The Praized Blog

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.

Google just launched a “status update” field that merchants can use to send real-time messages to their profile page (i.e. Place Pages) in Google Maps. Accessible from the Local Business Center dashboard (which means it’s only available to businesses who have claimed their listing), you can read more about it on the Google LatLong blog.

Excerpt:

Holding a special event today? Want to post a coupon for 5-7pm tonight? Have a new product in stock? You can now get the word out by posting to your Place Page directly from your Local Business Center dashboard. Once you’ve logged in and are on your business’ dashboard, post an update and it will go live on your Place Page in just a few minutes. To see an example, check out the Place Page for Mission Mountain Winery which posted to introduce a new wine.

What it means: After Facebook, Google is now having real-time envy (or is that Twitter envy?). This is a small addition but it tells a lot about the product direction. As you can see in the example, attribution for the message is showing it’s coming “From the owner”. Expect Google to allow users to give that kind of real-time feedback in the future, hereby improving on user ratings/reviews. You can also expect broadcast bridges to other social networks.

If I was in Facebook’s or Twitter’s shoes, I would move quickly and enter the structured local business listings world by offering pre-populated fan pages (for Facebook) and merchant profiles (for Twitter). This would simplify the entry for SMEs and basically enable a “claim your profile” function on those two social networks. It also would simplify the mass structuring of real-time content (which is very valuable).

A deluge of important news in the local social space this morning, all very relevant from a local strategy point of view.

1. Yesterday afternoon, PaidContent detailed AOL’s, Yahoo’s and MSN’s aggressive plans for local. All three are attracted by potential local advertising revenues. The article says “Microsoft could integrate content from local bloggers”. As for Yahoo!, they recently ”rolled out a new service called “Neighbors,” which lets users ask others in their neighborhood questions”.
2. In this interview with Stephan Uhrenbacher, Qype’s founder, he reveals the site now has 17.7m monthly unique visitors. He also says that in Germany, Qype is ” larger than the yellow pages in terms of traffic”. From reading between the lines, Qype is thinking about implementing a game mechanism (or reward system) and a check-in system à la Foursquare, two features I recommended in my “perfect local media company in 2014” presentation.
3. Google just shipped QR code stickers to the 190,000 most popular Google local US businesses. A QR code can be scanned/photographed by a camera phone and links to the Google profile page in Google Maps when activated. The Techcrunch article adds “Local businesses can also set up coupon offers through their Google directory page, which would turn the QR code into a mobile coupon”. Mobile + QR code + coupons = monetization strategy for the real-time Web. Another important data point: “There are now over a million local businesses which have claimed their Google local listing”. Does Google need the Yellow Pages sales forces anymore?
4. Citysearch partners with Twitter to offer tools to small businesses. Citysearch will display “tweets” on merchant pages, offer the opportunity to merchants to create their Twitter account and offer a reputation management service. A Gigaom article says “Citysearch says it has direct relationships with some 200,000 local merchants”. These things will all be required features of any local search site within a few months.
5. Techcrunch reveals this morning that Aardvark, the social Question & Answer service, is considering an $30M+ acquisition offer from Google. The service allows people to ask questions to their friends and to the network using instant messenging and social networks.

What it means: expect these kind of partnerships, acquisitions and features deployment to speed up as industry players try to capture market share of the real-time local/social Web. Expect Facebook to make a lot of noise as well in the next few weeks (the aforementioned Gigaom article asks “who wants to take bets on how many hours till Facebook Local launches?”). They are the 900-pound gorilla. In 12 months, we will already have a good idea who will win and who will lose in that space.

I don’t want to sound like an informercial but my company Praized Media foresaw the rise of social Q&A services like Aardvark and that’s why we introduced our Answers module (currently used by Yellow Pages Group) which enables consumers to ask local questions to their network of friends. Based on market evolution, we’re also developing a white-label reputation management service that will enable social media monitoring and small merchant Twitter sign-ups (like what Citysearch is doing) because we believe it’s going to be needed in every local media company in the future. Our real-time search module also allows any media publisher to display related ”tweets” on merchant profile pages. And we’re also preparing an eCouponing module to monetize all that real-time activity. We’re basically building the whole social media toolkit for local media publishers. End of infomercial.

According to CTV’s Chris Abel, CanPages.ca, the local search site of Canpages Inc., the independent Canadian directory publisher, has launched its own Street View feature. CanPages has partnered with San Francisco-based MapJack to deploy this technology in Canada.  Abel says it’s very similar to Google Street View but includes new features such as ”a fullscreen mode and paths that explore pedestrian walkways as much as they do the streets ruled by cars and trucks.”

You can see it in searches in Vancouver, Whistler, or Squamish (all in British Columbia). As for future expansion, “the company plans to expand to include Street Views of Toronto and Montreal next, followed by as much of Canada as possible.”

In the last few days, an ad for a video camera operator has appeared in a Quebec job site, making people think Google was going to capture Quebec City in Street View. It’s possible but I suspect it might be an ad for the first French Canadian street view deployment of CanPages.ca.

What it means: looking at the introduction of new features inside the CanPages.ca site in the last 6-12 months, it’s clear that the exec team there has identified feature gaps inside YellowPages.ca, the main property of Yellow Pages Group (and directory incumbent in Canada) and are trying to differentiate themselves via those new features. It’s a good strategic move. On the other side, YPG has a mapping agreement with Microsoft and I’m fairly certain the Redmond giant is also taking street view pictures (many people on Twitter have reported seeing the Microsoft vehicle taking pictures). This will certainly be easy for YPG to deploy once it’s available in Canada. As I reported a few weeks ago, the new DexKnows.com has a nice integration of Google Maps and Street View.

This morning, Google announced the launch of Google Latitude, its location-based mobile social networking application for mobile devices. Similar to other products like Loopt, Whrrl and Brightkite, it allows users to position themselves on a Google map (either manually or using your phone’s GPS), leave a status update message (like on Twitter or Facebook) and share (or not) that information (location and message) with your friends.

Although the current service does not really innovate vs. the other three players I mentioned above, what’s very powerful is the ability to invite all your Gmail contacts (your “friends”) to connect to you in your mobile social network. Google understands that a large portion of your social graph resides in your e-mail software. Privacy is of utmost importance in a service like this and you can decide on various privacy settings for each friend. There is a nice online integration as well through an iGoogle application allowing you to interact with the service there.

What it means: think of Latitude as the next platform play for Google. Expect them to integrate it with Google Friend Connect to allow anyone to use those pieces of technology inside their own Web sites. I firmly believe that kind of feature/site infrastructure (friends/location/status updates) will be used by a majority of sites in the next five years and Google is hoping to capture a large portion of that market. Facebook, with its far superior Facebook Connect, is already ahead of Google on the friend infrastructure side but will need to play catchup and launch their own local/social platform as well in order to compete in that field.

Last Thursday, during Google Inc’s Q3 results call, Youssef Squali from asked for more details about Google’s strategy and progress around local search:

“You talked earlier about GeoLocal with product like Maps and Earth is big monetization opportunity, so we have talked about them for a long time and they remain opportunities. One of the issues there has been this direct access to the advertisers to the local merchant. Have you – are we any – are we closer to cracking the code on that?”

Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founder answered:

“Certainly GeoLocal has been a substantial source of investments on the part of our company and you are absolutely right. I think it is a really big monetization opportunity but it is going to have a pretty long bootstrap time because there are so many small businesses and you have to get them all in the loop. Technology is evolving quickly with respect to things shifting to mobile phones and some of them will have GPS now, some of them do not, some have cell ID different device and things. I do think that this is an investment that we are going to have to keep investing in for some time till we get really big payoff.  I should mention we already have fairly substantial revenues from geo local, so it is not the case but somehow this is I mean this is a good chunk of our business and I expect that when we do finally bootstrap lots and lots of local advertisers. When there is some settling of the best user experiences for doing this both on mobile devices as well as on the desktops, I think you will see a substantial ramp there.”

Jonathan Rosenberg, SVP Product Management, added:

“The biggest thing I would reinforce from Sergey’s comments is, this is an area where we are winning. Maps is the most popular mapping site in the world. We have got all sorts of data now for over 160 countries. We are also doing some very exciting things in terms of ramping our ability to get data for areas where there are not very good maps, where we are harnessing the power of users to enter information in. On the local side, what we are doing really goes beyond the traditional Yellow Page types of activities and I mean we are taking all the information that a business would want or a user to see; reviews, hours of operations, photos, web results, and we are embedding all of those on to these maps which have a great deal of traffic. So, if you just run a query, steakhouse in Chicago or something like that and when you click on the map and select a particular listing, you can now do things like click on Street View and actually see the restaurant. So we are very pleased with the traffic that is being driven.  One other thing I would actually suggest you try one of the coolest maps applications I saw. Go to swisstrains.ch to see the precision of Swiss trains in real-time and you will actually get a visceral sense of what it is going to be like for people when all of this stuff works on their browsers and works in mobile devices.

Source: “Google Inc. Q3 2008 Earnings Call Transcript” from Seeking Alpha

What it means: what Google is really saying: we’ve been very successful from a user point of view with our Google Maps sites throughout the world. We’re getting good revenues from local search but it could be better.  We’re still struggling to reach the small and medium-sized businesses that make up the bulk of offline local search revenues. But, once we crack the code, it will be big. Watch for disruption happening through mobile devices and technologies.

Google just announced that you can now embed YouTube videos in merchant profiles in Google Maps. Videos are displayed in the “Photos & Videos” tab in the extended listing bubble that appears when you click on a listing.

“Local business owners can easily add YouTube videos along with other content such as business details, photos, and descriptions to their listings. To do so, simply upload your videos to YouTube and ensure that the ‘embed’ option is turned on. Then, associate your video to your business listing through the Local Business Center.” A bit difficult for the average small merchant but fairly easy if you run a local SEO program.

The Google blog points to this example, I Dream of Cake in San Francisco.

What it means: most major North American directory publishers have launched their local video offer in the last 12 months (often powered by TurnHere or Weblistic). I think this will drastically increase the value proposition for those local videos, if publishers agree to distribute their videos in YouTube and Google Maps. I think they should do it and leverage the enormous amount of traffic found in those two sites.

As this week’s Mobile World Congress slowly winds down (tomorrow’s the last day), I thought it was appropriate to summarize the top 10 trends of the conference as identified by Infoworld magazine.

1. GPS on board. Amongst the manufacturers, Nokia “plans to sell 35 million phones with GPS” this year.
2. Better cameras with “face detection, image stabilization, and the ability to take better pictures in the dark”.
3. Linux. Google Android prototypes. ’nuff said.
4. Movies on your phone.
5. Geotagging that “combines built-in support for navigation and photography. When you take a picture, your location is also saved. Then you can overlay that information on services like Google Maps and see where you’ve been.”
6. Windows Mobile. “Four out of five of the biggest phone makers have phones based on Microsoft’s Windows Mobile operating system”
7. High-speed mobile Internet
8. Wi-Fi on board.
9. FM transmitters.
10. Touch-based interfaces.

What it means: phones are becoming more and more like mini-portable computers and trying to be at the center of your mobile life. In addition, more GPS on board and the geotagging functionality are very exciting stuff for a local search freak like me! I was also intrigued by the better face detection. Expect a day where you can take a picture of someone and, with his/her permission, become a “friend” in a social network…

Google is now showing 10 local listings in all local category searches in their main search results pages. I’ve captured a few examples below. What’s interesting is that no address is shown (only the phone number) but the clickable link goes straight to the merchant’s web site.

Lawyers in Montreal

Doctors in San Francisco

Architects in New York

(As seen on SearchEngineGuide)

CNET’s News.com reports on a new forecast from Swedish analyst firm Berg Insight predicting that “the number of GPS-enabled handsets is set to more than triple during the next five years”.

Growth in the GPS-handset user base should also lead to more applications that use such information, Malm (a telecommunications analyst at Berg Insight) added, pointing to the success of currently available location-based services like Google Maps. “Perhaps it is not right to call them services, but small apps that use location as a filter or enhancement–we will see a lot of that going forward, once developers and users get more used to using location,” he said.

Berg’s press release adds “The availability of accurate position data in mobile devices creates exciting new opportunities for developers of local search, navigation and social networking applications”, said Mr Malm. “Nokia and Google will be two of the foremost players in this arena but there is a good chance that the development will also give birth to the next Facebook or MySpace.”

Flickr photo by Jimmy_Joe

What it means: I am truly excited about these numbers as local, social and mobile combined really has the potential to create the next big web phenomenon. But one thing concerns me currently in that space: the creation of an even playing field. In 1995, barriers to entry on the World Wide Web were low (even non-existent) and allowed the creation of Yahoo and eBay (current combined market cap: $67B). Still today, the barriers to entry for new Web projects remain very low. It’s not the same in mobile where there are a lot of gatekeepers. Handset manufacturers and Telcos come to mind, but the position of strength major portals and search engines enjoy through their relationships with the aforementioned gatekeepers make their stranglehold very difficult to break. Because of that, I wonder if we will see a real innovation burst in mobile/local in the short term. It will come, I have no doubt about it, but it might not come as quickly as it potentially could be.