Gillmor Gang 10.15.09
Saturday, October 17th, 2009Location, location, location — foursquare’s Dennis Crowley, drop.io’s Sam Lessin. socialmedia.com’s Seth Goldstein, and Robert Scoble. Recorded live Thursday, October 15, 2009.
Mr. STEVE GILLMOR: Hi. This is Steve Gillmor and this is the Gillmor Gang. Welcome to an edition we are going to continue some of the things that we have been talking about over the past few weeks. Of course, this entire show is about whether RSS is dead and of course it is. But we don’t yet know how this relates to that fact and we are going – I’m sure getting argument from Robert Scoble who has a son named RSS.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. GILLMOR: But I’d like to welcome some special guest here. First of all, this is his second time on the gang or actually he’s been on before but second on this new gang is Seth Goldstein who is the – you are CEO and founder of SocialMedia.com, right?
Mr. SETH GOLDSTEIN (CEO, Founder, SocialMedia.com): Yes. Hi, Steve.
Mr. GILLMOR: Hi and welcome.
Mr. GOLDSTEIN: Hi, everybody.
Mr. GILLMOR: And Seth and I had a conversation, actually it was a chat while he was flying west from New York yesterday afternoon. He suggested that we might bring in someone who he had some conversations with in New York and so joining us from New York is Dennis Crowley of Foursquare. Welcome, Dennis.
Mr. DENNIS CROWLEY (Foursquare): Hey, how’s it going? Thanks for having me.
Mr. GILLMOR: Thanks for being here. And also from, I guess, it’s Brooklyn, right?
Mr. SAM LESSIN (Drop.io): Yeah.
Mr. GILLMOR: Sam Lessin of drop.io who is going to contribute some commentary about all things identity I think and how people…
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. LESSIN: Oh hey.
Mr. GILLMOR: Excellent.
Mr. GILLMOR: And of course we got some sort of simulation of Robert Scoble coming through us from – Yes.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. GILLMOR: All right. So, I’m going to have – since I’m – I’ve tried to keep myself blissfully ignorant of all things Foursquare and location in any case, I would like to have Robert Scoble describe for us a little bit about why he thinks that this is such an important technology.
Mr. ROBERT SCOBLE: Because it lets us – first of all it let’s us check in and tell other people where we are like I just checked in at the Ritz down the street and that let’s all my friends who have subscribed to me or followed me here at Sea(ph) where I am. And that – on one level that’s pretty cool but that’s been around for awhile. What Foursquare has really done is at a game on top of that. So, here I just checked in and it says I’m still the mayor of the Ritz in Half Moon Bay. And that make – and you get points for check in at new places and there is badges and here’s the badges that I have so far unlocked which isn’t like many compared to some of the kids and…
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. SCOBLE: Or like in San Francisco. But as you – as you add more things to the system or do more things or add more things that add more badges and that’s pretty cool for cool kids who want to play game. But what’s really need and what really got me to be a huge fan is when you get to Hermit(ph) City as long as it’s in square, people can leak tips and hears the tips for Half Moon Bay that are on my screen. And they include all sorts of things like you know, tres – three amigos has the best tacos in the Coast side. And Pasta Moon said – you appear at the Pasta Moon Restaurant and says get a book or magazine next door and read it while having good wine and doing that kind of stuff. And there’s just tons and tons of little tips on the cities that you landed and I found that – this is much different than Yelp. Yelp tells me what great restaurants to go see but it’s very cold because it’s not from my friends. My friends have left these little suggestions for me. And I really love friend with that…
Mr. GILLMOR: OK. So, it’s fairly…
Mr. SCOBLE: Square foot.
Mr. GILLMOR: Basically he loves it. Dennis, is this what you – did you design this for Robert Scoble or…
Mr. CROWLEY: Yeah.
Mr. GILLMOR: Are there other reasons?
Mr. CROWLEY: It seems like it, right? No, I mean I think Robert that’s kind of the best pitch you could have – you could have ever given instead within the job that I do a lot of times. And you know, this is the stuff that we have been working on for awhile. It’s like you know, trying to build tools that kind of intersect in the middle of, you know, how do you make smarter friend finders and how do you make smarter social city guides and really that’s how do you engineer software that can encourage you to do things that you wouldn’t normally do and make you – rewards you for doing this such, for being more adventurous.
Mr. GILLMOR: Yeah. Seth Goldstein, what’s the important of all this?
Mr. GOLDSTEIN: I think the important thing is going to come checking in and you know like the most powerful consumer services and social media seem to be able to top into some basic latent human gestures so that Facebook…
Mr. GILLMOR: All right, we’re having a little…
Mr. GOLDSTEIN: (unintelligible)
Mr. GILLMOR: Crisis here today.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. GILLMOR: Could you repeat that last, Seth?
Mr. GOLDSTEIN: On the hills of people’s (unintelligible) based on people’s inherent (unintelligible) can meet, update the status. Right, they top (unintelligible) to something that was here and I think and just people wanted to share information at themselves and that, and Twitter is being built upon people’s needs to tweet. And I think what Foursquare is topping into is this sort of third – third generation social gesture which is checking in that people for whatever reason want to check in their whereabouts in a social environment and it’s very simple as Dennis himself will tell you in the applications on themselves aren’t phenomenal but they’re topping into something right now. It’s primal and it’s scaling like crazy and that’s why I think it’s important.
Mr. GILLMOR: Dennis, you’re a little jerky because of the bandwidth issues that we seem to be having.
Mr. CROWLEY: Yes, has the audio come through or?
Mr. GILLMOR: Yeah, the audio is fine. So…
Mr. CROWLEY: OK.
Mr. GILLMOR: We’ll just have to live with that. Any comments on this checking in, you know, philosophy and that…
Mr. CROWLEY: Yeah.
Mr. GILLMOR: Go ahead.
Mr. CROWLEY: Well, yeah, I mean we’ve been using the stuff in New York for years and you know, I mean you know the previous version or incarnation of this was The Dodgeball Project that we are working at Google and it was – you know, we are kind of, it was very lowest common denominator worked on you know on mobile phones with SMS. And you would check in just to know where people are and you know, it was one of this like creed(ph) Twitter things were just like having a sense of what your friends are doing whether they are in or out or where in the city they are or who they hang out with. It just turned out to be like a very, you know, there is something very final about it. You feel like you have like a six sense where you can, you know kind of see around corners and see through walls, just knowing you know what’s going on around you without having to leave your desk or leave your apartment. And you know, like a lot of what we are doing is trying to build on top of that stuff. So, you know a lot people have than done this stuff in the past. They generally stop at the check in. It’s like, oh yeah I checked in and that’s the end of the story. But that’s kind of a beginning of it, right? What you want to know is like where people have been over time and what does it mean that I’m at this particular place at a certain time and that’s all the stuff that we are trying to explore. You know, like dragging off trends like what is it mean that a lot of people are going here right now. What does it mean that a lot of people have been at these places over the last couple of weeks? I think one of the most interesting things we can get in to is in the same way that Amazon or Netflix can make recommendations based on the types of, you know, movies they watched or the types of books that you buy, we can do the same thing for people in places. So, you know, if you’re you know you typically hang out with this group we can – and recommend you know, places to going other people here to meet. And you know it’s – a lot of the technologies are the same which was applied in a different way. And you know, I think on top of that just a lot of things are different now or much different now than they were the last time we’re doing The Dodge Ball like everyone understand – we have spent half time on Dodge Ball trying to explain to people why you would ever want to do, why you would ever want to check in. And now, with, you know in a post twitter world, they twitter and redone that like every – Twitter has explained to people why it’s important to know what you are doing for lunch and what you did last night and what you are doing right now and we get the piggy back off of a lot of that way common knowledge that other people already have now. I think that is why the stuff is taking off in a way that it did not take off the first time that we try to.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. GILLMOR: You mentioned Google. Were you at Google in the past?
Mr. CROWLEY: Yeah, yeah. The last thing we worked on Dodgeball we sold it to Google in 2005 where therefore like two years.
Mr. GILLMOR: Yeah, well did you actually work at Google or…
Mr. CROWLEY: Yeah, I was there for two years.
Mr. GILLMOR: And what were you working on.
Mr. CROWLEY: I was working on The Dodge Ball Project.
Mr. GILMOR: And so did they abandon it? I mean, what happened?
Mr. CROWLEY: Yeah, it just. I don’t think it was the right fit for that product at that time, you know and so we try to make it happen there. It just didn’t work and then Alex Rainert, my co-founder, you know, we ended up leaving about two years afterward we both went on to different things.
Mr. GILLMOR: Let me bring Sam into this. Sam, what – do you have any comments on what we have heard so far and…
Mr. LESSIN: Yeah, I mean I think Dennis can confirm this but I think I’m probably one of the first few hundred Foursquare users. I’m a huge fan. I heard Seth completely at the social gesture and you know I actually working with a few friends most notably with John Steinberg and Bill Tall(ph) who are kind of driving this forward. I think that is really confirms, I think we actually built the first app on Foursquare that is called Social Great and actually aggregates at city rebels(ph), all the data into almost real time guide based on now Foursquare and Brightkite and Graffiti Go what’s going on in getting space. It’s super powerful. I’m actually cut the data myself with a few hundred thousand check ins and you know, I’m excited too. I think there’s a lot of depth that you can pull out of it and a lot of really interesting trends and you know I think that you know just as Twitter does an ecosystem format, you know Foursquare and a few other of these great applications that are really started harnessing capture the check in vocabulary and going provide a really interesting open – in some cases data set to drive some huge insight out of it. So I’m pretty excited about it also.
Mr. GILLMOR: Robert, drop in.
Mr. SCOBLE: I’m just listening because I agree with everything, you know, there is some serendipity. A lot of people go – this is lame. Why do I want to tell the world where I am right now and once you are on the system you start to understand because you start having meetings with people who are just showing up in your area or like if I am in San Francisco, I had checked in and then I see has anybody checked in within a couple blocks of me at a coffee shop or something like and I have had meetings like that, you know, I see like right now I see Miranda(ph) just checked in.
Mr. LESSIN: Here in Strawberry.
Mr. SCOBLE: Was it?
Mr. LESSIN: He’s in Strawberry. I just saw him check in to Strawberry.
Mr. SCOBLE: Yeah, Strawberry Shopping Center and let’s see MG Siegler(ph) just checked in on 2nd Street and you know and so I can see who is checking in and I can have this serendipitous meetings. But that’s only one piece of it that there is something to the game play. I have played with other systems that are competing with Foursquare like Gorrell(ph) and I just like to game play. I like you know competing with friends in hard away over the local pits(ph) to get – to be the mayor. It sort of a fun little poke that we have back and forth who can go to the pits more often and then check in and who can become the mayor, you know. And it’s also fun when I get in some place new and I see who is the mayor. Sometimes I know that person sometimes I don’t and they usually have their Twitter address so I can Twitter them and say hey, I’m in your spot. What else should I do? You know well, I’m here and that starts with different conversations. Then you also see people twittering you know about their conquest about their badges or about you know, I just became mayor of you know this cool spot, and that there is some conversationality to this…
Mr. GILLMOR: Yeah but I mean you guys are forcing me into the – into the (unintelligible) role but…
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. GILLMOR: So what? I mean you know I…
Mr. LESSIN: So in any case or what?
Mr. GILLMOR: OK, so there’s a lot – You have a lot of free time here I think so.
Mr. SCOBLE: OK.
Mr. GILMOR: Steve.
Mr. GOLDSTEIN: Well, sorry.
Mr. GILLMOR: Go ahead, Seth.
Mr. GOLDSTEIN: OK. So, I was talking to one of my investors today George Zachary at Charles River Ventures and what you are seeing, what you are looking at. And he said you know not surprisingly that he’s looking at a lot of things connecting. You know the internet world to the physical world. And it reminded me of the stuff that we were doing at (unintelligible) in 1999. We launched the pervasive computing fund and it was early and it was around things like Cosmo.com and Vindigo(ph) where Dennis was in a couple life times ago which was the first – it was just – you know, the first mobile city guide for the Palm Pilot and there was a company called Modo from Scout Electromedia that had a city guide that was based on our pager bandwidth that they could buy in the store, open it up sticking that battery and you got automatic content. And as I thought back about all these businesses and a lot of them failed after the Dot Com Bubble crashed. What surprising to me somehow on this social, you can have social – a social network and a social graph and certainly these identity systems have now made this pervasive computing idea much more we owe. I’m still that, you know, augmented reality in itself, not so interesting, augmented reality simply with, you know, list of local pizza joints that you can see through your iPhone camera, not so interesting. Augmented reality that connects real people that you know or that you have known in the past, you’ve kind of see them through rotoscope or superimposed over the virtual world gets really, really interesting.
Mr. GILLMOR: Right so basically ….
Mr. GOLDENSTEIN: But it’s something.
Mr. GILLMOR: Basically what does began to start to make sense here is the notion of swarming around, you know, businesses, conversations you know the sort of group awareness, a social graph as spread across a bunch of services that start to, sort of, populates. It’s the minority report vision but it seems to be…
Mr. GOLDSTEIN: Correct.
Mr. GILLMOR: Go ahead.
Mr. GOLDSTEIN: In the (unintelligible)…
Mr. GILLMOR: (Unintelligible) your bandwidth again. (Unintelligible) your bandwidth again. Now, it’s – turn off the BitTorrent. Sam, Seth mentioned identity. You want to jump in with – where you’re coming from as far as that’s concerned?
Mr. LESSIN: Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, this is something that I think about from a lot of different directions. It actually drives forward. The truth is, it’s even behind drop.io, believe it or not. And it’s that what you’re witnessing in the online world is that conversations have three fundamental components. One is identity, who’s speaking. The second is content, what are they saying. And the third is distribution or who’s listening. And kind of each piece influences the next in a really nice way. Historically, you know, if you think about email or well-formed applications like Facebook, communication happens on single platforms that are all raised together in a very kind of nice holistic way, and what I think is so interesting about, you know, in some cases, Foursquare and kind of a gaming element and how that place is generating content, and will drop your focuses which is being kind of the best in breed, next generation, kind of well-timed, cross platform type for content, is that this is all verticalizing. And so, you know, just as Netscape used to sell web servers in the late ‘90s, logically, because there was no internet. So, if you’re going to sell browsers, you have to sell the internet along with it. You know, now, we’re witnessing the fact that, you know, e-companies like drop.io in the content space, companies like Facebook in the identity space, companies like Twitter in the distribution space, and Foursquare, I’d argue(ph), you know, has an identity component and a content component and some days(ph) has a distribution component and we’ll see how that ends up sorting out to know inter-plating(ph) really, really, interestingly and nicely. So, I just think that it’s a really interesting question about how each of these pieces when you chunk it out influences the next and how services, you know, seem to be kind of verticalizing to these different pockets.
Mr. GILLMOR: All right. So, unpack drop.io, the description of the company alerted me.
Mr. LESSIN: Sure. So, drop.io, you know, at its simplest is a private way to share files and rich media in a really light wave(ph) fashion with exactly whom you want, how you want. You know, you post files on us through a URL, we convert them, we have kind of an XMPP background behind it, and we let you share things in collaborated real-time. That’s great and we love that and we’re happy to watch it grow. What really excites us in the – for the point of over-viewing and kind of what Seth and I are talking about earlier is we – is, you know, we strongly believe that as the internet verticalizes, you see companies again specifying in these different areas. And one thing that’s been pretty neglected in a lot of ways is companies that focus on facilitating content for content’s sake. And so, companies like YouTube are incredible in the public sharing space. And what they say, based on what the users say, here’s the deal, you know, content’s expensive, we’ll upload it for you, we’ll convert it for you, we’ll close it for you, we’ll serve it for you. But in return, we’re an advertising-driven model, so we want to control the content and we’re going to spread it all over the place and harvest the page used. And, I mean, that’s great for public content. But, you know, 90% plus of the content in the world has a private component. What we’re basically trying to do and go out there is facilitate all that other content and basically give people a plug and play content facilities that are real-time and cross platform and allow you to move things between different inputs and outputs, but then you can kind of raise(ph) into your own work flows and applications. So, it’s really just taking to the point that we don’t do distribution, we don’t do identity. We rely on email for the ad, piece(ph) of our Yahoo! Mail integration, we rely on, you know, Facebook for that and Twitter for that and lots of other things. And it’s just – you know, that’s kind of what we’re after is this kind of verticalization that we (unintelligible) foreseen everywhere. Does that follow or…
Mr. GILLMOR: Yeah. That helps a lot. Let’s turn the tables a little bit and, Dennis, can you comment on what you just heard?
Mr. CROWLEY: Yeah, it’s – you know, we’re thinking about it in the same way, too. And you’re talking about, you know, all these different companies kind of going after different things. We look at it and we’re doing just like assembling – I think, assembling Lego, it’s like pieces that other people have already built or have already tried, you know, like we’re taking, you know, like even (unintelligible) back in the day, it was, you know, taking a little bit of Friendster and dropping it on top of mobile phones, right? And so, I think the stuff we’re doing now is like taking a little bit of Facebook, you know, combining it with Twitter, combining it with Yahoo!, you know, shaking it all up and see what comes up and adding some gimmick and (unintelligible) will happen. Anyway, even to what Sam is saying, it’s like, we’re beyond using just Facebook Connect and, you know, the Twitter Connect stuff just for, you know, bringing people in and they can sign up processes easier. It’s like, you know, we don’t want to build an internal messaging system for our users to communicate with one another. Why would they do that when they can just communicate through Facebook and they can communicate through Twitter (unintelligible), and then that way, we get to kind of offload all of the, you know, the privacy settings that go over that stuff to the privacy controllers that Twitter has already built and that Facebook has already built. And then, you know, it just makes things a lot easier for us and we can focus on things that, you know, that we’re really good at and the problems that we really want solved.
Mr. LISSEN: Yeah. And that – just from our perspective, you know, again, you know, we thought exactly the same concept. What we’re good at and what we want to do for people is facilitate content. Meaning, an XMPP probably can hook into an asset conversion and IO services. When you’re building an application, we want to take care of the content piece of it. But we don’t want to do the distribution piece and we don’t want to give you identity piece, and someday, you know, we’d love to make it so easy that Foursquare can drag and drop rich media right into their application just by calling us back and forth in a really simple way.
Mr. GILLMOR: So, kind of a widget platform?
Mr. LISSEN: Well, I wouldn’t quite call it a widget platform as much as I would call it kind of a way to verticalize and unpack some of these services that are normally considered bundles. So, widgets to me are interesting first step in kind of the interconnectivity of the web. So, they were an interesting version of one. But to me, kind of a concept in a way the other (unintelligible) sits on a page or sits on a (unintelligible) fashion, you know, service is really not as interesting of where the web is going as much as really a seamless connection where you might be using drop.io, you know, inside Foursquare or inside of that application and not even realize it, right? We’re just powering stuff for them and if the connections work properly, that’s great and we’ll go from there. And because we are a premium service model, we’re happy with that. You know, in other cases like Facebook or Twitter or some of the other big audience(ph) examples, the implicit deal with the API is that it gives something and you get something, right? You might, you know, get a lot of distribution and you might get some great services, but ultimately, you know, they have either advertising or a question mark, you know, models behind what they’re doing that you’re obviously going to be compounding. So, but I do think that this is what’s so exciting about where we are in the internet is that we can all build services that talks to each other, which means that everyone can develop much more rapidly better stuff. And (unintelligible) issue…
Mr. GILLMOR: Right. What’s the – you know, what’s the mechanism for walking up to another server or something? Is that a private business deal? Is that an API – developing API, provide access and then wait and see what happens? Or it sounds like this is more of a – this has to have some sort of an intermediary eventually. Seth, do you agree with that?
Mr. GOLDSTEIN: What’s the question again, Steve?
Mr. GILLMOR: Do you think that this is going to bubble up as sort of a platform where intermediaries are going to stitch these services together into sort of, you know, mashups? How does this…
Mr. GOLDSTEIN: Yes. I think, you know, in the last show, and this is actually when Sam and I first met after the last show, I talked about sort of the similarity – I mean, APIs are obviously, unregulated – there’s no regulated body for APIs and so they’re more and more rampant, and the number of businesses that are being built on top of other people’s APIs(ph) in this unregulated environment reminded me of the strange way of the growth of derivatives and complex financial instruments the last 20 years in Wall Street and so with that platform…
Mr. GILLMOR: Well, that’s exciting. That’s going to end up in a financial crash in the widget business.
Mr. LISSEN: Yeah. Well…
Mr. GOLDSTEIN: Yeah, there’s going to be probably some API meltdown in the coming years. In the meantime, there’s going to be – like there was in the CDO market, you know, a lot of money being made and a lot of platforms coming into being incredibly quickly with a huge amount of leverage and a huge amount of scale with very, very little – with relatively little risks themselves but a whole bunch of risks systematically. Does that make sense?
Mr. GILLMOR: Yeah, yeah. So the question is, are we going to see the so-called, you know, guerillas, and I don’t mean the Microsofts and the Googles so much as the Facebooks and the Twitters and whoever is going to basically neither the on-ramp to their stream. Are they going to be in control of this or is there going to be a third party? I mean, it occurred to me the other day when I was looking at what MySpace did with iLike, was that they were – I think that their current model is pretty much toast, that they were going to do an M run(ph) and basically start acquiring companies or services or features that exist across Facebook and MySpace and other sites and basically build up a sort of an intermediary rule(ph). Do you see that as being what’s going to develop here?
Mr. LISSEN: Do you mind if I jump in?
Mr. GILLMOR: Not at all.
Mr. LISSEN: This is not – I think it’s absolutely fascinating and I couldn’t agree more with the concept of this that’s exactly like the financial system in Wall Street. I wrote a blog post about this in – about a year ago almost now, and this is kind of what we were connecting on, Seth and I were connecting on a bunch recently. You know, I think, it’s very hard to see the concept that some sort of regulatory agency or board or everyone agrees to the same rules and all of a sudden we have real regulation. I think what’s going to happen is some people will regulate; there’ll be kind of transparent pockets and non-transparent pockets. And people will have to make their own decisions in the next phase about, you know, how much they trust any API that are working. And so, companies will have in their incentive to build in lots of ways to be trusted, because the more and more you’re offloading and the more we verticalize and (unintelligible) depends on each other, you know, we basically are both getting a lot of leverage, you know, as we’ve been pointing out and, you know, potentially causing a lot of risks if you’re not sure what exactly it is that’s three layers deep in the financial product or in the API. So, you know, I can’t see a way – although, you know, I’ve been wronged many times in my life – that this problem goes away. I think it’s just going to be one of those things we have to be aware of and be properly evaluating the risk of.
Mr. GILLMOR: Right. But when you say trust, that’s a loaded word and it also means different things to different people. What are you talking about? How do you (unintelligible) for us?
Mr. LISSEN: Well, you know, there’s a probability every second the Twitter will go down. And I have a guess on what that probability is and (unintelligible) what other guesses and what they might be and that has a dollar impact in some certain way. And based on the window and the availability, there’s obviously compressions, and the curves are all linear in terms of what the dollar impact is. And so, you know, if, for instance, you know, Foursquare were to start using drop.io as a rich media pipe so that I can move video and pictures through locations and not just textual updates, you know, we are now, intimately linked and they could ask us for an SLA, we probably couldn’t provide one in the way that they’d want because, you know, we’re on Amazon’s (unintelligible). And so, you basically have to figure out, you know, basically, the levels of abstraction below that and make your own bets in terms of what the dollar impact cost is of different, you know, essentially runs on the bank.
Mr. GILLMOR: Right, but, you know, the failover of the internet, you know, basically, the 404, you know, maintains some degree of uptime for somebody somewhere. So, if Twitter goes down, typically, what happens is that people move over to FriendFeed for a while until the services restore. Obviously, I think, Facebook will adopt that as, you know, a certain value proposition for them.
Mr. LISSEN: So, sure. The ultimately – the people, you know, no one dying, we’re not talking, you know, and luckily no one’s losing necessarily trillions of dollars right now, whatever the estimate was in the financial crisis, but someone is losing money when Twitter goes down, right? You know, because now, all these services are agnostic(ph), the Twitter and…
Mr. GILLMOR: Yeah, but, you know, turn it around, somebody is making money when Twitter goes down.
Mr. LISSEN: Yup.
Mr. GILLMOR: OK. So…
Mr. LISSEN: But if you’re the guy who has exposure and you’re only making – and you’re losing your – money(ph), isn’t that something you should be evaluating risk-wise and figuring out?
Mr. GILLMOR: Well, I think that what we’ve seen and, you know, obviously, you guys can correct me if I’m wrong, but the tendency of, you know, spreading the danger and the risk across multiple streams is – that’s going to become a very valuable strategy and very correctly(ph).
Mr. LISSEN: And so, that means that again, if I’m building, for instance, a Twitter code or service, I have to evaluate whether, OK, if Twitter goes down for this type of the Window, is it worth to be spending the time to also integrate FriendFeed.
Mr. GILLMOR: Yeah.
Mr. LISSEN: Is it worth the money or is it not? Because I can afford to let Twitter go down and maybe for a day I don’t have ad revenue. Whatever it is, like there is, you know, there’s a really interesting inter-relationship which mean API has built on it – (unintelligible) built on APIs and, you know, ultimately schemes of revenue built on streams of revenue built on streams of revenue. You’re going the trust the guy who’s downstream from you.
Mr. GILLMOR: Somebody was jumping in. Who was that? Dennis?
Mr. CROWLEY: Right now, I was going to say that, you know, we think of this stuff all the time, like we’re starting to pull in some of Twitter’s, you know, Geo API stuff and it’s not mission critical to what we’re doing on, you know, about like let’s say that we were using the Yelp API to pull in over when we did, you know. Well, that does go down, our service is generally – it’s totally – it’s really not an option for us. And you know, as Sam is saying, we have a good weekend until we have a backup provider like, oh, we try Google then we try Yelp and we try Yahoo. At least we have three sources of it there, you know. But maintaining the code that makes those connections all three of those and managing, which has become of a nightmare like you’re tripling the amount of work that you have to do.
Mr. GILLMOR: You know, I’m not sure that this is a job for you, guys. I think it’s a job for the client, basically.
Mr. CROWLEY: Yeah. I mean – well, someone’s got to build it. I mean, it’s…
Mr. GILLMOR: Well, I mean, these aggregated clients are already effectively providing fail over for these services.
Mr. CROWLEY: Yeah.
Mr. GILLMOR: You know when the guy is going to be on next week, Rob Goldman from Thread (unintelligible) that I hear that thing going off from the background.
Mr. CROWLEY: Yeah.
Mr. GILLMOR: I don’t use it a lot right now, but it’s – soon they’re building up, you know, data, you know, much the way the FriendFeed when we adopted it, it became their repository for sort of fail over insurance, if you follow me. It seems that if you combine that with filtering, you have what is probably the next generation of a lot of so-called Twitter apps as they start to migrate upstream to being Twitter plus whatever Microsoft is doing plus, whatever Google is doing et cetera.
Mr. CROWLEY: Yeah. It means obviously (unintelligible) place up. We haven’t – we have no time to play in that space yet but we’ll going to be – we’ll get there eventually.
Mr. GILLMOR: So, what are you doing right now in terms of your development? Is it all about being (unintelligible) of my Starbucks or are we going to see something along the lines of what Seth – and I think Robert have already suggested this – the Sweet Spa where these cooperating services start to swarm around people as they move around?
Mr. CROWLEY: Yeah. I mean, I think – I think we know that the Sweet Spa has been working the space for awhile because we’ve been working in the space for awhile and it’s, you know, how do you – it’s less – like we’re just conditioned to take our phones out of our pocket and ask our phones questions like, where is the nearest Italian restaurant, like what should I be doing right now? Really, the phone has enough, you know, enough sensors in it to kind of gauge your context, are you’re moving or not, are you with people or not? Where were you coming from? In order to – we really make some of those decisions for you. So, I think that’s the space that we’d like to go into or we’re just, you know, we’re making some smarter applications for the device that – you know, as the devices will be coming a lot smarter. You know…
Mr. GILLMOR: But, you know, the thing that happens from these conversations that I find interesting is that not only are we talking about what we were talking about, but we’re also sometimes branching and talking about things that we haven’t thought we were going to be talking about.
Mr. CROWLEY: Yeah.
Mr. GILLMOR: And in the same sense, you know, the shifting nature of services that become available and, you know, based on location can change the conversation and move it in different directions. So, that’s not so much monitoring where people are as allowing some sort of interface that suggests where they are in the – both physical and the larger kind of interaction space.
Mr. CROWLEY: Yeah. I mean, getting that contextual party is more interesting, like people talk about, you know, the difference between location and place. It means, one thing to know that I’m at this, you know, latitude and longitude, but I get a lot more context out of that if you know that, well, you know, I’m in my office with five other people and two hours from now, I’ll be at the – you know, the bar across the street or the cafe out the street. I mean, it says location versus place is, you know, something interesting to think about more definitely, more not like in that place for you, like trying to had context to everything that before doing.
Mr. GILLMOR: Seth, you jump in.
Mr. GOLDSTEIN: Yeah. I just going – maybe reduce it to a sort of simple statement that maybe we’re moving from description to prescription, which is the social jest on Twitter and Facebook, you know, what are you doing? And I think what Dennis is saying is, you know, based on what you are doing, here is what we think you should be doing.
Mr. GILLMOR: Yeah.
Mr. CROWLEY: I find that a little chic(ph).
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. CROWLEY: Yeah. You don’t want to be too, you know, big brother ask about it but, you know, very cool things can come out of the, you know, types of queries that we can run where, you know, I’m coming to San Francisco next week and, you know, of course, where knows the types of places that I hang out in New York, and it knows who my friends are in San Francisco and where they have been going. So, as soon as I, you know, as soon as I – making recognitions, oh, these are the bars that you’re going visit, the places we should do these and the taco places that you should head. It’s just, you know, interesting stuff that a lot of people haven’t done. We do that prescriptive type of behavior. And then you kind of weigh on some of the game mechanics that we’re doing on top of it, so it’s like, oh, yeah, my job want me in San Francisco next week is to check of the 10 things that Foursquare prescribed for me to do. And it’s like get turns into a little bit of game, it’s forcing me to do things I wouldn’t normally be doing and just like it’s a different way of interacting with people and kind of looking at, you know, social data and, you know, specifically like City Guide’s all data.
Mr. GILLMOR: Robert?
Mr. SCOBLE: I don’t have too much to add to this. I do have a bunch of bugs that I want to report but – what’s that, Steve?
Mr. CROWLEY: And so do I.
Mr. SCOBLE: What’s the Steve?
Mr. GILLMOR: Yeah. Go ahead, I mean, as far as I’m concerned this…
Mr. SCOBLE: Some of the things that are – I mean, the obvious ones are if you are not in the city that’s in Foursquare, you can’t check in officially because it says, you know, you’re not in a place that’s…
Mr. CROWLEY: Yeah. Yeah.
Mr. SCOBLE: Part of the – that’s the major complaint that we hear out on Foursquare. So, how – you just added more cities today, right?
Mr. CROWLEY: Yeah. We added 15 more cities today. We’re going to have a bunch more next week, a couple of more after that. You know, the goal eventually is just to be everywhere, you know. It shouldn’t matter where you are, just be able to work – you know, work everywhere. You know, but that – a lot what we’re doing is we’re writing all of the infrastructure like – in order to get this thing launched in South by Southwest and to get to the point of that is at now we just – we’re rewriting all of that stuff now. So, you know, the bugs that are on that site, oh, they’re awful but we’re getting pretty close just fixing all that stuff.
Mr. SCOBLE: Yeah. The other thing is when I do try to check in sometimes it doesn’t have the place that I’m at even though I know that place has already been added to the data base. See how the – the local – and here is a sub-bug of that same bug. But, so we got a local Pete’s and it’s – the local Pete’s is in there twice.
Mr. CROWLEY: Yeah.
Mr. SCOBLE: Somebody entered it as Pete’s HMB and somebody else entered it as Pete’s Half Moon Bay.
Mr. CROWLEY: Yeah.
Mr. SCOBLE: And the Pete’s Half Moon Bay is the official one, but the Pete’s HMB keeps popping up, and I don’t know how to get rid of the second entry, you know, et cetera, et cetera.
Mr. CROWLEY: Have you seen what we’ve been doing with some of the crowd sourcing, so far?
Mr. SCOBLE: Not yet.
Mr. CROWLEY: So, you know, we’ve been – yeah. So, basically, we look at the user logs and we look at who the best, you know, the best users are. And we’ve been promoting them, giving them like admin capabilities. So, they go in and they fix the venues and they suggest some mergers. And then all the people that are kind of better that those users are more active or more helpful, we promoted them to another level and we allow them to merge those venues. So, like we – it’s funny we have like 2,000, you know, duplicate venue request, you know, an hour before we launch that merge venue tool for the users and I’m like, you know, an hour it looks all done – all those (unintelligible) will fix less. So, it’s nice to have – it’s like basically we have users baby-sitting our data set in the same way that, you know, Wikipedia has people baby-sitting their content, and it’s been working out pretty well so far.
Mr. SCOBLE: The other thing is when I try to check in with the chain, like the local Safeway, I put, you know – first of all, I didn’t pull up Safeway, which is really weird, you know, because you think Safeway is there. And then I typed in Safeway and it checked me in in San Raphael which is two hours away.
Mr. CROWLEY: Yeah. Yeah.
Mr. SCOBLE: And it didn’t make sense. It’s like, why did it pick San Raphael to check me in? I mean, it should be…
Mr. CROWLEY: Yeah. It’s just we do a horrible job matching chains. But the two big fixes – the two big things that you’re going to see like before Thanksgiving time, hopefully, way before Thanksgiving time or, you know, the everywhere issue, like just use it wherever you want. And then, better venue matching so I cannot – going to have a chain problem. I mean, it’s two big things that are in play right now. We’re rolling like super, super close to fixing them.
Mr. SCOBLE: Yeah. We should also pull in the conversation I had over on my blog between you and Gowala(ph). Gowala makes a point that their system forces you to use the GPS…
Mr. CROWLEY: Yeah.
Mr. SCOBLE: So that you can only check in at the location you’re actually at.
Mr. CROWLEY: Yeah.
Mr. SCOBLE: What’s your take on that? I know what you’re take is because you read it on my blog, but I think it’s good to get that out and not – open here so that we can have a discussion of it.
Mr. CROWLEY: Yeah. I mean, we don’t want to prevent people from using the service. I think, you know, it is a lesson to be learned from, you know, Friendster way back in the day when they saw people making fake profiles and they flipped out and just deleted all the users. And so, you know, we see people using Foursquare in all sorts of ways and you don’t want to prohibit people from doing that. Sure, occasionally – in places that they are not, but – you know, at the same time, you can do some stuff in the backend that flags them. It’s like this kind of a suspicious behavior. And if we see a lot of suspicious behavior from a certain user, we can say, well, we’re not going to count these check-ins or we’re going to remove them from the leader board, whatever happens to me, you know. So, there’s fixes for that that we can do. I think they’ll…
Mr. SCOBLE: The reason I like the Foursquare approach better because you can be fuzzy about your location.
Mr. CROWLEY: Yeah.
Mr. SCOBLE: We talked about this on our earlier Gillmor Gang. I think Kevin Marks brought it up or maybe Seth did where…
Mr. CROWLEY: Yeah.
Mr. SCOBLE: Part of the – when I show people location-based stuff, a lot of them get freaked out. They’re like…
Mr. CROWLEY: I’m sure.
Mr. SCOBLE: Why would I – why would I let somebody know exactly where I am? You know, this is the Google Latitude problem.
Mr. CROWLEY: Yeah.
Mr. SCOBLE: Where it shows you exactly where you are right now if you have it on. And a lot of people want to be a little fuzzy. Like for instance I…
Mr. GILLMOR: A lot fuzzy.
Mr. SCOBLE: I checked in at the Ritz. I don’t check in at my house because I don’t want people knowing my home address, right?
Mr. CROWLEY: Yes, sure.
Mr. SCOBLE: And so by checking in at the Ritz it adds – it’s close enough that you know I’m in the neighborhood, so if you’re at the Ritz you can call me up and say, hey, why don’t you come over and have a drink. But it adds some fuzziness to my actual location…
Mr. CROWLEY: So you’re not – you know, a person who doesn’t know me closely if they accidentally – or if they get added to my friends’ list, they won’t know the actual location of my house.
Mr. CROWLEY: Yeah. Well, I think there’s two things that’s right. So, there’s the difference between like active tracking – or, I’m sorry, the always on tracking like Google Latitude does and then the Opt In stuff like Force Word does. And – I mean, there’s no question in my mind that for doing social apps you really needed to be opt in tracking. And, you know, the situations that we’re talking about where people not wanting to disclose their location it’s not – I think it’s less about – of crime and danger, but it’s more close – it’s more about awkward social situations, you know. Sometimes it’s just awkward for everyone to know where you are because you’re, you know, you’re on a date or you know, you skipped someone’s birthday party and you’re suppose at work and you’re not. You know, it’s like all these little – I don’t always think they’re white lies, but there is – you know, there is like the fuzziness to location that goes beyond than just, oh, I’m in this neighborhood but like, you know, oh, maybe I’m not where I’m supposed to be I don’t know need to necessarily disclose that. Because – go ahead.
Mr. LISSEN: Sorry, to say – I mean, I started doing this thing early on which I’ve actually done to a few friends jokingly which I call four crashing where you’re just near them, I just show up. And I – once or twice, I actually fore crashed some dates and it is awkward. So…
Mr. CROWLEY: People – people learn over time that there’s some situation you check into and there are some situations that you don’t. And I think it’s important for us, as long as we have those tools that people can use, you know. It’s not like we’re scrambling to build them people will learn, oh, I’m not suppose to, you know – I’m not suppose to broadcast my location when I – you don’t want people coming in, knocking in, you know, the glass outside the restaurant.
Mr. LISSEN: And then of course, you have for Four (unintelligible) thing, which is when you check in someone you’re not actually at to get people to fore crash you there, and then, you know, you ended stranding them. So, it’s…
Mr. CROWLEY: It’s – man, I wrote like a paper on this once in grad school about all like the, you know, the weird things that people would do with dodge ball that seems to translate over the Foursquare to avoid like awkward social situations, you know. Like you got like the pre-check in where people will check in like a – you know, 20 minutes before they go to a party, you know, to get other people there so when they arrive they’re not the first ones in. You know, and there’s all these like little weird ways of, you know, people have co-opted the tools as their own, you know, to get the desired effects out of them that if you…
Mr. LISSEN: You can even do fore closing, we came up with the other idea which is if you’re the last person to check-in and no one ever checks in after you, you’re probably not a very good person.
Mr. GILLMOR: All right, Seth…
Mr. CROWLEY: Yeah. It’s a funny thing. You got to build the tools that are flexible enough to like, you know, to take into consideration all the critic things that people want to do with them. You know, you just don’t want to push people away from checking in, so…
Mr. GILLMOR: Seth, this is what you wanted to have happened, right? This is the discussion that you find fascinating, right?
Mr. GOLDSTEIN: I’m interested in this. I’m interested because…
Mr. GILLMOR: I am too. I just want you to say why you’re interested.
Mr. GOLDSTEIN: OK. I’m interested. I’m interested because it feels like on the spectrum that checking in is a bit easier gesture than tweeting. Because when you’re in, it knows more about your context that you can choose or – you know, you can choose to not check in but there’s less friction. There’s, you know, the issue with tweeting or without doing your Facebook status is what are you going to talk about? You know, what are you doing now? As oppose to checking in where, you know, in the world of a GPS and (unintelligible) iPhone or whatever, it sort of already knows it can begin this (unintelligible). Now you may augment it with a shout or something, but it’s becoming more and more implicit. (Unintelligible) the services that have gone over the line, whether it’s Google Latitude or Beacon, in its first instantiation where – or even some of the stuff that (unintelligible) with Quick Stream syndication Steve, a couple of years ago with attention trust. Clearly, there are these lines that if you share too much too soon, too automatically, too implicitly, there’s going to be backlash. But, what seems to be working is this slow, incremental approach where it is opt in but you’re taking away more and more friction by virtue of, you know, the mobile social devices that you have available to you. Some make sense?
Mr. GILLMOR: Yeah.
Mr. CROWLEY: Yeah. What comes after checking in? What is the next gesture? I don’t know, obviously. Otherwise, I would be trying to figure that out. But…
Mr. GILLMOR: Well, I think it has something to do with what seems he’s talking about.
Mr. CROWLEY: That’s opt in. That’s opt in that – but that leverages a lot of implicit momentum so you’re not starting from a blank slate every time.
Mr. GILLMOR: Right. There’s some sort of, you know, profile that’s captured to this, you know, a dynamically update profile that takes into account multiple services. It seems like, you know, is what we’re talking about.
Mr. CROWLEY: I think we’re – you know, we’re pretty close to being able to pull some of the stuff off. So, you know, Foursquare – you know, just to the checking data we know – like we know that you’re in a café and we know a couple of people that checked in before you, and we know that you’ve been there a lot. And then once we start, you know, aggressively tying stuff to Twitter we can say, oh, what are the things that you tweeted about at this time? Oh, you must have been at a movie, the movies you saw, oh, like, you always go to the movies with these particular people. Or we can tie it in post – you know, after the fact with Flickr. Like, oh, well, we automatically know that these Flickr photos are, you know, tied to this venue because we were checked in at that time, and they probably have these people in there so we automatically tag us up too. There’s this, you know – there’s really interesting ways that – not the services necessarily but just the data over our lap. And so Foursquare can – you know, Foursquare can fill in the missing location information from a tweet. And Foursquare can fill in the missing context information from a photo that you’ve taken. And, you know, all these things can kind of work back and forth.
Mr. LESSIN: The interesting part about checking in versus loyalty of friends is there’s actually a lot more information per bid in a check in and there is in latitude, right? Because you’re seeing – not only you’re exclusively checking in, that carries a lot more information in a passive location.
Mr. CROWLEY: Yeah.
Mr. LESSIN: And I wondered what a lot of these services like – it’s interesting like tagging a photo is an explicit gesture that actually carries information, right? And so there’s like this interesting dynamic between how much of the stuff should be automated or optimizes automated and how much of it. Actually, what you’re doing is each those clips have like an implicit dollar value or like whatever, a retail value and then you exchange it. So one thing I always find interesting at Foursquare is, you know, there is a social value exchange to checking in with other people, right?
Mr. CROWLEY: Yeah.
Mr. LESSIN: You’re actually telling a story and it’s interesting because that’s – it’s a story because we all are doing it actively like we’re all clicking. Whereas if it’s just passively said hey, you’re with other people, there’s no explicit gesture that actually play less valuing. I don’t know. I mean, I just think it’s really interesting dynamic because there is this kind of tension between – you know, Facebook friend tagging, that’s an explicit valuable action, right?
Mr. CROWLEY: Yeah.
Mr. LESSIN: Like actually tagging everyone automatically isn’t necessarily the idea, right? We’re actually removing information from the system
Mr. CROWLEY: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I don’t think we’re doing it automatically, but you know, you make it easy for people to leverage the data that we’re collecting and then push it to other services. You know, like Geotag these tweets, Geotag these photos, tag these photos of people if I want that stuff to kind of to occur. I think you’re totally right when you – like, it goes back to that – you know, we talked about a check in being more valuable than a check in on Foursquare than – you know, an update on latitude, for example. It goes back to the location versus place thing. Like, there’s one thing to be (unintelligible), there’s another thing to be a venue name, but then it’s a completely different other thing to say oh, not this venue, you know, with six other people and here they are. You know, it’s like a little bit out of context that you get for free and you can determine a lot from that information. Are you on a date? Are you at a birthday party? Are you with a lot of people? Are you with a couple people? I mean, that’s just – there’s a lot of information that we can pull out.
Mr. GILLMOR: Have you thought…
Mr. LESSIN: You’re sharing social credit back and forth. It’s what you’re doing?
Mr. CROWLEY: Yeah, totally. You’re making…
Mr. LESSIN: If I don’t want to check in and everyone else is checking in, then I’m basically telling everyone else in the room that I don’t want to admit that I’m with them, right?
Mr. CROWLEY: Yeah, there’s a social pressure effect.
Mr. LESSIN: The conversation I have with Dennis, that’s great. I want to tell everyone on my desk.
Mr. CROWLEY: Yeah.
Mr. GILLMOR: What about the kind of virtual check in? I mean, have you thought about, you know, sort of a Second Life type of integration with this between so-called real and so-called virtual worlds?
Mr. CROWLEY: Not really. You know, There’s really – there’s some – I like the fact that Foursquare is a software that like overlays very nicely with the real world, right? And so, you know, when you go to a place, you dip into your phone for a second, but the information you’re getting is about what’s going on in the real world. Like, I’m not into – not really big into the, you know, dropping fiction on top real life type of part of it. I’m going to say…
Mr. GILLMOR: Yeah, I’m not talking – I didn’t mean to imply by the use of Second Life (unintelligible).
Mr. CROWLEY: OK.
Mr. GILLMOR: I’ve never been in Second Life except – I think I was dragged into a room once by somebody with IBM, but it was forcibly – I was kidnapped. No, I’m talking more about – I mean, what we’re doing here for example is…
Mr. CROWLEY: Yeah.
Mr. GILLMOR: We’re establishing a place.
Mr. CROWLEY: Yeah.
Mr. GILLMOR: It’s kind of a virtual place that does have, you know, a certain amount of social dynamics to it as well.
Mr. CROWLEY: Yeah.
Mr. GILLMOR: And I guess I’m asking Sam this more because what you’re doing with Rich Media types here – I mean, what component of streaming are you involved with right now?
Mr. LESSIN: Yes, I’m with Drop.io. You know, the goal is that we can ingest any digital asset. So any type of picture, video, document, whatever, in whatever format you want to push it to us in. And then we’ve kind of built out, you know, the kind of conceptual back end lobby applications for figuring out what it is and then turning into whatever other format you want that you can then move out in kind of a real time, you know, basis. You know, (unintelligible) background via push or, you know, right now also VRSS if you wanted. And you know, for us, the whole point is that Rich Media, people still think of uploading and downloading a file, the bits themselves. That’s not the point. The point is moving information. And so a video or a document or a picture, these are just container types. And our job at Drop.io, is to basically make it totally seamless for end users, for small businesses and consumers now, you know, through email and other formats, but also for people building applications and work flows to basically leverage that so that, I mean, everything streams not only kind of over the web which, you know, is valuable obviously, but basically based on where you are. You can pull down that information from whatever container it was originally in and whatever container it’s best to consume it in that moment. So it’s all about kind of just – we really have to – it’s like very old paradigm of the importance of a file and what a file is, and what we’re trying to do is kind of re-contextualize and generalize it as saying, you know, there’s signal in the world, there’s valuable information and it’s unfortunately very tough to move it right now if you are not willing to broadcast it because every model today and most models today on line are fundamentally based on the broadcast model in order to harvest the adults.
Mr. CROWLEY: Yeah.
Mr. LESSIN: So we just want to give people that flexibility to move signal efficiently.
Mr. GILMORE: Seth…
Mr. CROWLEY: Can I just ask something that’s kind of (unintelligible)?
Mr. GILLMOR: Yeah, sure.
Mr. CROWLEY: OK. So Sam, I think you guys have this. But you know, we talked about geotagging content. I can take a photo on its tie to, you know, New York or its tie to the street address. But Sam, I think you’ve done something where you have drops that are tied to location that can only be unlocked at that certain location. Is that correct?
Mr. LESSIN: Yeah. So basically, we have this metaphor called “the drop”, which is a point of exchange. And you – it’s just addressable space. So on the web, we talked about it as a URL. Drop your system is all about making this points of exchange and then typing information in and out of them. So I can make a drop that exist at drop.io/ – you know, heydennis.
Mr. GILLMOR: Yeah.
Mr. LESSIN: But – which can also do because it’s just a different way to describe a location and say, I actually know. This drop is at 68 J Street. And you literally drop a pin in it, essentially. And so instead of describing it with URL, you describe it with a physical location.
Mr. CROWLEY: Yeah.
Mr. LESSIN: And you can do all sorts if interesting stuff around that by saying, OK, well, you can only open it if you’re in a certain radius of the information or you could say instead of – you can go to your mom and say hey, mom, it’s not the files (unintelligible), drop.io/heydennis. I just put them on top of your house. Why don’t you go open it, right? Because what’s the difference between a location and the URL? Actually, very little. There’s just ways of describing somewhere.
Mr. CROWLEY: Yeah.
Mr. LESSIN: And so that’s where the drop is. It’s the container that has the description and some interesting inputs.
Mr. CROWLEY: I mean, that’s a really big idea. You know, when we think about – you know, if we’re talking about how to cross phone services here – that’s kind of what the last question went back to. It’s like, what does the check in actually unlock? And there’s no reason why – like, if you want to unlock the new JC track, you specifically have to the go to the record store, check in, and then you get it sent to your phone.
Mr. LESSIN: Yeah. So that…
Mr. CROWLEY: It’s such a huge idea like no one is playing with you.
Mr. LESSIN: So we’ve actually – we should talk because the answer is like, we’ve actually had some really interesting conversations specifically with record labels about that.
Mr. CROWLEY: Yeah.
Mr. LESSIN: You can also layer another type – so we have also this kind of concept that – she accessed a drop that has a location and then you can have parameters on top of that like a password. But the other thing you do with drop is actually drop a pay wall on top on it. So you can say, you must be here, which is where the information is, and you must pay me five dollars in order to open this, right?
Mr. CROWLEY: Yeah.
Mr. LESSIN: And you can kind of do these relationships about moving content. And yeah, I mean, it’s interesting because really, you talked about the physical versus the digital and the convergence between the two. It’s really just space, right?
Mr. CROWLEY: Yeah.
Mr. LESSIN: It’s just ways of describing areas that you interact with in different ways and then moving content bits and context through those spaces.
Mr. CROWLEY: Yeah.
Mr. LESSIN: And so we like, do the content and you guys do the contest.
Mr. CROWLEY: Yeah, so Dennis…
Mr. CROWLEY: That’s awesome.
Mr. GILLMOR: It will be interesting to – for the people who watch this on YouTube to be able to scroll back about 10 minutes and then listen to what you just said.
Mr. CROWLEY: Yeah. Looks like, you know, Scoble knows how, you know, how engaging the mayor aspect can be, like to be the mayor of a coffee shops or a hotel or whatever and – you know, right now, like we have a couple of places that will give out like a free hot chocolate or free appetizers, free beer to whoever is the mayor the place. But being – to tie it to like, you know, digital properties like – yeah, you get this album if you’re the mayor of this place and you can only get it by becoming the mayor of that place. I mean, that’s like – it’s just a really interesting idea that a lot of people haven’t really explored yet. Thanks for showing out there.
Mr. GILLMOR: Right. Well, I think that – you know, Seth, I’d like to hear your thoughts on this as it gets into the advertising room.
Mr. GOLDSTEIN: I’m sure you would. That’s what we do here at socialmedia.com. However, I’m going to talk about something else, which is…
Mr. GILLMOR: All right, just as long as you get back to what I asked you.
Mr. GOLDSTEIN: Sure. I always do at some point.
Mr. GILLMOR: OK.
Mr. GOLDSTEIN: The (unintelligible) comment and the fact, you know, I think that well, Foursquare just for this early adopt the market to relatively small audience relative to the number of Facebook users, et cetera. I thought a scale a couple of weeks ago that just arrived yesterday, that’s a wide vast scale and it’s now in my bathroom. And when I step on it, it sends my weight and my body mass to a web server, and so all my kids got on it. They all configured it now. Over breakfast, we’re looking at each other’s weight on my iPhone that was listening to what the scale was saying in the other room. And I don’t know what comes on that. I don’t know. I’m sure Sam and Dennis have a much better idea how to connect that to the fit that’s coming to Foursquare or the restaurant recommendations to the fact that I should be eating more (unintelligible) as opposed to more bread meat. I don’t know. But we’ve gone beyond the – it’s moving into our houses, right? You know, iPhones are not for small matured anymore. More and more people have them. There services are syndicating. They’re connecting with each other. All these APIs are talking to each other and just it is what it is and it’s happening, it’s pervasive, and I do think at the edge of all these different APIs, I think what the challenge is – kind of back to the earlier question around, you know, this sort of coming API apocalypse, is the investors love – I mean, I’m sure investors love the idea that Dennis and his team with four people, right? Five people?
Mr. CROWLEY: Yeah. No. Four of us, you know.
Mr. GOLDSTEIN: Four people, I mean, have tremendous leverage. You know, given – you know, you build a very leverageable business. We’ll see if you can monetize it properly but with very few people, with very few – not a lot of code, you kind of move up, stag at a really important place. And so I think it’s going to be – I think the same thing I can say about Drop.oi and others, which is with some smart quoting on the front-end into 10 APIs, you create some substance. And Mint is a great example of that. Mint was built on top of Yodlee. Yodlee spent 10 years building all the hooks and the anchors and the connections to all the banking infrastructures. What they did exceptionally well is put a front name on top of it. It was really useful (unintelligible) and hid behind the scenes all the (unintelligible) coming and (unintelligible). And so I think we’re going to see it with $170 million exit. That’s the kind of investment that early stage venture capitalist want and they’re going to support and publicize. So I think there’s going to be more and more of these services that do nothing other than connect other people’s APIs and put something on top that is an input. So in the case of Foursquare checking in and the case of my scale, I step on it and without even touching a button, it just knows how to send, you know, my weight to web server. So I’ll check it out later and share with people.
Mr. CROWLEY: Yeah. You know, what I’m thinking is I want an API for your scale so that when you gain – well, I’m sorry, when you lose 10 pounds I can give you the Congratulations You Lost 10 Pounds badge.
Mr. GILLMOR: Yeah, just as long as you never get that data from me.
Mr. LESSIN: Dennis and I were out actually a few weeks in ago at an event and I actually was playing around with a garment heart rate and location watch that I have. And we were drinking, just not too much, but you know, we had a glass of wine or two that dinner. And we were checking in and then I was watching my heart rate change, you know, as I had a lot of alcohol on my system and I think that, you know, when you start to – when you talk about an API that would will be interesting. I mean, there’s all sorts of crazy data in the world that you start mashing up, you know, you can have – you can give out badges for.
Mr. CROWLEY: Yeah. Oh, that’s – I love that stuff. I mean, if there’s no – I don’t want – like – of course we establish hugely inspired by Nike Plus, you know, the thing you put in your shoe and, you know, you plug in to the bucket, the bottom (??) and then you go running and then track how many miles you ran and you can compete against other people. And you know, have this experience with the Nike Plus where it was like a rainy, you know, September day and I had no other incentive to get out of bed except to earn the points that it was going to take me to beat my buddy Alex, you know. And it’s like there’s no other way I would have one out of bed if it wasn’t for that little bit game mechanic.
Mr. LESSIN: Yeah…
Mr. CROWLEY: You know, I think that can – game mechanic as motivator can do lots of different things like to exercise more, to see more films, to meet more people, and to do any these things. It’s fantastically interesting and as we start to think about what can you do with other people as API it’s like, yeah, I watched 20 films this month through Netflix, let’s add a game mechanic to that. Oh, yeah, why read 10 books – presumably read 10 books through Amazon, let’s add a game mechanic to that. There’s a lot of – there’s a lot of interesting stuff we can do and there’s a lot of data that’s out there just waiting to be used.
Mr. LESSIN: Sorry…
Mr. SCOBLE: Dennis, are your APIs open? Because I know I was talking to the guy who’s building the South by Southwest iPhone app for next year and…
Mr. CROWLEY: Yeah…
Mr. SCOBLE: And we were saying why don’t you hook in all the bars into Four Square…
Mr. CROWLEY: Awesome, yeah…
Mr. SCOBLE: And let people check-in in your app and show where people are…
Mr. CROWLEY: Yeah…
Mr. SCOBLE: We just didn’t know what kind of API you had and whether that was, you know…
Mr. CROWLEY: Yeah, definitely, put me in touch. We have an API. It’s kind of a private data and there’s probably 40 people that are playing with it. If you want to play with it you can always e-mail us and we give it out. We’re just trying to get the scaling issues in the site under control before we open up to everyone. But we are – it’s funny, we’re seeing our first round of apps come out that are kind of competing with their owns apps like, you know, different iPhone clients, different Android clients, you know, different clients for Four Square that kind of do the same stuff that we do. See the early days with Twitter again. You know, we’re – like they build this stuff and they’re kind of like competing against themselves until they just give up with that risk(ph). But we’re – you know, we’re still continuing with our own (unintelligible) phone app and try to make that as…
Mr. SCOBLE: Yeah…
Mr. CROWLEY: Awesome as possible.
Mr. SCOBLE: To go back…
Mr. CROWLEY: But for these guys definitely put me in touch because I love to see that built in and out.
Mr. SCOBLE: OK. To go back to the Dodgeball times, what did you learn from being in this – on the right target but having Twitter take the game away from you guys? And what are you doing differently with Foursquare to make sure that nobody come – you know, Evan Williams doesn’t come in and take away the game again?
Mr. CROWLEY: Yeah, well, you know, I don’t think in the sense that we like we’ve lost out to them. We were doing two different things, right? But this time around if you can look at – like we’re just – we’re really into locations. It might just be the fact that we’re in New York and, you know, we have been conditioned like my list – my group of friends are being conditioned to use things like (unintelligible) Foursquare to make plans. It’s like there’s no other way to make plans, you just go with the checks in is the way to go. But I think the big thing that’s different this time around is, you know, we recognized that Dodgeball was a kind of crappy, one-player experience. Like – it’s like, you know, signing up to Facebook and having one friend, like that’s no good. And a lot of people sign up and they only have like three or five friends and so like how do you make that more interesting to them? And our approach to that was like you make it a better one-player game. You add game mechanics, you let people, you know, you reward them for discovering places. You reward them for doing something different and then hopefully, you know, that last long enough to get that, you know, get people to invite their friends and then it becomes an entirely different experience. So I think there’s a couple of things there that we can do.
Mr. SCOBLE: One thing Twitter taught us was the that game – the rules of the game can change, right? You know, Twitter is sort of a game. I mean, you can have a game over followers or number of friends. Let’s see who guys have more (unintelligible) follower numbers…
Mr. CROWLEY: Yeah, sure, sure.
Mr. SCOBLE: And they change the game by doing the suggest user list. What guarantees do we have that, you know, if I become mayor – you know, that you won’t change the term of the game and let people buy the mayorship away from you or something like that, you know.
Mr. CROWLEY: Yeah, I guess it goes back like a trust issue, you know. We know that if we did that that would break the game for people. Like I had a call with an advertiser today that one of the bomb like, you know, super users up and they’re checking this count as twice as much. I’m like, no, that’s awful, that breaks the rules of the game, it breaks the promise that we made to the users. And so, you know, I don’t think of ourselves as a game designers, you know, but like, you know, that being said I think, we’ve got a strong enough handle on, you know, how to push people’s buttons especially after doing a lot of this stuff. Like seeing how riled up people get about cheating, seeing, you know, people make paycheck(ph). And it’s like we know – we know what to do that, you know, people really love and we know what to avoid. That’s what we’re going to, you know, upset people in some way(ph). I don’t think we ever want to break that kind of, you know, contract that we have with the user that kind of keep it fun and engaging.
Mr. SCOBLE: Yeah…
Mr. GILLMOR: All right, I think we’re going to start to wrap this one up. So, I’d like to go back to Seth and get the answer to my question that he never gave me.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. GILLMOR: What about the advertising? Where it’s going to go? I mean, I hear a couple of things about the nature of companies that might emerge to sort of take advantage of this real time serendipity that, you know, these kind of social swarms that are going to start to take place. But, you know, since you’re – I’ve a hard time hearing you so you maybe locked up again.
Mr. GOLDSTEIN: You hear me now?
Mr. GILLMOR: Try it again.
Mr. GOLDSTEIN: OK. Can you hear me?
Mr. GILLMOR: Yeah.
Mr. GOLDSTEIN: In the line of best formation – I mean, the evolution from demand – fulfillment of the demand creation (unintelligible?) from Google as the information company to, you know, Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and others as social media companies. And in light of demand creation it’s really about suggestion like we talked about before, move the description to prescription. And I think there’s an opportunity for advertisers to prescribe things(ph) want people to do. And so as the case of, you know, Twitter, we, as a social media built (unintelligible?) be interested in ad products that suggest people to tweet about certain things. And so, ordinarily, people are (unintelligible?) to give out with every (unintelligible?) and you don’t know what you’re going to tweet about. And if I knew that you were a runner based on your tweet history maybe you’ll tweet it out the new (unintelligible?) issue. And maybe you would – somebody wouldn’t because they’re not a runner. And so the Foursquare model, I talked to Dennis about this, is the opportunity for (unintelligible?) and for company (unintelligible) to get people to (unintelligible) recognized that might get you to checked in (unintelligible?). And you have social network for the (unintelligible) very beneficial as Starbucks you check in there. Like (unintelligible?) on this directions.
Mr. SCOBLE: Steve, we’re not hearing you.
Mr. CROWLEY: Yeah, he broke up…
Mr. GILLMOR: Sorry, yeah, it’s really hard to hear Seth, because of the bandwidth problem we’re having. Dennis, do you know what he was referring to in terms of the conversation you had?
Mr. CROWLEY: Yeah, I think he was talking about like the way the context that you, you know, that you associate with Foursquare check-ins and really, the context we associated with tweets like, you know. Right now there’s not a lot of structured data in Twitter to know that you were talking about the movie or to know that you were talking about sneakers, or you know, whatever the topic happens to be. And you know, we have a little bit of that baked into Foursquare because, you know, we know the location and, you know, if you are in a movie theater we’re going to assume maybe you’re talking about the movie or whatever. But I think what he was getting at is that, you know, these things are kind of measurable. So, if we have people that check-in at coffee shops and then broadcast their location to, you know, a thousand, 2,000 followers and that’s basically (unintelligible?), hey, I checked in that thing coffee, you 2,000 people should also do that because that’s where I go. And right now, there’s no way to reward – you know, if I tweet that out or if I, you know, send to Foursquare check in that goes to a large number of people, like there’s no way that me as a user is getting rewarded and then maybe an opportunity for that at the future.
Mr. GOLDSTEIN: Because like maybe an…
Mr. CROWLEY: Where, you know, branch care…
Mr. GOLDSTEIN: Problem?
Mr. CROWLEY: Is it what?
Mr. LESSIN: And so that’s going to be FTC problem, it’s like going to be $11,000 fine?
Mr. CROWLEY: Yeah, I don’t know how that stuff works out. We’ll let someone else get find that first then we’ll figure it out.
Mr. GILLMOR: Well, asking a similar question of you, Sam. What’s the – it doesn’t’ sound like your company is particularly consumer facing at the moment or is…
Mr. LESSIN: Well, actually – yeah, I mean, it’s quite (unintelligible?) at the moment and what we’ve been kind of going through over the last two years since we started it is moving it from being a consumer-focused company, kind of up the change that we don’t only help kind of, you know, early adopters and consumers but small businesses, some large businesses, and now we’re kind of – we’re about to expose all the basically the entire system at API level so that you can hook in and use any of our services to power your kind of own ends and needs. You know, it’s interesting when you start to think about content to separate from identity in distribution a lot of the dynamics changed pretty significantly. And so, you know, it’s been really interesting to watch. I mean, the number one asset on the (unintelligible) photos because that’s what people have the most of. But really the diversity of uses to put – put it to everything from my favorite example of people sharing pictures – kid farmer sharing pictures of their pigs and videos of their pigs for auctions(ph), you know, through the kind of mom sharing baby photos and creative agency sharing video rough cuts, it’s been pretty interesting to watch.
Mr. GILLMOR: We just dropped our screens so I’m going to wrap this up on the recording.
Mr. CROWLEY: Can I just say – in the last few seconds Seth had sent me…
Mr. GILLMOR: Yeah.
Mr. CROWLEY: A link to the RSS feed for his scale. So that data is available, you can use a component if we want to play with it.
Mr. GILLMOR: OK. So I want to thank Seth Goldstein. Thank you, Seth.
Mr. GOLDSTEIN: Welcome.
Mr. GILLMOR: And I want to thank – and particularly for the idea of having these two guys come on a show. It’s been fascinating.
Mr. GOLDSTEIN: Steve, it’s a part of the New York School. Let’s not forget there’s some really, really, really exciting ideas and companies being built in New York even though I left there for San Francisco couple of years ago.
Mr. GILLMOR: Well, I keep seeing you on Twitter, being on a plane to New York. So, I think that’s pretty obvious. You’re using Moreno’s bedroom community now from New York.
Mr. GOLDSTEIN: Correct.
Mr. GILLMOR: Sam, why don’t you get in touch with me and let me – you know, start taking advantage of your service I’d be interested in doing that. I’m still not going to touch Foursquare because you guys are just…
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. GILLMOR: Just kidding. Dennis, thanks a lot.
Mr. CROWLEY: We’ll get to one of these (??).
Mr. GILLMOR: Yeah, it took me about a year to go into Twitter and it took me about three years to get out of it. Robert Scoble, thank you so much.
Mr. SCOBLE: Thanks and I’m carrying a fit bit – fit that too and we’ll report that on the web some time after I start exercising…
Mr. LESSIN: We’ll use some API, we’ll mix some magic from here.
Mr. GILLMOR: OK, this is Steve Gillmor. This has been The Gillmor Gang. I want to thank everybody who showed up and especially those who didn’t. We’ll see you again next time. Bye-bye.
