I’m A Local
I know it’s hard to remember a time before the Internet. Before chat-rooms – YES, even before “You’ve Got Mail.” Before the socialized Internet, your community was just your physical social environment: Your mailman, your grocer, friends, family, roommates and the physical places where you would see these people. The emergence of social Web was astounding. Suddenly we were part of a global community and you could find web content from South Africa and chat with people in Belize. Now that the Web is mobile, there is this new fascination with socializing our location. Mobile services like Foursquare, Brightkite and even Tumblr allow users to tell all of their networks where they are and what they’re doing.
You Are Your Own Paparazzi
This rings in a new phase in online social interaction – bringing your physical locale online – not just the people, but the shops, restaurants, gas stations, post offices, parks, churches. They all inhabit real-estate on the Web within these applications. Checking in on Brightkite gives you the option of cross-streets or nearby listings that include businesses and landmarks. Take a picture and include it in your check-in – then send it to Twitter and Facebook. Now, when you check in, you can easily connect with several people who are in close proximity to your activity who are also socializing their activities.
Social Historians Tag As We Go
Blogging is no exception for the digital local yokel. Devote an entire Tumblr post to a photo and tag it to a location that shows up on a built-in Google Map on your site so that your followers can know exactly where you were when you posted. It’s crazy! And speaking of Google Maps – also crazy: Do a Google Maps search for Shake Shack NYC’s and not only will you find the street view, but you’ll also find relevant photos tagged to exact locations that were submitted by users like your GPS-powered social self. We’re literally uploading our neighborhoods onto the Internet.
Digital Town Criers
You find the same thing with local news. Sometimes, if the train is ever delayed – which happens often here in San Francisco – I’ll check Twitter for updates from @NJudah to see if there’s anything holding up the system somewhere. We find out news and alerts from our online social networks, but it’s not always organized, relevant, so targeted to you and where YOU are–Hence the idea of Fwix. It combs the best of the Web–blogs, local news, even user-submitted news stories, breaking them down to the most relevant bits of information, in real time, in your city. Plus, it lets you shape your own local newswire–got an iPhone? Break the story to Fwix, and share it with your social network. Know that your news is filtered to the most important parts.
Meaningful Meetups
Forget, though, about being “nearby” and “checking in” and “running into”. As your two local communities merge, there still exist physical, premeditated gatherings – events, if you will. And services that digitize them, namely, Eventbrite, have the challenge of re-socializing an innately social idea – a gathering of people at a venue for an event. As a location-centric, web-based service they have the option to integrate with these increasingly popular mobile services while still owning the digital social future – the planned get-together, so different from the random, cheap check-in. Eventbrite, and the like, are the best of both worlds. Their site, while listing planned events, has elements of surprise and the larger sense of community (fancy a Fusion Fight night in Billings?) while catering to needs of local communities – they are a valuable entity to the growing story of the location-obsessed and the new digitized local community.
-
Corey
-
Jason