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Posts Tagged ‘location’

It’s All About Location, Location, Location

One of the key features within Sysomos’ technology is geo-demographics: the ability to determine where social media conversations are happening and who’s leading them. For companies that want to understand what’s going on, having information about where (locations) and who (age/gender) is extremely valuable.

Geo-demographics has been a core part of what Sysomos offers clients around the world, and there’s no doubt that location will be a major theme in 2010. In fact, location could be the biggest trend within social media in 2010.

There are two major factors driving the “location” market: One is technology that will make it easier for social media services to integrate the location of a user into the overall experience, and two, the emergence of real-time search that will leverage location by quickly showing where social media users are located.

Twitter’s embrace of a geo-location API, and its purchase of MixerLabs and its GeoAPI technology yesterday is just the tip of the location iceberg. Like the real estate business, the Web is now about location, location, location.

For businesses, location is important for a few reasons. Perhaps the biggest is it gives them intelligence about where people are located and what they’re doing. For example, if you’re shopping downtown, and tweet about looking for a place to have coffee, Starbucks can now hit you with a special offer at a store two minutes away.

This ability to deliver the right message at the right time to the right person is a powerful combination, which is why businesses will be all over location, and why companies such as Google and Twitter are all over it.

For more thoughts about the “location land rush”, check out TechCrunch.

By Mark Evans - December 24th, 2009 - 1 Comment »
Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Social Media

You’re Tweeting from Where?

One of the challenges in assessing Twitter-Land is getting an accurate picture of where users are located.

Right now, location is mostly determined by the information that people provide within their profiles. There are a few issues:

1. Not everyone provides their location information

2. Some people provide wrong information. For example, many users change their location to Tehran to support the political activists in Iran.

3. It can be difficult to assess location information if it’s written in non-English languages such as Arabic, Chinese and Japanese.

So, it’s exciting – if you’re into geography and geoloation – that Twitter is going to be introduce a new API that will lets developers add latitude and longitude to any update. In a blog post, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said:

“Folks will need to activate this new feature by choice because it will be off by default and the exact location data won’t be stored for an extended period of time. However, if people do opt-in to sharing location on a tweet-by-tweet basis, compelling context will be added to each burst of information.”

If and when the new API gains traction – and users opt-in to having their locations made available – it will provide a much more accurate and interesting view of how and where Twitter is being used around the world.

For more thoughts, check out Fast Company’s blog on what Twitter could do with your location information, and Mashable’s list of five geolocation features it wants.

Here’s a chart from our Inside Twitter report that shows the countries where Twitter is being used the most. In future reports, we plan on providing more details about countries and cities.

sysomos-twitter-newusersbycountry

By Mark Evans - August 21st, 2009 - No Comments »
Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Social Media, Technology

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