Nike just released a new iPhone app which takes run tracking to a new level.  It uses the GPS sensor and accelerometer to track pace, distance, and calories burned and visually maps the run routes on Google Maps – see the picture insert.  Full review on VentureBeat.

I have been using Runkeeper, which does many of the same things, but with a less intuitive interface.  In particular Runkeeper makes it difficult to see exactly where on my run I go slowly and where I go at a better pace.  I’ve installed the Nike app and will try it out tomorrow.

Nike have slapped a £1.19 charge on the app though which I think is a strange decision.  Their reason for releasing the app must be brand promotion, and, given that any revenues Nike might earn from app sales will be negligible in the context of their apparel business, I would have thought their best strategy would be to get the maximum number of installs by making the app free.

This Nike app, and also Runkeeper, Gymfu and the others that I use make use of the sensors within the iPhone (accelerometer, GPS).  I’m also fascinated by the idea of third party sensors that connect to the iPhone to display data and sync with web apps.  The Withings scale I have at home works in this way and my next ask is for a heart rate monitor that works in the same way.

I haven’t been able to find one yet, but the device from ithelete in the pictures below points the way.  It connects with a heart rate monitor and runs analytics on the heart rhythm which guide how hard you should train on any given day.  That is a little sophisticated for my training requirements, but will bring information formerly only available to professionals to serious amateurs.

mobypicture have written one of my favourite Layars and from the iPhone screen grabs below you can see how the interface works.  In the first image you can see the wall in our office augmented with pictures taken nearby.  The circle in the top right corner has white dots for all the photos within 800m and the photos layered over the top and the detail at the bottom shows pictures in the direction my phone was pointing.  I was pointing the phone in the direction of Google’s offices in Victoria and as you can see in the second and third images the Layar found a picture of my friend Anil who heads up corp dev for Google in Europe. 

The Layar browser provides the camera interface, link to the compass in the phone and format for displaying the content on the screen.  Each Layar then integrates whatever content they are interested in – in the case of mobypicture it is pictures taken nearby, other interesting apps are the Tweeps around (3D), and the Rolling Stones Exile on Your Street campaign.

As you can see for Layar the notion of augmented reality is taking reality as per the camera view and augmenting it with interesting content.

Foursquare however has come up with a different idea which doesn’t use the camera and the phone’s compass, but simply takes the location information from a user checks in and pushes the relevant data via an on screen alert.  For example, the Independent Film Channel (IFC) just announced a ‘layer’ on Foursquare which takes descriptions of places crowd sourced from the IFC member base and then pushes them to Foursquare users who opt in who get to see ‘the world as IFC fans see it’  – see the picture below.

The Wikipedia article on augmented reality focuses heavily on adding content to video in the way that Layar does, so the Foursquare notion stretches traditional definitions in this area, but they do so in quite a cool way. One of the limitations of Layar is that you have to open the app and wave the phone around to find the content you want, which (for now at least) is not a natural feeling process (trust me…).  To access the Foursquare augmentation of reality I only have to make a single opt in and then use Foursquare as I normally would, which seems like a lower barrier to adoption. 

What do you think – is augmented reality just hype? is the camera view important?

Computerworld reported yesterday on the results of a global Nielsen study into trust on the web.  There are a lot of interesting nuggets in the article, but my favourites are the following:

• 90% of internet consumers worldwide now trust recommendations from people they know
• 70% trust consumer opinions posted by people they don’t know
• 70% trust brand websites

All three of these are on the increase. It is unsurprising that as the number of reviews proliferate and the world becomes more comfortable with eCommerce generally that trust in personal recommendations is increasing – so this is welcome news, but perhaps not that surprising.

I was, however, surprised to learn that trust in brand websites is increasing. This might be because advertisers have reacted in the right way to consumer opinions, that would make sense to me, and is also what Jonathan Carson, President of Online, International, at Nielsen is saying:

However, we see that all forms of advertiser-led advertising, except ads in newspapers, have also experienced increases in levels of trust and it’s possible that the CGM revolution has forced advertisers to use a more realistic form of messaging that is grounded in the experience of consumers rather than the lofty ideals of the advertisers.

And the stuff that from a trust point of view isn’t working so well?

Perhaps unsurprisingly, text ads on mobiles (24% of us trust these), online banner ads (33%), online video ads (37%), and search engine ads (41%).  Clearly the money is where the trust isn’t – perhaps this is inevitable.

I’m a big believer that there is value to be had, a faith that comes from the utility these various services provide, but at the same time these are very real concerns and it is clear to me that we need to go about building these companies in a slightly different manner if we are going to create sustainable businesses.  In particular a focus on revenues and profitability seems to make sense.  As I’ve said before for all but the very hottest consumer internet brands I think profitability is going to be a pre-requisite for a good exit, at least for the next couple of years.

However, if you are aiming big I still believe that the best way to get to revenues and profits is to focus on building great product, achieve your first million users and then start layering the revenue on top of that.

LinkedIn is perhaps the premier case study for this model of a consumer internet company and I’m going to finish this post by pulling some quotes from a recent interview with Reid Hoffman.  You can read the full version on CNN.

Firstly – he started LinkedIn in 2002, the post internet bubble downturn:

I have a strong belief that starting businesses during an economic downturn is the exact right time to do it because it gives you runway. It’s harder to raise capital, but if you can do it, it gives you an advantage.

Secondly – they set themselves a big but achievable target that was based around product and audience, not revenue:

We had this initial challenge of, "How do you get a million people?" The first challenge was getting enough people so that functions like searching for people or sharing information had enough people in it to be valuable. The year 2003 was all about tuning and viral growth.

I’m a huge believer in getting a million people, getting them engaged, and then building a business model on top of that. I knew I wasn’t planning on really trying to work on a business model until later.

Thirdly – they did get round to revenue pretty quickly and with paid for products that were pretty obvious and I guess conceived of from pretty early on:

We launched three revenue streams in 2005. The first was job listings. The second one we figured would help us get to profitability fast: We launched subscriptions, which was enhanced communications and search capability. People need to talk to people they don’t already know in order to get the job done. That’s the plural majority of our business today.

We had originally not even thought about doing advertising. But two things persuaded me to launch advertising as well. One of them was that our demographic was so good. The second one was that we began to realize we could build unique business products.

This strategy isn’t for everyone – you need to have the resources to cover the early period (Reid used the money he made from Paypal) and you need to have a business that genuinely has breakout potential – but if those criteria are satisfied then focusing 100% in the early days on getting the product right is the best way to create value.  The downturn doesn’t change that.

For some time now it has been apparent that social media companies have to make customers party to strategy decisions.  The best example of this is still the AACS encryption key controversy on Digg in May 2007 when Kevin Rose backed his users by defying cease and desist orders demanding that DVD decryption instructions be removed from the site.  In so doing he consciously exposed the company to a potentially terminal lawsuit, famously saying “If we lose, we die trying.“

It has often seemed that this fact of life is lost on Facebook, and the company has taken a lot of stick over the years for not paying enough attention to its users.  Sometimes it was right to do so, e.g. over the introduction of news feeds, and other times it arguably got it wrong – e.g. over the introduction of Beacon and more recently changes to its terms of use.

Now they have launched a user poll which allows users to choose between two alternative sets of T&Cs for the site, with the results independently audited and binding on the company if certain conditions are met.  Further, there is a commitment that future changes will also be subject to ballot.

This is a first step towards formally empowering the users of Facebook as stakeholders in the company, and is something I expect we will see more of over time, both on Facebook and on other social media sites.

The significance is that it is the first formal step to empower customers – but it is only a small step.

It is not binding in law and if push comes to shove there is nothing to stop Facebook going against the ballot.  Moreover one of the conditions is that for the vote to be binding is that 30% of the active user base must vote in favour of the winning option – that is 60m people, a target that may well not be hit.  Further, this is a very dry subject presented in a dry way it is eminently possible that even if 60m people do vote many of them won’t bother to fully read the documents first.  Together this has caused many commentator to react to this development with a yawn, e.g. on Techcrunch Arrington asks to be “woken up when the ballot is over”.

If I’m right, and we do see more of this over time what we are witnessing here is the development of a new kind of stakeholder capitalism.  To be clear I’m not expecting for a second that social media sites should be run exclusively by or for their customers, simply that they will get more of a say over time.  It will be interesting to see how this pans out, particularly when the wishes of users come into clear conflict with other stakeholders, like the VC shareholders .

This year because of the conference’s impressive growth and Twitter’s broader mainstream appeal, it has become almost impossible to find the same value as in the past. I did a search for the “#sxsw” tag on Saturday afternoon and found that there had been 392 tweets with the term in just the previous 10 minutes. That number mushroomed to more than 1,500 in the previous hour.

For those that don’t know Hashtags is a system which enables tracking of in-message tags that Twitterers add to their messages, similar in a way to Flickr photo tags or blog post tags – full description here.

as Alan says this is a bit of a storm in a teacup, as you can get round this problem by using different search techniques.  Further as Twitterati points out this is a ‘quality problem’ that can be innovated around:

All these problems are nice to have because they’re growing pains. The challenge will be creating tools that meet these pains. Two areas that might get a lot of attention in 2009 from third-parties may be noise filters – services that intelligently eliminate inane updates (e.g. remove any mentions about lunch or coffee”) or smarter, easy-to-create groups.

Tweetdeck is already working hard on this, and I’m sure there will be others.

I’m not sure that tools are the only answer though.  The more observant amongst you might have noticed from the LivingSocial widget in my right sidebar that I recently read Lessig‘s Code2.0, a book in which he talks at length about how communities are governed and regulated.  He persuasively argues that for there are four modes of regulation – architecture/code, law, norms and the market (more details here) – Tweetdeck et al are code based solutions to the problem of the too much traffic on Twitter, but the other modalities or regulation (as Lessig would describe them) are also important. 

Norms are already at play with lots of discussion about what is appropriate to Twitter, what is an appropriate frequency of Tweets etc., and as another example there is a section on norms for the use of hashtags on the page I linked to above:

Suggestions and tips 

The use of hashtags is still an emergent phenomena, and as such, etiquette is negotiable, though some have already expressed their distaste for hashtags. 

Used sparingly and respectfully, hashtags can provide useful context and cues for recall, as well as increased utility for the track feature. Used excessively can cause annoyance, confusion or frustration, and may lead people to stop following you. It’s best to use hashtags explicitly when they’re going to add value, rather than on every word in an update. 

A good rule of thumb to follow is to focus on your update first, and only if it quantitatively adds value, to append one-three hashtags. There are no hard and fast rules, but Twitter should continue to be about answering the simple question: “What are you doing” rather than “What tags apply to what you’re doing?”

Market as a force will start to come into play subtly as Twitter gently bends the service towards areas where it can make money.  The recent focus on search could well be an example of that.

To complete the discussion of the four modalities there is the obvious point that I doubt we will see any direct application of law – either as direct regulation from government or ‘policy’ from Twitter (note this is different to Facebook).

It is pretty clear to me that as the community grows something is going to have to change – and as I have written before it is instructive to think of the Twitter community as an emergent system with rules that need to evolve to ensure that the signal to noise ratio is maintained at a sensible level whilst keeping the service growing.

Facebook went through a similar problem when they launched applications – initially apps took off like wildfire but after a while all the application invites became annoying.  FB responded by changing the rules which governed the number of invites that can be sent out, something they were able to do because they operate a closed system.

Because Twitter is such an open system the rules will evolve in a different way.  On the positive side they can let third party developers like Tweetdeck innovate and experiement for them – benefiting from the success of the winners but not suffering from the failure of the losers.  That benefit, however, comes at the cost of a lack of control.  The health of the Twitter community (as with all communities online and offline) is 100% dependent on the rules, and to an extent Twitter will have to stand by and watch what happens to theirs.

UPDATE: Integration with Facebook makes this a much more pressing issue as the volume of messages we have to deal with will rise signficantly

There are two interesting things here.

Firstly, using Hitwise tools Tancer analyses the sources of traffic to YouTube through it’s early growth period.  There were three phases:

1. Social network driven traffic – in October 2005 52% of YouTube’s traffic came from social networks.  Word about the still newish site was spreading through online communities of high school and college students.  The real early adopters of online video.
2. Email driven traffic – within one month the 52% from social networks dropped to 30% and traffic from web based email shot up to 17%.  Traffic was now being driven by people using the ‘email a link for this video to a friend’ feature after they had viewed something they liked.
3. Search driven traffic – by January 2008 people searching for specific video clips that they had heard about was becoming an important traffic driver (Tancer doesn’t provide any percentage data for this)

This analysis shows the benefit of tight focus in the early period of a site and then providing the tools which allow growth to spread out from there.

Secondly Tancer uses segmentation data from a company called Claritas to profile early adopters of social media sites generally according to income, age, purchasing habits and so on.

He identifies three groups:

1. “The Bohemian Mix”, they comprise 2m households in the US, are urban dwellers, read the New York Times, shop at Bloomingdale’s, work in the arts, and drive mini-coopers.
2. “Money and Brains” – were wealthier and more into sports than arts
3. “Yound Digerati” – were the most affluent of all and the most tech savvy

I have missed out a lot of detail on these segments for the sake of brevity, but the point here is that this anlysis can provide vital input data for site design and marketing activities at different stages in a site’s evolution.

Looking at which sites these groups are shifting towards also gives an early insite into what might be the next big thing.

It is just a shame that this data doesn’t come cheap.