Srcasm

In this day and age of mobile phone, PDAs, Flip Video cams and EyeFi cards, everyone and their mother is connected to the world wide web (even my mother texts now…  guilt in multiple forms.)  This also means that location-based services are even easier to work with today than they were only a year ago.

Tools like Brightkite and Loopt allow a user to both tell everyone where they’re at and pinpoint people and places close by.  Now I’m happy to see sites moving to a more granular location system.

When I searched for a car two years ago, I went onto Cars.com and searched for cars in my area.  This meant “within 10, 20 and 30 miles” were my options.  This is fine when searching for something in the area, but what about if I want to know the closest restaurant to eat at while downtown at New Work City?  This is where granularity comes in.

GoMobo.com allows restaurants to setup online ordering for their customers directly from their mobile phones or the web.  While I believe this is a fantastic idea (especially for my late-night Wawa trips), something they’ve taken one step further is how they show restaurants near you.  It’s no longer large areas around a point, I can go as close as .25 miles away from my location.

While up at NWC, I could see restaurants that are actually within walking distance, not those that I’d spend an arm and a leg taking a cab to.  I could see places to grab some grub that would deliver, not those that I had to go schlep over and pick stuff up at.  This is superb on a number of fronts but in my mind it’s the way of the future. 

Now that you’ve found me to the square meter (GPS), tell me what’s near me to the square block.  Now, who wants to order from Cafe Español?

The conversation of why social networks work has come up time and time again in all of the circles of people that I talk to.  My tech friends try to explain why Twitter, Plurk or Brightkite are the best networks in town.  My old college buddies explain that Facebook or Myspace are by far the greatest tool to catch up with friends.  And finally, my business associates swear by LinkedIn to help connect them to the people that they need to reach. While we don’t always agree on everything — One thing is certain, everyone seems to love the social networks.  But why?

Could it be that we are just social creatures by nature?  Even the gamers (who sit in their bedrooms and wear their gigantic headphones all day) want to socialize; albeit in the online world.  Maybe it’s that we love to connect with old friends and hear what they have to say, where they’ve been and what they’ve been up to.  I believe is a much simpler reason.  Ego.

Ego seems to drive most of what we do in our daily lives.  Whether we like to admit it, ego is why most women doll up in the morning before running out to CVS or school.  It’s why guys want a big, fancy, expensive car to drive around town.  I believe it’s even why we all flock to social networks.   We, as a general public, enjoy being in the spotlight and online social networks have made it simpler than ever to get our 15 seconds of fame.

As far as why I believe this is the single most important reason why social networks are working, I give you my theory/self-example.  I could go ahead and email, text or IM a bunch of my friends to let them know that my birthday is coming up and we’re going out to the bar.  I don’t because I want others to know that we’re going out.  I may not even be inviting other people to come to my private event but I want them to know it’s happening.  As far as networking sites like Twitter are concerned, I send links to information there instead of emailing it to the people who are interested so that I can show everyone (that follows me) that I got that information before someone else.  In addition, I continuously try to grow my network on LinkedIn not only because I like to have a large network of contacts but also because the higher the number of connections, the more popular I look to others.   All of these things benefit no one else except for me and my overly inflated ego.  We all do it.

Now, I’m not saying that there is anything wrong with it.  Just simply pointing out an observation that I’ve made over the past couple of years.  What do you think?  Why do your social networks continue to grow?  Why do you share information on Twitter instead of IM?

As Bart and I were walking into a networking/mobile information event, I started talking about an idea I had. People have done something very similar to this in the past but I think there are a few key steps missing in the process.

Virtual/connected business cards

The idea is simple, instead of handing out a card that has your name, phone numbers, emails, web sites, address, and more on it, why not hand out a Moo card with a short set of directions (Send a text to 84782273 (VIRTCARD) with:) and then a unique username (SRCASM). That’s it. When you meet someone new (and they best have a cell phone), you simple either tell them these steps (and save the environment) or hand them a tiny set of instructions. They can text that at their earliest convenience and be hooked up.

Now, this is where it gets a little better. After sending that text message, a few things happen…

• If the person sending the text has an account:
  • Your information is added to their online account (this includes all of your social networking links, email, contact info and any other information you wish to provide), AND
  • They then receive a text message with your pertinent immediate contact info such as name, phone number and email address, AND
  • They receive a text message with a vCard (or whatever compatible format works for their specific phone) attachment to add your info directly to their address book.
• If the person sending the text does not have an account already:
  • They receive a text message with your pertinent immediate contact info such as name, phone number and email address, AND
  • Next, they receive a text message with a vCard (or whatever compatible format works for their specific phone) attachment to add your info directly to their address book, AND
  • Finally, they get a specific activation ID that can be used on the web site later to both activate a new, free account, for them and with your info already included in their profile.

There is so much more that could be added to this service, I am only beginning to scratch the surface. Tie it in with Brightkite for location specific info, Twitter for updates of the people you know and add it into my aggregated address book idea for even more contact power!