More ways that “social” application can be useful…
Ever since I developed a FourSquare plugin (well, 2 actually) for OpenVBX from Twilio I’ve been thinking about this idea that social application might actually be useful. It’s time somebody made one of my ideas a reality!
Imagine this: you’re a Busy Person™ in a big city. You have lots of appointments and social entanglements. You lead a hectic life.
You use Google Calendar to manage your schedule.
You checkin on FourSquare a lot.
You allow people to Tungle you.
You have Glympse installed on your trendy smart phone.
Scenario 1:
Somebody who wants to meet with you (we’ll call him Joe) manages to Tungle you. It gets put on your calendar for 5pm, you get an alarm at 4pm. You get in a cab and get stuck in traffic.
Joe gets to the destination at 4:50pm (eager beaver!) and checks in on FourSquare. You’re not there yet.
Your phone starts a Glympse tracker because it notices you’re not at your destination (no checkin yet and it’s already 4:58!) and sends it to Joe so he can see that you’re stuck in traffic.
Scenario 2:
You’re attending a new meetup for the first time and you don’t know many (or any) of the people there. You put the meetup on your calendar, it gets published on Plancast because you tagged it and the morning of the event you get an email with a list of other people planning to attend and more info about the presenters.
When you get there you checkin on FourSquare and you get added to a list of people who attended and maybe get entered into a drawing for an iPod or a Zune. (they still make those, right?)
You get a DM from @backnoise with a link to the backnoise.com discussion about the event that’s going on right now and maybe an email with links to archives of previous twitter traffic from TwapperKeeper.
The pictures you take while you check in are uploaded to Flickr, Tumblr or Picasa and tagged and then tweeted out and posted on FaceBook.
When you leave (check out) you have the chance to write up a quick review of the time you spent there (Yelp?) or write about it (Tumblr). You get a follow up email with suggestions about similar events coming up in the places you plan to be in or travel too.
So?
A lot of these things can be done now but they aren’t integrated together into a common fabric. It’s not easy to follow people from Twitter to PlanCast to FourSquare to Yelp to Tumblr because they are all (mostly) separate networks. The next class of “social” applications will stitch these networks together.
