr.com/photos/silvertje/tags/amsterdam/
• Qik | Anne Helmond | Untitled. Streamed by Anne Helmond. More at http://qik.com/silvertje.

These actions performed on social objects² such as Flickr photos, blog posts and videos, seemed to be Google’s first steps into real-time search. By partnering up with Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku, Identi.ca and Twitter, Google has now officially welcomed the updatesphere.

Twitters’ status updates have been included in Google’s index for a while but they are now actively promoted on the main site:

Google Social Search and the statussphere

Please note that this screenshot shows the Social Search experiment, part of Google Labs > Experimental Search. It seems that -while writing- Google removed the real-time social results from the main site and moved it to its Labs.

Status updates are moving from the Web sphere to its own distinct sphere: the updatesphere. Google is acting as a demarcating engine in the construction of the updatesphere.³

1. Google its official partners are: “Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku and Identi.ca — along with Twitter, which we announced a few weeks ago.” Google, Relevance meets the real-time web[↩]
2. social because they the objects are part of social web services that allow other people to participate in the objects by tagging, rating, leaving a comment, embedding or favoring for example[↩]
3. For more on web spheres: R. Rogers, The End of the Virtual: Digital Methods, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009. (38p) [pre-print pdf][↩]