The Praized Blog

One of the first things you learn when you launch your own startup is to actively monitor opportunities in the market and move quickly to leverage them. In my case, it happened three times in the last three years.

The first strategic move happened back in the fall of 2006 when Sylvain Carle, Harry Wakefield and I founded Praized Media to help local media companies leverage the rising force of social media and online word-of-mouth. I also started blogging about what I call “local 2.0,” the intersection of local search and social media. At the time, most people believed that this convergence would not happen. Three years later, it’s one of the hottest sectors.

We made the second key move in fall 2008. Having launched our first social local tools (for WordPress, Movable Type, Facebook and our hub site) a couple of months before, we were approached by a few major media players who signaled to us they would be interested in using the technology we had built within their own online platform. This gave us the confidence to develop white-label enterprise versions of our social local media software, which has been in the market since spring 2009. Building on the popularity of our initial module, we developed many more enterprise modules described here.

The third strategic move is happening now. Last fall (what is it with fall???), we were approached by two US investment banks who aspired to represent us if we ever wanted to find a strategic partner for Praized Media. A few companies also hinted to us that they might be interested in investing in or acquiring Praized Media. Based on that enthusiasm, Sylvain and I (along with our board) discussed the pros and cons of going to the altar with a strategic partner vs. continuing alone.

The market is super-hot for technologies like ours. In the last three months, there has been a flurry of acquisitions and funding events in the “social local” space (we’ve created a document listing them if you’re interested). We could go on the road and raise new VC money to fuel our growth, but anyone that has raised those kinds of funds before knows that this is a brutal process, even when your market is hot. It takes a lot of time and energy, and for small companies, the process forces you to take your eyes off the product/company development roadmap. At the core, Sylvain and I are product/technology guys and that’s what we want to do. In the last two years, we’ve built world-class real-time social local search technologies. We’ve assembled a five-star (pun intended) social local technology development team. We’re notable thought-leaders in our space.

The future of local media will be centered on Aggregation / Discovery / Social / Search and our technology stack enables that. We believe what we’ve built (team and technology) represents the cornerstone of the next-generation local media company (traditional or pure play), and we want to focus on building that vision with a larger organization.

For all those reasons, we have decided to hire Siemer & Associates, LLC., an investment banking firm in Los Angeles that specializes in digital media, to represent us in our search for a strategic partner. We’re obviously supported a 100% in this decision by our board and the whole team is excited by this new move. For our current customers, collaborators and service providers, it is business as usual as this does not impact our day-to-day operations (actually, it frees up more time!). Given current market conditions, we are extremely confident we will find the right strategic partner.

If you’re interested in discussing more the opportunity, you can contact Siemer & Associates at (310) 496-4510 or info@siemer.com.

Multiple news in the last few days points towards Twitter and Facebook becoming serious forces in the world of “local”.

First, in yet another chapter of Twitter’s improvements to become locally relevant, it has started rolling out its “local trends” for a series of US cities and ome countries (probably based on the ones with the most usage).

Screenshot source: Techcrunch

On a related note, the Kelsey Group analysts issued five predictions for 2010 and one of them is “location and geotargeted advertising will represent a long-elusive revenue stream for Twitter and for third parties that mash up Twitter streams and location data.” They also suggest Facebook will also “integrate automatic location detection
into the status updates” .

Third, supporting the permanent shift of user behavior towards sites like Facebook and Twitter, Forrester reports that “a third of all Internet users in the U.S. now post status updates on social networking services like Twitter and Facebook at least once per week.”

Fourth, David Hornik, a well-known American investor, recently attended a Procter & Gamble (P&G) outreach event in Silicon Valley. Asked what they thought of Twitter, Hornik writes: “To P&G, Twitter is a great broadcast medium — it is best for one to many communications that are short bursts of timely information — but as good as it is for timely information, the P&G folks do not view it as particularly relevant to what they are doing on the brand building and advertising side. For those things that Proctor & Gamble thinks are most interesting and important, they do not believe that Twitter will ever approach the value they can get out of a Google or Facebook.” This reminds me of what big brands think of Yellow Pages as a medium. They don’t understand it but it’s still drives business for millions of advertisers. Twitter will be (is?) all about the same thing. And for the record, I’ve always thought packaged-goods companies could have made a killing with Yellow Pages by making their product information locally-relevant…

Fifth, Hitwise’s traffic reports in Australia (as reported in ReadWriteWeb) show that “For perhaps the first time ever, social networking sites have surpassed the traffic search engines receive”. That would explain why in the long run Google is afraid of the new conversational capacity of sites like Facebook and Twitter. And why they’re racing to
introduce social functionalities within Google Maps.

What it means: Twitter and Facebook are both on their way to becoming serious local discovery and communication tools. It is happening.

In the most-awaited session of the afternoon of Day 1 at LeWeb, Michael Arrington (from TechCrunch) sat down with Marissa Mayer, Vice President, Search Products and User Experience at Google to discuss a series of hot topics like recent Google innovations, mobile and the newspaper industry.

On recent innovations:

• Mayer says Google is focused on future of search and they expect different modality of search, not just through keywords. That’s why they launched Google Goggles this week which is basically image recognition (you take a picture and Google tells you what it is). See this example. They also expanded voice search to Japanese and added the “What’s nearby” mobile functionality. Mayer thinks that people will eventually talk to their phone or take a picture to make a search. They also added real-time results (from Twitter, blogs, Facebook, MySpace, etc.) to regular search results, which drastically increases the relevancy of Google search results.
• On Google Chrome, she mentioned the release of Chrome Extensions which allows anyone to add functionalities via plugins in the Chrome browser (like Firefox). She said there are “tens of millions of Chrome users”.
• On Google Wave, Arrington stated “there’s something there” but wondered if we needed more “training”. I think most people are unsure of the value of Wave today and that’s why the Techcrunch founder asked the question.

On mobile searches:

• Mayer says they’ve grown tremendously on smart phones. Asked by Arrington if their total share of mobile searches over total searches was in the 1 to 5% range, she answered “slightly higher than that”.

On newspapers:

• Arrington started by saying we all understand the dire situation of print media and mentioned Eric Schmidt recent vision piece in the Wall Street Journal. He then asked Mayer: “What’s your vision?”. The VP from Google answered with a question: “how do you get users more engaged with news online?” She continued by stating that if we could build a news site from scratch today, it would probably look very different than what we have today. She then mentioned The Living Stories experiment they’re doing with the New York Times and the Washington Post. “What if the story was alive? Not just the print version posted online.” She added that the Web ”puts pressure on the atomic unit of consumption. The article is the atomic unit.” She then suggested we could aggregate all news story on the same topic on one page, like Wikipedia, to help with discovery in Google.
• She closed that topic by suggesting “personalized stream of news”, probably on your mobile phone, would be interesting. The stream would be filtered according to your social circle, location, the news brands you like, the writers you like, and the important news you should know about (she called them “veggies”).
• Asked if newspapers will move fast enough, she thought so and mentioned the New York Times and Washington Post are very progressive partners and very interested on how they can reinvent themselves.
• On Murdoch, Mayer mentioned the partnership with MySpace. Asked if she thought News Corp would pull their content from Google, she answered ”I hope not” as it would impact comprehensiveness of their results set. She added ”we have to respect the content owners. We would respect his will.”
• Finally, Arrington asked if Google would consider paying for content, Marissa Mayer proposed that they already have programs for content monetization through Google Adsense and their display ads network.

See more on Techcrunch.

This morning, I had the chance to sit down with Gilles Barbier, CEO and co-founder of TellMeWhere (Dismoiou in French), a Paris-based European social Yellow Pages service. As with any ratings/reviews service, people can find places (see Le Louvre profile page for example), read the basic information, see the map and pictures, rate/comment on the place, see what others have said and discover related places. So far, although well executed, it’s not very different feature-wise than a lot of ratings/reviews sites like Yelp or Qype.

Mobile as a differentiator

Where it gets really interesting is with their iPhone application (they also have an Android one). The beautifully designed (both from a user interface and user experience) app is where the rubber really hit the road for the young startup founded three years ago. Launched in July, the mobile version has been downloaded more than 400,000 times (on a total of 2 million iPhones in France).

Features include:

• Location-based business search
• Ability to rate/comment places and broadcast your comment on Twitter/Facebook
• See feedback from other users and your friends
• See recommendations based on your tastes
• Great integration of Facebook Connect with instant account creation based on your Facebook information
• Push of your activities to your friends’ phone and possibility for your friends to answer you back via SMS
• Integration with Google Maps
• Integration with the iPhone camera allowing users to take a picture and upload it right away to the place profile page

The release of their iPhone application has created a lot of user traction. Barbier asked me to pick a small town in France just to prove the breadth of usage. I chose Venasque, a small 1000-inhabitant village in Provence where I stayed last spring. I think there are only a dozen businesses in the village. TellMeWhere had two votes in their system. They even had a few activities in smaller towns in Canada. And now they’re on the verge of releasing version 2.0 of their mobile application of the iPhone and it will include check-in functionality (like Foursquare) and an activity stream of everything your friends are doing to enable real-time discovery. You can see a video of the new application here.

Barbier shared with me that they’ve now realized their mobile applications (built in-house) have become strategic for the small 7-employee company. The combination of mobile + local + social (utilizing an existing identity system like Facebook Connect) is a winning formula.

Mobile will be disruptive

And this is where, in the future of local search, mobile wins (as opposed to the Web). I finally see the light and now realizes that mobile will probably be the great disruptor it was always supposed to be. Why? Because, as Barbier said, mobile usage is real. It’s grounded in real life, with your day-to-day local usage and your social graph. That’s how you build usage. In web-based local search, it’s all about search engine optimization (SEO) these days as it’s very expensive to build new brands. It’s traffic coming from Google and other search engines from users with little loyalty. And with the Mountain View goliath hosting more and more content on their own site, I suspect that strategy will soon go off its rails.

Real-time business model

As for TellMeWhere’s business model, they’re monetizing using “special offers”. Merchants can claim their listing and submit deals/coupons/special offers (the best way to monetize real-time local as I’ve often said). It’s a pay-per-action model (or as Barbier coined it “pay-per-visit) where merchants only pay when the user displays the coupon on their phone on location. With geo-location, it’s easy to verify if the user was really on premise or not when he displayed the coupon. Barbier told me he can charge 4 euros to restaurants each time someone uses a coupon. Sounds like a good model.

I think TellMeWhere has everything to become Europe’s Foursquare. The application is beautifully executed and is easy to use. Current usage seems to show a very positive trend. They have traction in France and other francophone countries and want to go after the rest of Europe and the English-speaking world. You should definitely check out their iPhone application if you want to see a great social/local mobile app.

Update: Gilles Barbier tells me version 2.0 of his application has been approved by Apple and is now available for download.

I was watching the US Open Federer-Djokovic match on TV yesterday when, towards the end, Federer made an amazing, between-the-leg, return to score a point. I immediately tweeted “What a hit by Federer!!!”. I then stopped everything I was doing to watch a couple of instant replay on CBS, the network that broadcasting the game in North America. I was floored, what a shot. Federer went on to win the game.

Turns out I wasn’t satisfied with the two instant replays the network had provided me. I wanted to see more of it! Five minutes after the game, I searched for the word “Federer” on Twitter. Somebody had already uploaded the whole scene to YouTube in HD quality! I could watch it, pause it, analyze the shot the way I wanted to. I then tweeted back
the YouTube URL for all my friends to see.

What it means: a critical mass of people were watching the game. Someone took the time to “atomize” a portion of the broadcast (the amazing shot) and uploaded it on YouTube (the support). The “news” was then “announced” on Twitter (the discovery tool). Why isn’t this happening on CBS.com?

Just found out that someone has uploaded the video of the presentation I gave at the European Association of Directory Publishers (EADP) conference last May in Barcelona. Topic was: “Blended Search: Local Media Content Discovery”.

Watch it in three parts here:

Watch Part 1

Watch Part 2

Watch Part 3

You can follow with the slides on Slideshare.

From the Facebook corporate blog, Look Who’s Talking Now announces that Facebook is testing a better, more powerful Facebook search engine. That engine will allow users to find information from a variety of activity displayed in your friends’ activity stream.

Those of you in the test group will see new layouts for search results that will continue to include people’s profiles, Facebook Pages, groups and applications, and some entirely new Search features. With the test, you will be able to search your News Feed for the most recent status updates, photos, links, videos and notes being shared by your friends and the Facebook Pages of which you’re a fan. You will also be able to search for status updates, posted links and notes in Search from people who have chosen to make their profile and content available to everyone. (…)

The people around us are a powerful source for finding information about new and interesting information — from the latest on last night’s episode of “The Office” and suggestions on what to do for your next vacation to current events.

What it means: a very important move from Facebook. Surfacing activity content via keyword search is a fundamental element of discovery. Twitter had better technology that allowed users to easily find information in the activity timeline and Facebook is playing catch-up. I suspect we will amazed by the quality of information we can find when we’ll have access to all of our Facebook friends’ content via a search tool. Hopefully, Facebook will release an API for this search that other sites will be able to use to integrate.

I just finished giving my presentation at the European Association of Directory Publishers (EADP) conference in Barcelona, Spain. Topic was “Blended Search: Local Media Content Discovery”. It explores blended/universal search as it currently appears in a local context in search engines and local search sites. I propose in the presentation that the evolution of blended local search and content discovery will be through real-time feeds.

You can see it on Slideshare. If you’d like a copy, please e-mail me.

From Don’t Fight The Stream: Facebook And FriendFeed Redesigns Are Paying Off on Techcrunch:

When Facebook redesigned its homepage in early March in a wholehearted embrace of the real-time activity stream as its primary user interface, everybody complained. “Why on earth does the world need 2 Twitters?,” asked one of my friends on Facebook. Twitter-envy aside, some early data suggests that embracing the stream was the right decision after all.

Since the redesign went into effect, Facebook’s growth has accelerated. After flat 0.3 growth in February, Facebook added nearly 4 million unique U.S. visitors in March (up 6.6 percent over February), and another 5 million in April (up 10.3 percent over March) to end at 67.5 million domestic uniques, according to comScore. That puts it within kissing distance of MySpace’s 71 million unique U.S. visitors in April, by the way (…), and keeps a healthy 50-million visitor gap with Twitter, which added 8 million U.S. visitors in April alone.

What it means: As I wrote in my “I have seen the future of local media” post last week, the activity stream is the new gold standard for content discovery and Facebook’s new focus on it seems to be paying dividends in terms of usage. If you’re in Local Media, you should embrace it as well.

I have seen the next evolution of local media…

Yes, I have. And why am I so sure? Because I’ve seen it happen before and it’s about to happen again.  I hope you’re sitting down comfortably with a good coffee because it’s a long blog post (more than 2300 words!). But stick with me, it’s worth it!

Let’s go back to 2003. I’m running Yellow Pages Group’s online strategy and business development. YPG owns the leading online directories in Canada. At the time, our focus is on building the best “online directory” site in Canada (called Internet Yellow Pages or IYPs in the US). “Online directories” at the time are characterized by the infamous 4-fields search boxes (category/heading, business name, city, province/state) that basically recreate the print Yellow Pages experience online. Not always a very good user experience but all major directory publishers worldwide offer the same thing. It’s the design standard/convention for online directory sites.

According to general perception then, our biggest online competitor was Superpages.ca, owned by Telus, a major telco from Western Canada. Superpages was entering Yellow Pages Group territories (Toronto, Montreal, etc.) with print books and monopolizing a lot of the attention. In 2003, I had been using Google as my home page for at least three years. It seemed to me like it was the best entry door to Web content and Google’s traffic and revenues had been growing like crazy. Remember, this is pre-IPO (August 2004) and pre-Google Local (September 2004). Except for early adopters, small merchants were not yet talking about Google (that will come post-IPO) and directory publishers didn’t see Google as a threat.

But consumers were clearly starting to use Google for local searches and every time I used it, I found the experience was satisfying and the results were quite relevant.  I came to the realization that Google had just created a new design convention around “Web search” (simplified user interface, focus on results relevancy) but the train had left the station and it meant the whole industry had to play catch-up. In Canada, Superpages.ca is not important, Google is. Over the next three years, the entire online team at Yellow Pages Group would work at transforming our online strategy around local search. That included the delivery of a streamlined YellowPages.ca user interface (seen here on archive.org when first launched in 2006), an improved search technology, the introduction of enhanced content in search results (via digitized ad content, etc.), better search engine optimization for the site and a content partnership with Google for the launch of Google Local Canada. Over this transformative period, YPG becomes better at being user-focused which is what made Google’s success. Over the same period of time, the whole directory publishing industry worldwide metamorphoses itself into local search hubs.

The rise of social media

Fast forward to September 2006, I start writing about local search and social media. Blogs have been very popular for a couple of years allowing a new level of self-expression. Online social media as we know it today still hasn’t exploded but I get the feeling it’s going to be important. I remember when I first joined Yellow Pages Group (back in 1999 when it was still called Bell ActiMedia), someone told me word-of-mouth was the biggest source of leads for small businesses. That stuck with me. What if social media was able to create this enormous word-of-mouth machine? What if consumers become able to ask questions, share recommendations and have discussions on local places on a massive scale? It could happen but, at that time, I have no idea yet what form it would take.

In 2006, I’m already a heavy user of Linkedin but have missed the boat completely on MySpace. Facebook is growing but is still not open to everyone. They have just introduced their newsfeed feature (more on that later) and Twitter’s will slowly surface in March 2007 at the SXSW conference. In July 2007, Silicon Valley starts to get excited about Facebook. That same week, after studying the activities of famed blogger Robert Scoble, I understand what he’s doing with Facebook and what that means. An individual can become “media” by broadcasting his activities and having many friends/followers/fans. In August 2007, I reflect on the fact that the web is becoming a big word-of-mouth machine because of human activity.

In October 2007, Friendfeed, co-founded by Google Maps lead developer Bret Taylor, launches. They’ve taken the newsfeed element of Facebook and made it a standalone feature calling it a lifestreaming service. In March 2008, Twitter explodes. I write about how they’re slowly becoming “the new Facebook“. In June 2008, following an experiment I did on Twitter and Facebook, I see how practical it is to “ping” your social graph (i.e. your network of friends) when you have questions or needs. It works very nicely when you’ve “collected” hundreds of friends/people/fans around you.

Fast forward to this year. March 2009, Facebook redesigns its home page to make it more Twitter-like, with a focus on the activity stream. Beginning of April, Friendfeed also redesigns its home page and integrates real-time updates. Twitter, Facebook and Friendfeed all feel strangely similar now. I believe we’ve now reached a new gold standard in terms of display and interaction with real-time conversations, which means that consumers will be now be expecting a similar user experience in this context.

Small merchants have started creating a presence on Twitter. You can already find bars, restaurants, pizza places, lawyers, plumbers, bakeries, etc. These technology early-adopters are joining the conversation, the same way early small merchant adopters started doing local advertising on Google back in 2003.

New “‘Marketplaces”

With Facebook and Twitter, we’re clearly seeing the emergence of new ”marketplaces”, where people and companies/brands meet to discuss, to share links (including news) but also to “buy” and “sell”. To the foreign eye, they’re noisy, unruly and useless but I think they are a modern version of souqs. According to Wikipedia, “souqs were more than just a market to buy and sell goods; they were also major festivals and many cultural and social activities took place in them”. Sounds familiar?

Flickr picture by khalid almasoud

Need more proof? Michael Bauer found a 1901 New York Times article talking about a new growing technology called the telephone. “No doubt the telephone is used unnecessarily, and sometimes abused. Its sharp alarm jars on the nerves, and its incessant and insistent demands upon the attention of the subscriber who is much in request are (…) very wearing” but it adds “to dispense with it now would be to necessitate the reorganization of our business system”. As Bauer says, “Sounds like a twitter morning.”

Traffic explosion

In any case, consumers seem to love their Twitter and their Facebook. According to ComScore, “Worldwide visitors to Twitter approached 10 million in February (2009), up an impressive 700+% vs. year ago” while Facebook welcomed its 200 millionth active user in April 2009. Again according to ComScore, Google’s monthly searches grew by 42% to 9.1B in the last 12 months in the US (March 08 to March 09). So, they still have an excellent growth rate but I’d be curious to know how many “interactions” (a proxy for searches) happen in one month in Facebook and Twitter. This Techcrunch article gives us a better idea by indicating that “more than 850 million photos (are) uploaded to the site each month”.

Fighting yesterday’s battle?

Let’s go back to Yellow Pages publishers. A few weeks ago, RHD presented me their new DexKnows site. I was impressed by the evolution of the site with its simplified user interface (search engine-like) and better taxonomy. But at the same time, as I wrote in my post, “it also made me realize that the industry is still very much looking at Google (or Yahoo or MSN) as the local search benchmark.”  I then wondered out loud: ”instead of doing incremental innovation, how do you leapfrog search engines? In other words, what is keeping Google up at night? The answer to that question leads to a possible new strategic direction.  Community, humans, social interactions, marketplaces are what’s keeping Google up at night.” As I said in this interview with Michael Boland from the Kelsey Group, “There have been many recent IYP redesigns that have been drastic improvements but I’ve started to wonder if they aren’t fighting yesterday’s battle. All IYPs are innovating on an incremental fashion but there is no game changing innovation going on.”

Where do we go from here?

What is it then? I think you can guess where I’m going. I know “newsfeeds” are a key element of that brave new real-time world. They’re addictive and allow for content discovery. I know “real-time conversation” is a crucial component as well. After all, social media is all about communication. But I was missing one piece of the equation. That piece was “real-time search”. I discovered its tremendous value when I installed this GreaseMonkey script that integrates Twitter search results on top of Google search results. For timely queries in Google, the Twitosphere offers much better results. For example #1, see this screenshot of a search query when author JG Ballard died a few weeks ago. The Twitter results gave me relevant links to find out more information about his death. You need to scroll down the page to find Google News results that mention the writer’s demise. The screenshot for example #2 was taken when we learned that scientist Stephen Hawking was gravely ill and had been taken to the hospital. Once again, Google failed to provide me timely, relevant results.

What if you were to apply these three fundamental social elements to local media? The newsfeed would allow for publishing of local activities and discovery of new places to go to, important local news and cool people that share similar tastes. The real-time search would allow for structured search on recent activities, showing consumers where the action is happening in their city. Finally, the real-time conversation would enable consumers and merchants to engage in conversation, increasing user satisfaction and generating new leads for businesses. Sounds like this would be a cool and brave new local world isn’t it? This is a game changer and represents a major opportunity for all local media publishers. Ok now, I’m warning you, I’m switching to pitch mode!

Introducing Praized Media’s newsfeed, real-time search and conversation platform

My company, Praized Media, was created to help media companies tap into the growing potential of online word-of-mouth and social media. I believe the future of local media is right in front of our eyes and that if we act now, we can maintain (and even increase) the relevancy of media companies in the next years. We’ve developed four key enterprise-class social modules that can be integrated within an existing platform or be used to create a brand new social destination site.

1) The Local Buzz local newsfeed (integration of a real-time local activity stream including user and advertiser actions, advertising, editorial content, classified ads, weather, events, etc.). Praized will create an activity stream out of your current content and ideally, that feed should be displayed on the home page of your main site.

Click for larger view

2) Real-time search integration within existing local search platform. This module provides structured data search results based on the newsfeed activity. It enables the integration of the most recent activities around a specific keyword/merchant name in a specific geographical area. It gives user the freshest results around specific keywords.

Click for larger view

3) Real-time users and merchants communication module. This module provides the ability for consumers and merchants to start posting short-form web messages (à la Twitter) in the newsfeed located on your home page. Consumers can “follow” other consumers or merchants and can engage in real-time asynchronous conversations.

Click for larger view

4) Answers (a “local” Question & Answer service, including a social network broadcast mechanism). Consumers can ask questions to the community and to their Facebook/Twitter friends and all answers come back to a unique page. Merchants can even join the conversation!

Click to see actual implementation

What it means: Ten years ago, Google invented a new paradigm for search. The local media industry was blindsided by this upstart which has now become a juggernaut. Back in early 21st century, quick industry reaction would have made the fight more even-handed. Fast-forward to now, Facebook, Twitter and Friendfeed have created a new gold standard for real-time conversations and search. Consumers are using them in drove. Small merchants are creating a presence on those sites and joining the conversation. These sites have become marketplaces but they have yet to fully discover their local angle. The rise of social media online is a game-changing opportunity for local media publishers. People are discussing, sharing and recommending to each other news to read and places to visit. Millions of word-of-mouth conversations about local places are occurring every day on the Web, yet they are not happening on major media portals.

I firmly believe that this is going to be the gold standard for local media and that, in the next three years, all major Yellow Pages, newspaper publishers and possibly magazine, radio and television Web site will serve their content via a newsfeed on their home page. They’ll show real-time community activity that way and will allow conversations between all local stakeholders (consumers, merchants, journalists, politicians, etc.). Praized Media might not power them all but we’ll do our part to make this change happen.

I leave you with this perfect quote from Robert Scoble, famed Silicon Valley thinker. He thinks the future of local is in real-time. He says ” You’ll find all sorts of things this way in the future. How about a restaurant? A plumber? A TV repair shop? A lawyer? Consider that you’re walking down the street with a future version of Facebook or Twitter or friendfeed in your hand. You’re looking for a restaurant. Which is going to be able to bring back the best restaurants that your friends care about? That requires having metadata to study. That’s why Facebook copied friendfeed’s likes so that it can come back and say “there are four restaurants that have more than 20 likes from your friends within walking distance.” Translation: the future hasn’t been built yet. That’s why Twitter has not won the entire game yet. That’s why this is a fun industry to watch.”

Update: many people have asked me for a portable/printable version of the article. I have created an acrobat (.pdf) version that you can download here.