I’ve been pretty vocal about how I’m down on Foursquare. Not their business model or potential, but how I’m personally struggling with Foursquare’s relevance in MY life. At the very least its pointed out to me how much cooler my friends’ lives seem to be.
And I’ve been equally vocal about my current WeRewards obsession (go ahead and sign up and see what I mean, and yes I’m pimping the referral program, guilty). I’ve made over $10 from using it so far. I love it and if you’re interested in them, check out the podcast we did with their CEO, Ted Murphy.
Last week Stacy and I recorded a DIG:this podcast with Tungle CEO, Marc Gingras. I’ve blogged about Tungle, along with some other apps/sites I am playing with, but essentially its a social calendar service. I love it.
The podcast should be up soon, maybe next week, and I expected to hear about Marc’s entrepreneurial past and about Tungle’s startup story. What I didn’t expect is to uncover a glimpse of the future of location-based apps.
I don’t want to give too much away because hey, I want you to listen to the podcast, but since its not up yet and I’m excited about this, I’ll start the conversation.
Marc pointed out that if you think about it, your true social network, your true friends, the people that you actually want to connect with, can most likely be found in your calendar. These are people you are actually meeting with. Novel idea, huh. Your calendar is a rich source of your likes (where you eat, what you do), your friends and contacts (your real ones, not your phony/fake ones), and your future (where you’ll be and what you’ll be doing).
I’ve had a nagging problem with the current batch of check-in apps in that it only tells me where people are right now, not where they will be. Most of the time it does me no good to find out where my friends were. It’s a novelty to see that Josh went to Chick-fil-A for the 41st time this week, but I couldn’t really ever meet him there because I can’t be ready to go at a moment’s notice.
But, if his calendar was somehow attached to his social presence, I might have known that he was going to Chick-fil-A. The connection of your calendar to your check-in activity holds a massive amount of rich data. We’re just beginning to see how mobile can be relevant in people’s lives by messaging them when they are checking-in at places. But imagine if we know where people are going, what they’ll be doing and who they’ll be doing it with… (and no I don’t mean this, sickos).
I’ll stop there and see if any of you want to continue that thought. I have my ideas but I’d rather hear what other people think of the potential of unlocking someone’s calendar and making that part of their social graph.
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