Google Maps, Limbo and Whrrl, originally uploaded by Aaron Landry.

It's been more than a day now since Apple released iPhone OS 2.0 and released the new iPhone 3G. With GPS and the ability to add third-party applications, mobile social networking tied with location information may finally take off.

As many of my friends and readers know, there's a real soft spot in my heart for Dodgeball. It was created way back in 1874 or something and bought out by Google a few decades or so later (okay, about 2000 and 2005, but it feels that old). Dodgeball was the first mobile service that told your friends where you were. Even though there is no longer any active development on it, it is still one of the best, most reliable and most simple services to use from most mobile phones. There's one other service that might be more simple than Dodgeball but doesn't currently have location information (for the most part): Twitter.

A frequent joke about all these new services coming out is "if it's harder to use than Dodgeball, it will fail." Some technology-minded friends might laugh at the joke because Dodgeball is as simple as saying "@turf club" or "@town talk diner" and you're done. It's not so much of a joke though because I actually believe it. My idea of a successful mobile social networking application is one where you can actually spend your time being social. If I'm at a bar or music venue with friends and I need to stick my nose in my phone for more than 30 seconds to make it work, I'm not going to use it half the time if at all. Lastly, if it is not easy for the non-techie to use, those non-techies won't use it. What good is a social network if it's all nerds like me? ;-)

I took a bunch of the new iPhone social networking applications for a spin. There's a bunch I'll skip because I want to cover the most popular ones.

Limbo

Limbo might be the most thorough and detailed mobile social networking site I've ever used. In fact, it blows my mind how big it is. It has everything from telling your friends where you're at, where you're going, being categorically specific about the type of activity you're doing, being specific about when you are starting and stopping activities and even selecting if specific activities you are doing throughout the day are ones you do or do not want to be disturbed during. You can search for other members based off of what kinds of activities you are doing right now. You can search for restaurants, bars and shops near you, you can play social networking games, subscribe to events, weather, tips, sports scores, horoscopes and the like and even accrue points that you can earn stuff with.

Holy crap, I just want it to know where I am and find my friends. In the photo at the top of this post I show a three screenshots. The one on the far left is Apple's implementation of Google Maps with GPS, which is fantastic. In the middle is Limbo telling me where I am: "It looks like you're in the Minneapolis, MN area." Yeah, no shit.

The interface looks nice but isn't very intuitive on some of the basics. For example, when I click "Find Me," I don't need it to give me a dialog box. There's separate "who" and "what" sections that both list my "Faves," "Friends," "Contacts" and Members" but I still can't remember if I go to the "Who" or the "What" part for different tasks. I still can't figure out how to change my profile photo. The default it gave me was a scene of smokestacks and smog! Is that supposed to mean that I'm polluting their service?

Lastly, this application takes time. There's a learning big curve and it takes a lot of time to do anything with it. I can see, though, that if you live in Limbo's world it could become addictive. I'm uninstalling it though.

iFob

iFob is a simple application that finds people using the same WiFi network you are on that are also using iFob. It alerts you and you can see the basics about them such as their first name, a one-line comment from them and their photo. From their site:

In public hotspots the isolation gets so thick it chatters and hums: people sitting behind their computer screens not meeting -- typing email and chats, and clicking through profiles of virtual, distant people. iFob changes this. iFob only shows profiles of people who are so close that they can look up and smile at each other.

An old idea internationally but something that hasn't taken off here. The application seems simple enough, but I haven't found anyone using it yet. I'll keep it on for awhile.

Whrrl

Whrrl comes across as one of the biggest up and coming players but I'm not sure why. Every time I use it I get frustrated. When I use the map, I can't zoom in or out. In fact (as shown by the screen capture in the top photo on the right), my street is missing! When I show a list of what's near me, it shows "Auto Mart," "Honda Town," "Taco Bell," "Nielsen Framing Studios" and "Adprint," none one of them places I'd ever meet up with friends at. When I hit the "current location" button an option comes up if I want it to identify my current location or not compared to the Maps application where it just does it.

In fact, I can't seem to get anything to work the way I want it to in Whrrl. I gave up and started playing with Whrrl with a browser. Even if it knows my last location as being at home in Minneapolis it says:

Welcome Aaron!
What are you doing right now?

Where in Seattle, WA are you?

Weird. I've never been to Seattle in my life. I'm uninstalling it.

Brightkite

Oh wait, Brightkite didn't release an iPhone application! They have had, however, a ton of hype amongst the tech crowd. They've successfully deployed a private beta invite strategy that got a lot of people excited about it and on paper, Brightkite looks perfect: you can declare your location by a specific place, an address or just a city, you can manage your privacy settings and select who gets to know to what detail about your location you want to share and you can attach photos to what's going on at the location you're at.

My problem with Brightkite is that it isn't even close to passing the "is it as easy as Dodgeball?" litmus test. Even their iPhone-friendly website takes too long for me to even check in somewhere. That, and their preferences take a lot of time to go through to get everything just right. The defaults are way too noisy and bombard you with a ton of text messages even if they aren't your friends nearby. The good news is that the preferences are granular enough for people extremely interested in the service but why not make some good defaults so it is friendlier for everyone else? I figured a nice iPhone application would fix all of this. Where is it?

Brightkite had a lot of hype and now they're missing the boat.

Twitterrific

Twitterrific, the popular application for Twitter, will supposedly use (at some point) location-aware features that exist with Twitter's API but are not widely used yet. It doesn't matter to me much because Twitterrific has two serious faults that prevent me from using it: the UI can be jerky but more importantly it doesn't pull any of the messages on Twitter between the last twenty and those from the last time I loaded Twitterrific. It is mostly a limitation of from Twitter, not Twitterrific, but it is still pretty important. Once they clean things up and location-aware features are more widely used on Twitter, Twitterrific might be a big player in this arena.

Loopt: "List" view and two "Map" views

Loopt

True story: The first time I opened Loopt after setting it up initially, it automatically found where I was and put my friends that were nearby on a map. I saw my friend Dave was a few blocks away so I texted him and we went out for beers.

That, my friends, is how this shit is supposed to work.

Loopt has been getting some great plugs from Apple and for good reason: they're the one mobile social networking application you should get for your iPhone. Or Blackberry, even. (By the way, it humorously shows the Motorola Razr on their site but it actually isn't supported.)

Loopt, like most applications of this type use your mobile phone number as your primary user ID. While some people may argue against this as a privacy issue, I think it is a great assumption: if you aren't comfortable giving someone your mobile number you probably shouldn't be comfortable with that person knowing exactly where you are all the time.

Loopt, by the way, doesn't show friends-of-friends or random people in the area.

Wherever you are at, you can also give a short message about what you're up to, similar to Twitter. It can give your friends a good idea of what you're doing at a particular location. You can easily take and attach a photo of what's going on too. It logs it with your location without needing to think about it.

On the map screen, in addition to your friends you can overlay search results for restaurants, bars and other places. That portion is powered by Yelp, which completely negates needing to download the separate Yelp application because the integration is fantastic. I saw a friend of my map and was able to find a great place to meet that was almost equidistant to our locations.

The integration with other iPhone apps is great as well. If it sees my friend on the other side of the city, you can choose to have it use the Maps application to give you driving directions to where they are. You can easily call or text your friend directly from the application as well.

Loopt isn't without its faults though, but only the kinds of things that'll likely clear up in a minor version release.

The "Map" page is powered by Microsoft Virtual Earth. While there may be a few advantages compared to using Google Maps, it is clunky for zooming in and out on the iPhone. If you zoom in on a location, the center of where you zoomed ends up not where you'd expect. Sometimes it screws up and throws my view into the Caribbean Sea! Sometimes, as shown in the screenshot above on the right, the address and the map don't match up. It seemed like my friend Brian was only a couple blocks away but the address indicates otherwise. So the map is a bit clunky but overall hasn't been too bad.

The "List" page view gives the option of viewing my friends by how close they are to me or in alphabetical order. Alphabetical order doesn't do too much for me because I am usually not concerned with my friends out of state. Viewing by "Distance" makes sense, but it shows some pretty stale entries. As I'm looking at my phone now, it is showing me some friends that haven't updated with Loopt for more than 8 hours. I wish it'd grey those entries out, not show them at all or otherwise indicate that the data is stale and quite possibly inaccurate. Thankfully for now, it does show a time-stamp in small print.

The friend invitation portion of Loopt has a big quirk I'd like to change: It shows your address book and you can choose who you'd like to invite to be your friend. You can also have it search your address book to find if any of your friends are already on Loopt. If you use that feature, by default it selects those people as wanting to receive an invite and you have to deselect them. This is a serious problem if you have people in your address book that you don't necessarily want to friend on this service. My friend Justine just made a mistake because of this issue. I'd like an option to permanently block those people I never want to add on Loopt or have it never default to send an invite to anyone.

Overall though, those are mostly minor UI bugs and such. Well honestly, I've had it crash too. And Dodgeball co-founder Alex Rainert today expressed his disappointment with it. Even with those things, Loopt is still a good version 1.0 app for iPhone OS 2.0 and it's my favorite of the bunch. I think they have a real chance to become huge because Loopt is easy to set up, very fast to use and it's simple. You use it to find your friends then you put it back in your pocket so you can be social. If you haven't already, download it and try it out.

"What are you doing?", originally uploaded by Aaron Landry.

I like the idea of a service where I get updated on the interesting things my friends are up to in real-time.

I was a big fan of Dodgeball, a service in which you "check in" via your phone with a text message that maps you to a location such as a music venue, bar or restaurant. Then it notifies your friends where you’re at. Useful and effective. They later added a "shout out" feature to send messages to your friends that weren’t location-specific. It was smart for letting your friends know where you’re going before you get there. Google bought Dodgeball in May 2005 and development seemed to go dry. It must have been frustrating. The founders of Dodgeball left Google in April 2007.

Meanwhile, Twitter launched in October 2006 as a service that I thought did less than Dodgeball. You could answer whatever you wanted to the question "What are you doing?" I was initially skeptical of the open-ended nature of this question but little did I know what it’d become! Worried about the signal to noise ratio, I couldn’t help to bring it up when I was interviewed on Future Tense about what Twitter is in March 2007:

...some people will continue to post stuff about, you know, "I'm feeding my cat" or "I'm driving to work." And a lot of other people end up realizing, maybe I should only publish the stuff that somebody might actually be interested in. And those are the kinds of people I love subscribing to, because they realize "I have an audience here, so I'm just going to publish stuff people might have a bit of interest in." I tend to not watch the people who end up talking about their commute every morning."

Little did I realize that more and more people would use Twitter in ways that actually ignores the question "What are you doing?" Also, I was used to Dodgeball, a service that told me directly where people were at and little more.

I’m generally a fan of using an infrastructure of a service in a way that is beyond it’s intention when the results are good. For example, notifying people of emergencies or tragedy is a useful mis-use of Twitter. Unfortunately most of the alternative uses of Twitter, in my strong opinion, take away from the service more they give.

The Chatters

When someone tells you what they’re doing many times there’s an undeniable urge to respond to it. In principle this is a good thing and Twitter gave us the perfect method to handle it with a direct message. I’d argue that this feature hasn’t been used that much and historically most people post replies to other people’s messages as a public message. In other words, instead of telling their friends what they are doing, they send out a message to their followers that’s a reply to someone else they are following. For everyone that receives this when they don’t follow the person they’re replying to, they’re essentially receiving noise. Most everyone who has been on Twitter for awhile has gotten messages like this -- the ones where you ask yourself, "what the heck are they talking about?"

As far as I am aware it was was a combination of people not knowing the direct message feature and people wanting to reply publicly that caused the format of the public reply to be more or less standardized as "@username." Twitter recognized the issue of public replies without context so they gave Twitter the functionality to recognize the @reply notation causing your Twitter message, when viewed from the website, to link back to the user you they are replying to. A good idea but I think it reinforced the wrong mindset: it takes away from answering "What are you doing?".

Note that it was after people starting using the @reply notation that Twitter developed a system to formally support it.

When people choose to reply publicly to people instead of direct message these days, I don’t think there is generally much thought by most users of how it’s received by people that didn’t see the context of what they were sending. I won’t blame Twitter’s users for this though as this is Twitter’s fault.

I think that by adding the @reply-recognizing functionality, Twitter intentionally or not started to strongly encourage the use of public replies. A couple months ago I got more ammo for my argument that Twitter prefers that people use public replies opposed to a private direct message regardless of the content of the message because they did one more simple "upgrade": the reply button. Well, the reply button by itself isn’t proof but it was their choice on what the button does. Instead of plopping in the notation for sending a direct message to your friend it forces a public reply. Why would Twitter create a "reply" button that sends a public message instead of a direct, private reply?

Anyone who’s been on Twitter more than a year has noticed it’s a lot more "chatty" and contains less broadcasting what people are doing. Unfortunately, people that have joined Twitter in the last six months or less don’t know Twitter any other way and likely consider this type of chatter normal.

Sidenotes: UPOC is a service I’ve used for over five years and it’s perfect for SMS chat with multiple people. Same with AIM, Meebo and Jabber clients if you’re sitting at a computer. Why not use this for chat? I also think that Quotably, a service that tries to piece together Twitter conversations via the @reply notation is pretty humorous.

The Link Aggregators

The link aggregators are people that treat Twitter like a link blog in a manner similar to del.icio.us or Tumblr or those who use Twitter as a means of syndicating links to their own content. They’re the people that instead of answering "What are you doing?" are pushing URLs. Why would I want to get links sent to me this way? I subscribe to your feeds, add you as a friend on del.icio.us and follow you on Tumblr so I can find out the latest stuff you’re reading and linking to. I subscribe to your Twitter feed because I want to find out what you’re doing right now, not because I need aggregation in multiple places.

I want to arm wrestle Alex King for creating Twitter Tools for WordPress. That plug-in, when used to automatically post a URL to Twitter on your behalf every single time you create a new blog post is one of the most annoying things on Twitter. Especially because like many people that use Twitter, I use an RSS reader to read blogs. I don’t use Twitter to get notifications of when to go to your website every single time it’s updated. I was joking with Ed Kohler last week about Twitter and he was quick to jab that he is "not down with people who Tweet under the assumption that everyone is sitting at their desk and interested in being carpet bombed with URLs."

It’s frustrating that it’s been generally accepted now that this kind of use of Twitter is okay. Just tell me what you’re up to on Twitter and I’ll read about your links and blogs on your websites.

The Platform of Whatever-The-Heck-We-Want

This is the miscellaneous category I guess. It’s the folks that use Twitter to relay what other people are saying, to organize "wars", live blog events, make jokes and one-liners, give weather reports, greet their followers every morning or to complain about the day of the week and their commute. Either way, they’re not telling me anything interesting about what they’re doing.

I use Twitter because I want to know what you’re doing!

There are quite a few people that I have stopped following because of one one of the three reasons above. I like these people but we don't use Twitter the same way.

Twitter In My Perfect World

For the last time, I like the idea of a service where I get updated on the interesting things my friends are up to in real-time.

Without getting too granular and without imposing any rules whatsoever (although I do find the Ten Commandments hilarious and accurate), I think having a simple preference that suppresses Twitter messages that contain @reply and URLs would do the trick. I ask, if you’ve already read this far, spend a minute and think of the ramifications if people used a feature like this and what it would mean for the future of Twitter. I think it’s really quite positive. Twitter already recognizes to a point the importance of something like this as they suppress messages containing the @reply notation when updating your Facebook status on Twitter’s own Facebook application.

...or perhaps more realistically...

Remove that text from Twitter that says in big letters, "What are you doing?"

Just leave the blank text box. Let’s be honest here: it would make it more clear as to what Twitter really is and at the same time admits the kind of medium Twitter’s become (or perhaps always was). It’s truly a 140 character blank slate of whatever you want to put in it regardless of my perceived signal to noise ratio.

It would stop me from being a Twitter purist and I’ll go somewhere else.

I just want a service that lets me know what my friends are doing.

UPDATE: Sara points out that Twitter recently added the ability to block messages with the @reply notation. That helps, and I flipped that switch on my account just now.
UPDATE 27 Mar 08: This exploded into a pretty good conversation about what Twitter is and is not and how people don't agree on it at all (and should they?). I had a ton of good conversations in person, via IM and email about this in the last 48 hours in addition to the comments. For kicks I'm going to flip-flop and treat Twitter as the free-for-all service it's become. I started following all the people I said I stopped followed. I've changed my habits a bit to go along with what's perceived as the mainstream. We'll see how it goes. I'll probably write something in April about it but I'll probably talk more about what I really would love as a next-generation service, which Twitter wasn't, isn't and probably won't ever be.

I've been following PizzaPizza on Twitter for awhile. He's an anonymous Twitter user from an unnamed pizza delivery place in or near Minneapolis (and does not deliver to Longfellow, I know that much). It's his second job and will post about his experiences from his mobile phone while he's out delivering pizzas. Last night he got stiffed, got a $5 tip from a house with a tree fallen on it and sadly for us, he put in his two weeks notice. For our entertainment and insight into this world I hope he picks up at another pizza joint. If anything, his thoughts on what he thinks is a good tip and a shitty tip (and his reaction to it) are pretty valuable. Overnight, City Pages' Pizza Man posted a long tirade on bad tippers but at the end finally gave us the goods we're looking for: a seemingly fairly accurate tipping guide for pizza delivery with actual dollar signs and figures. Check it out. UPDATE: I've been asked, so I asked: PizzaPizza on Twitter says he's not the same as CP's Pizza Man.

City Pages delivers a pretty basic interview with Aric McKeown of Least Dangerous Game. If you're not at the Pizza Lucé Block Party or the Freedom Jazz Festival at noon on Saturday, you can hunt down Aric. Or if you want to sit on your ass you can add the game's Twitter feed to your reader to see if you can figure out the clues. (I've found him a couple times before.)

James Norton and Taylor Carik, originally uploaded by s4xton.

I was the guest host for Flak Radio's Episode 23 where I gave James Norton and Taylor Carik the gift of DUO Brewing, chatted a bit about Twitter, Julio Ojeda-Zapada stalking my friends, my experience with Jon Gordon swearing over the phone, and how I gave up and settled for a "4" in my URL. I exaggerate slightly.

Listen further to hear about the neutering of WKRP in Cincinnati, a very fair and humorous criticism on what American Movie Classics considers a "classic" and much more. It was a lot of fun and I'm glad they had me on.

A couple behind the scenes tidbits: It's recorded in Uptown, Minneapolis. Jim Norton's fiancée gave me a fantastic shot of Tequila before the show. There are two fantastic cats that are playful that aren't allowed in the studio and they serve good beer over there.

I’m in today’s episode (UPDATE: MP3 fixed, thanks Jon Gordon 21 May 08; MP3 embedded in new site 03 Sep 11) of Future Tense talking about Twitter.

Producer and host Jon Gordon emailed me through my website asking if I’d be interested in talking. Why he chose me, I’m not entirely sure. We arranged a conversation that lasted about 15 minutes where I continued to stutter and otherwise sound like a Minnesotan: “ya know" “um um yeah." He was using Grand Central from a coffee shop and we did the interview over VoIP to his laptop and Grand Central saved it as an MP3 for him. So not only does he write stories about technology, he lives it too.

When we were done with the interview, I posted this on Twitter:

Jon Gordon thought it was pretty funny, mentioned that he posted about our interview on his blog and added: “This is such a strange loop of old media / new media / blog / radio / Twitter." When I read his blog entry, I noticed that he quoted Twitter’s entry in Wikipedia, which I happened to have edited that morning. I bring this up to him “speaking of strange loop…" and he replies: “O M G."

Heh. He also asked me if there was anyone else he should talk to about Twitter. Without a beat, “Rex Sorgatz," and then added how he was the self-proclaimed biggest evangelist of Twitter. I mentioned his appearance on G4’s Attack of the Show talking about Twitter the previous day.

After his chat with Rex, he joined Twitter and started using it. You should add him. He needs more friends than just Rex and I.

On a final note, after hearing Future Tense on the radio for years, it was a little treat for me to finally hear Jon Gordon say the word “shit."

Minneapolis and Saint Paul listeners can hear Future Tense on KNOW 91.1FM weekdays at 8:20 am and 10:30 pm.

After SXSW suddenly everyone’s talking about Twitter. It’s your new 140 character-per-post instablog from your phone, AIM or webbernet. Still not on it? Join up and add me. You, like everyone else who’s not on it might be asking yourself, “Why would I care what people are doing? Why would anyone care what I post?" Well here’s a take on it: Just post what you think someone else might find interesting and don’t post the stuff nobody cares about. It took me a while to figure that simple idea out. It’s a great way to keep in contact and it’s a fabulous service for those who make last-minute plans. You can always “leave" people you don’t want to get updates on your phone from without un-friending them. The way Twitter is going, it very well be more widely used than MySpace in less than two years. Check out twittervision for a geographical look at live data coming into Twitter.

I’m in an upcoming today’s Chasing Windmills episode again… likely popping up this week. I think I’ll be in the next episode as well. It was a long shoot on Sunday but a lot of fun. Stopped by The Bulldog NE afterwards with Amber, Jen and Rich and for the most part talked about bloggers. There’s a Chasing Windmills season wrap-up party at the Kitty Cat Klub at 8pm Thursday. As Jeremy paraphrases, “if the building blows up, it’ll be the end of Minneapolis blogging." Come on down. Some of the real actors will be signing autographs amongst other things.

After the Chasing Windmills shoot and Bulldog on Sunday, I got a dancing parton the craziest thing on television, Call-In Karaoke. The premise of the show is that people in Minneapolis call in and are able to sing a song on live television over the phone. Karaoke Revolution serves up the songs, keeps a meaningless score and displays an animated version of the person singing and an audience on the screen. Meanwhile, Hamil Griffin-Cassidy hosts the show with chroma key to make sure people get their song set up and whatnot. During the singing, Hamil takes his microphone off the set and people dance on top of the game to distract the caller. It’s quite bizarre. This week’s episode took it a notch weirder: the people dancing were dancing live on top of a previously recorded episode that was already danced upon. Taylor and I were wrestlers for the most part. Amazingly crazy television. You can watch the whole thing on Google Video.