Ilk

Notable advancements in the geo sector -- GIS, GPS, slippy maps -- punctuate an otherwise steady equilibrium; progress in the geo world is subtle, and tends to sneak up on us without our at first knowing its significance. I think we've just passed one of these stealth milestones whose importance will be realized only after the amplitude of the ripple effect shakes the local landscape. I'm talking about the humble check-in and the like button.

On first blush the idea of a "check in" is unworthy of note -- broadcasting publicly that you are at a particular venue is neither technologically sophisticated nor particularly novel. However, the driving impulse here is what's interesting: the check-in is much more about who you are than where you are. The passion driving the uptake of Foursquare, Gowalla, and their ilk is sociological rather than geographical.

People check-in to venues for the same reasons they so proudly display swooshes on shirts, Coach emblems on handbags, and glowing apples (or penguins for the more enlightened) on computing devices: these emblems communicate a facet of one's identity to the world in a facile, shared language. Checking into "Zeitgeist" in San Francisco tells the world you have roguish good looks (surely), plus a penchant for beer, outdoor smoking, and tamales. Checking into "Costco" tells the world that you own a car, and have an apartment or house in which to store large bulk items; checking into "SFO Long Term Parking" tells the world that you check-in too much, and should maybe ease-off a bit.

What logo or symbol can say so much, with such brevity, about an individual? The venue makes the man.

The magic here is the expression of affinity with a business, which is where the idea of the "like" has similar power in the local space (here I use "like" as any systemic convenience to express affinity, not exclusively Facebook's). In many ways liking a local business has significant advantages over a check-in: you do not have to be on-site, you like only once in perpetuity, and your affinity for the business is not measured by the number of times you visit. Check-ins, however, measure on-site presence, a hugely important metric for any business that values feet-through-the-door.

Thus the check-in holds the most potential for point-of-sale, in-the-moment marketing ("I see you are next door; come try a free latte at our place instead"), while Likes may offer greater potential for geo-relevant demographic targeting ("Here are deals for restaurants, similar to the ones you like, in areas where you are commercially active"). Likes and check-ins are really two sides of the same coin, but unfortunately share the same curse: there is no way to realize this user-to-business affinity and the value it represents uniformly across platforms.

Where previously this lack demanded only a frustrating duplication of effort, the problem has become more serious: the advent of likes and check-ins drive a semantic necessity to open and aggregate -- the problem is no longer one of mere inconvenience.

Gary Gale calls this problem "Geo Babel"; and the local landscape has all the hallmarks of the eponymous tower. Without a common means, our likes and check-ins will continue to be bound to the platform on which they were created, hamstringing their potential. Elbowing my way into Tim O'Reilly's metaphor, I would propose that this is a critical, missing component of the Internet Operating System. It seems outrageous that we find ourselves in 2010 without the means to refer to a business in a unique and unambiguous manner. Developers are left holding the bag for a number of reasons; here are my big three:

1. Focus on listings data as end rather than means: Local search as we know it today is the parthenogenous child of the Yellow Pages industry. Many local search sites, and the data vendors they rely on, remain grounded in YP-era thinking, where the value was found in owning the listing data, making them discoverable in alphabetical order, and advertising against these listings. Local search for ages focused on being an electronic version of the Yellow Pages. Few organizations have looked above the horizon and considered carefully what value could be realized if listings were viewed as a means to connect users to businesses, rather than only advertise against their search.
2. Attempts at distinction with common data: With peripheral exceptions, every local site out there has the same data. Boil these listings down to their hcards and you're looking at dupes across the board. This is of course known by all the big players, which is why they focus on differentiation with ancillary data such as ratings and reviews, or making their listings the most inclusive or the most current. This strategy drives competitors to attempt the "one ring" approach, where each tries to climb above the other in an effort to become the premier source of online local listings. It is a bugbear for developers because efforts to differentiate a commodity are always frustrating and rarely carry the sector forward.
3. Over-fascination with pins on maps: The advent of GPS-enabled devices and Wi-Fi positioning gave us the ability to show people's location on the map; this has proved hugely distracting while the sector over the last four years has attempted to make buddy-finding interesting. We've since learned, I think, that people do not navigate by Long/Lat -- Foursquare and Gowalla succeed in part because they use business listings or venues as mechanisms of personal expression within a shared social landscape. Social location is best referenced by place not space; the coords tell me nothing.

This lacuna can be resolved one of two ways -- either one will do the trick but I am hoping for both:

First, we can work together toward an open database of places. Erick Schonfeld's post on TechCrunch a few weeks back is the most recent clarion. This is not an insignificant undertaking, but is certainly the preferred outcome. However, even with OpenStreetMap at our back, realizing this goal will take an eon in Internet time unless we see an unanticipated outbreak of altruism on the part of a data supplier. Of course, the 'new' players in the game -- those whose businesses use listings as a conveyance of value understand this need and are best positioned to deliver against it.

The second alternative -- one that is much more realistic in the short term -- is an open and accessible Local Listings Crosswalk, essentially an API that takes your URI and translates it to my URI so we can ensure we are speaking about the same business (I am less concerned about geographic place-names because such services already exist); Placecast's Match API went live as I was writing this post, so I hope that theirs will be the first step in getting us to where we want to be. The outcome,of course, will be achieved when we have a number of these services crosswalking via callbacks and hcard/og-aware crawlers, perpetuating listings data and ensuring they are up-to-date and uniformly accessible.

One or both of these services will allow us to put the bother of business listings management behind us, so we can get on with what's really exciting about local: connecting consumers with businesses they love, and providing genuine value to both.

Related:

• What you need to know about local search
• Foursquare wants to be the mayor of location apps

Location-based social network Foursquare counted its 40 millionth check-in a “couple days ago”, according to a Tweet from one of its developers.

The number shows that Foursquare’s growth rate is accelerating: Five weeks ago, we clocked Foursquare’s total check-ins at 22 million. In short: Foursquare appears to have doubled its check-in rate in just over a month.

It’s just over two weeks, meanwhile, since Foursquare hit the million user mark. What’s more, recent acquisition rumors have driven the Foursquare hype to new levels.

But Foursquare may soon face a new challenger: Facebook is launching its location features this month. Depending on how Facebook implements location into its service, Foursquare may see its growth stall — why would new users join Foursquare if their existing social network provides the same experience?

Alternatively, Facebook may offer a location platform: That might let Foursquare, Gowalla and their ilk build upon Facebook’s massive userbase, rather than getting squished like a bug.

Tags: foursquare, location, million, twitter

CSS and its ilk aren't precisely defended by technology--the standards are too weak or poorly executed--but by law. The much-excoriated Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) prohibits "circumvention" of software that's designed to prevent copying. Breaking DRM encryption breaks the law.

But Real went through the steps to obtain a license from the DVD Copy Control Association (DCCA), which controls CSS on behalf of the movie industry. RealDVD decrypted the DVD, copied it, and then locked it tight. Up to five PCs licensed by the same person could play back the discs. (Real also broke through a couple of unrelated protection efforts.)

RealNetworks must have calculated that as a company with a large war chest, it could succeed where others didn't dare to tread. As soon as it released RealDVD, it preemptively sued the DCCA and several studios to establish that it had the right to use CSS in the way RealDVD did. The studios and DCCA sued in return, and got software sales halted. The studios won in August 2009; Real appealed.

The settlement on Monday clears all the suits by RealNetworks agreeing to never sell the software again, refund the money to about 2,700 RealDVD purchasers, disable an associated metadata service, and pay $4.5 million to several movie studios, its Rhapsody partner Viacom, and the DCCA to cover legal and other expenses.

Some people may truly hate RealNetworks for its mediocre RealPlayer software (once a technical miracle) that was bundled with poorly disclosed third-party adware programs. But RealDVD was a thin blade trying to shimmy open the door of fair use.

Fair use is a maddeningly ambiguous set of rules enshrined in copyright law that mention nothing whatsoever about personal use and copying. Court decisions have shaped fair-use exemptions to copyright laws. Congress has passed extremely narrow copyright exclusions for personal use as well.

Without testing specific ideas about fair use or copyright scope in court, there's no sure way to know whether your particular software program, Web site, tweet, or steampunk-based laser decrypter isn't in violation. When the MPAA or a studio sues you, you could potentially plow through millions of dollars with no idea of the outcome.

You can always be sued, but you want to make sure that you have some basis on which to defend yourself, especially if the law and court decisions firmly back you up.

As BoingBoing recently reported about its battle with MagicJack, a group without crazily deep pockets can win and recover costs when it has a strong idea it is in the right. (BoingBoing benefitted from the California strategic lawsuit against public participation or SLAPP, which wouldn't apply to software and hardware.)

That what was made the RealDVD suits so exciting, because Real has hundreds of millions of dollars in the bank, and had a pugnacious CEO, Rob Glaser. Glaser faced down Microsoft over unfair competition and got nearly $800 million from the Windows maker. (Glaser was forced out as head of Real a few weeks ago, although he intended to move on after an executive search; he remains chairman of the board and owns nearly 40 percent of the firm.)

Even better, Real wasn't promoting piracy, or the broad right to rip DVDs into an unprotected format and then move them onto all kinds of devices for playback. RealDVD was very very narrow in purpose: can individuals buy software that converts one kind of protected content on a specific physical medium into another, with even stronger encryption?

Back in 2002, I joined a model lawsuit brought by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, what became known as Newmark v Turner (after Craig Newmark of craigslist, one of four other co-plaintiffs). The EFF wanted Newmark v to be joined to a lawsuit originated in 2001 by 28 movie studios, TV production firms, and cable operators against SonicBlue, which made ReplayTV, a digital video recorder that was at one point mildly superior to TiVo.

You may recall the ReplayTV suit, which begat the statement in a magazine interview from then chief executive of Turner Broadcasting that skipping ads was "theft," and that not watching ads was breaking a contract. He said, "There's a certain amount of tolerance for going to the bathroom." The industry later tried to backpedal from these statements.

Our suit was a way to try to establish that consumers had rights in this fight among firms: that time-shifting (recording for later consumption) and space-shifting (moving among devices under our control for personal use) were perfectly acceptable, and that we were in danger of losing such rights. Ad skipping was also part of the suit.

Remarkably, a judge agreed to join us in the fight, to the surprise, we think, of the 28 media firms. That would have been ugly had we gone to trial. We faced some potential (though unlikely) penalties were it to be proved that we had violated copyright in our efforts to establish we had used media fairly.

The media firms had a big problem, though, in that it would have been an ugly public-relations battle to try to paint Craig Newmark, your humble reporter, and three other mild-mannered individuals as horrible scofflaws.

Had we won, we would have enshrined a judicial opinion that would have perhaps emboldened consumer-electronics firms and software makers to create products that put much more control over recorded programs in the hands of consumers.

Instead, SonicBlue went bankrupt and sold its assets to another firm that removed the features in question in 2003. The media firms then dismissed its lawsuit against the companies involved.

Here's where it gets interesting. I had completely forgotten until researching the case to write this editorial that the 28 firms gave Craig, me, and our three fellow plaintiffs a "covenant not to sue" for the acts in question. That essentially nullified the suit because we had no more fear of litigation. (The EFF tried to get the same rights for all ReplayTV owners, just 5,000 people, but failed when the judge wouldn't move the case into class-action status.)

So we are copyright superheroes, with the ability to advance ads in a single click, shift content among hardware, and watch at our leisure! Behold us, and despair, for you will not see our like again.

RealNetworks needs to work with studios, so it settled and paid less than 1 percent of its still-giant cash horde--last year, the company's cash was of greater value than its market capitalization for several months--to be able to move forward on content licensing.

I can understand why they did it, but it resembles the Google Book Settlement, a massive effort by Google to get a special judicial and settlement right to not be sued for selling works to which the owner cannot be found and to which it does not have assigned rights (so-called orphan works).

If Google succeeds, then no other firm will go through the expensive litigation that allowed Google to reach the point where it can settle and win in cooperation with the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers. Google will have a de facto monopoly.

It's unlikely that any other firm with the resources to challenge the media industry will release software or hardware that would allow DVD conversion in a manner that a court could find legal. Real was the last, great hope, because any other similar firm already has multi-million to multi-billion-dollar deals in play. Apple, Microsoft, and others aren't going to release anything that jeopardized how they work with giant copyright holders.

That leads to the conclusion that in order to make legal copies, you are obliged to be a pirate. Media companies failure to accommodate the notion that people may have legitimate purposes for making digital copies for their own use dooms them to eternal piracy.

We're all screwed. Well, I'm not, probably. But you are.

(Disclosure: About a decade ago, a company I helped incubate was bought by RealNetworks, and I received a modest amount of stock, long sold.)

Email doesn’t need postage, right? Is that old hoax about the postal service charging per message finally coming true? Not really. But PostageApp and and their API may be a service worth paying for if you want to send email from your application.

In many web programming languages, such as PHP, it’s already easy to send email. However, making a user wait while the code sends out a dozen emails to their friends means your site seems slow. Plus, your email may be plain text and boring. And who knows whether your host’s server has been blacklisted by the actions of your more shady developer brethren.

Plus, unless sending out emails is a core part of your application, it makes more sense to let someone else do it for you. As PostageApp says, let “your app do what it does best… be awesome.”

Right now the service is in an open beta, though the company has announced pricing plans are in the works. There are some limits during the beta period, especially if you’re using PostageApp’s SMTP server. But there’s certainly enough functionality to tell whether it will work for you. And if you program in Ruby, there’s a how-to video (embedded below) to show you the way.

We’re seeing more of these sorts of services, which plug into a very specific feature that many apps have. These services save developers time, which is something many are willing to pay for. Look for PostageApp and its ilk to find plenty of interest, as building apps becomes more about focusing on your core competencies, rather than trudging through those annoying-but-necessary elements.