the tindog coffeehouse

I don’t use Klout (and have no desire to), but I thought this was a brilliant take on it as well as all social media:

When I was growing up, what we knew about each other wasn’t called data. It was called interaction, stories, and information. It came in the form of experience and shared events, gossip and oral history, and reports and report cards. Not every story told about us was unbiased, accurate, or even true. …

I had high hopes for Klout when it started, though I thought they were taking something close to impossible in trying to quantify influence. I was interested to see how they would approach it, hoping they might identify something useful toward sorting the gamers and spambots from the people who were making the social web work. Did I think they would identify true influence? Not really. But I thought they might find a stone of solid respect around engagement activity that was worth looking at. It seemed a big quest, but possible. …

[But] I became more aware that my data, your data, our stories are their product and they seemed to become less aware of the responsibility that might come with a offering product like that. …

In the process of opting out, I was faced with a list of options that asked why. I was looking for one that said “Changes in the algorithm” or “Too many changes.” I found it telling that the only choice I found that might describe my reason was “I don’t like my Klout Score.” That, of course, implies something that could be all about my ego and not in the least about their product.

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CNNMoney reported last night that Facebook is buying the Austin-based check-in-turned-travel-guide site Gowalla for an undisclosed sum, presumably to incorporate some of its concepts (and engineers) into its own fledgling Timeline profile concept and then shut the company down.

And I’d just like to point out that I called it back in September. Well, sorta.

When Gowalla relaunched as “Gowalla 4.0″ in September, it eliminated the gamification aspects of the service (the pins, stamps, and items) and even the whole check-in concept itself. Users would instead “create stories” and tag people in their stories and browse and share travel guides. The UI was gorgeous as always, but there was no longer any real incentive to use it.

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It’s a social network where you create status entries about things you’re doing and post related photos. You can tag friends, and they can comment on your posts. What is it? If you said Facebook, you’d be right. If you said Gowalla, well, you’d be right there, too.

Last week, I wrote about my knee-jerk reaction to Gowalla’s massive overhaul, deemed Gowalla 4.0. Gone are the game-like incentives such as pins and items, replaced by lists and guides. Instead of checking in to a place, you create a story about it.

I’ve had some time to think about it since then, and it occurred to me that in the process of becoming unlike Foursquare, Gowalla has become a sort of stripped down version of Facebook. Of course, Facebook doesn’t have the travel guides that Gowalla does, but the user activity is much the same. I’m creating a story (status update) about some place I’ve gone, not for virtual rewards but for the sheer socialness of it. Stories are meant to be social objects complete with photos, comments, tagging of friends, and sharing beyond a user’s private profile. Sounds a lot like Facebook, no?

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I’ve been a big fan of Gowalla since January, when I signed up for the social geolocation service mostly out of curiosity. I also signed up for Foursquare around the same time, and while I used both for a while, I never really liked Foursquare and eventually stopped using it.

The biggest advantage Gowalla had over its check-in competitor was that it was actually fun. I loved getting new stamps and working toward new pins while collecting virtual items such as a longhorn or an espresso machine along the way. I posted a bunch of photos and enjoyed seeing where friends had been and what they had collected. I would go out of my way to go to new restaurants just to earn a new stamp or go back to a place because I knew they had a particular item I wanted. When I had a recent business trip to Cleveland, I purposefully chose to have a layover in Charlotte in part to earn a North Carolina pin and get closer to the “Frequent Flyer” and “Fly Like an Eagle” pins. With Gowalla, there was an incentive to discover new places, go where I’ve never been, and share my experiences in the process. Which was the core concept of the service; it was meant to be more of a digital passport and virtual scavenger hunt than a simple check-in service that catered to the bar crowd like Foursquare.

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I’ve been on Google+ now for three weeks, and I really like it.

Actually, I should rephrase that. I’ve been on Google+ now for three weeks, and I really want to like it.

I want to use it. I want other people to use it. I want it to be awesome. So far, though, it’s been mostly disappointing.

Like me, it seems like a lot of people just haven’t found a good use for it. Maybe because it doesn’t really fit in with the existing Facebook/Twitter ecosystem. Nothing about it feels natural or cohesive or intertwined with any of our other social networks. Of course, this is largely due to Google not publishing their API for third-parties to use, but I think it’s also because anything posted there seems so incredibly redundant.

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Like millions of other techy folks, I couldn’t wait to get my hands on an invite to Google’s new Facebook wannabe, Google+. Now that I’m on, however, I can’t think of a single reason to actually use it.

Way to go, Google.

It’s not that Google+ is a bad product, although while it’s still in its early stages, it’s extremely bare in functionality. Rather, the problem as I see it is that it’s completely unnecessary. There’s nothing it does that other, more established social networks don’t already do, the biggest of course being Facebook. And this redundancy provides absolutely no value whatsoever.

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