• There are over 100 million Facebook mobile users.
• Facebook mobile users are twice as engaged as web site only users.
• Facebook have SMS deals with 220 mobile operators!
• Facebook have two versions of their mobile websites, one designed to support touch and another traditional WAP input.
• Some of the most active countries include Indonesia, Kenya and South Africa.
• Hints that the next wave of development comes from deep integration with manufactures – i.e. on home screen, address book. Android developers should look at using “Intents” to hook into other OS or app events (i.e. post photo to Facebook from phone gallery).

Despite the apparent simplicity of Craigslist, the man Craig definitely has a firm understanding of trust and reputation systems. I was happy to read this bullish outlook for the future:

Restating the bottom line: we are already seeing a shift in power and influence, a big wave whose significance we’ll see by the end of this decade. Right now, it’s like the moment before a tsunami, where the water is drawn away from the shore, when it’s time to get ahead of that curve.

Rummble is the first social location based service to be powered by a trust algorithm, and is often cited as an example of subjective logic in action.

• First, the Rummble API isn’t just about putting dots on a maps and retrieving local reviews and ratings. Not only is there a tonne of data at your disposal, but there’s also far more happening under the bonnet. It exposes a powerful trust profile algorithm, which is the product of years of research and coordination with founders in the field of subjective logic and reputation theory, giving developers the flexibility to seamlessly embed personalised relevant content.
• Rummble loves Twitter! Earlier this year we began an experiment called Tremors which scans the Twittersphere for content about locations. We’re now parsing over half a millions tweets per week, with a 90% match rate where a location has been established. Tremors data now forms part of our own core services and API. You can even sort results by tweetiness!
• Rummble recognises that ratings and reviews doesn’t fit into every mobile LBS use case. Users are also free to check-in to locations, and we handle the optional sharing the location updates via Twitter, Facebook and Fire Eagle without further API integrations.
• There are infinite cool new possibilities with the Rummble API and we want you to be creative. We’re a small and dynamic geek-friendly team based in London who have wide open door to developers. Come and visit us for a chat over coffee about your requirements. There are no support charges, and if parts of the API need tweaking then (in most cases) we can add new features upon request.
• You won’t get stiffed with API fees! Be confident that Rummble aren’t cruising for developers to send regular invoices to – we want to work with the most creative technical minds to create engaging social location-based apps and games. Founding members of the Rummble Developer Program will receive numerous benefits in the long term.
• Example code for Java, PHP and C# is currently available to help you breeze through OAuth and start rocking! Get instant access to Rummble’s registered users. Auth via Twitter and Facebook is also supported, which is a much bigger number

I’ll be talking more about the Rummble API at openMIC Mobile Innovation Camp in Guildford on 4th November, and hope to see you there!

Mashup*

My positive subjective view on the location-based market opportunity were backed up some research stats in Gary Gale’s presentation:

“The (User Location Market) … will nearly triple in revenue this year, to $1.3 billion from $485 million in 2007, and will reach $8 billion in 2011.” – Gartner Research

Here’s a slidecast of my talk (note that this post continues below):Being Location Aware

I sacrificed my slides about privacy to stay within the 5 minute slot, to avoid friendly fire a friendly reminder from Tony Fish. However location privacy emerged as one of the main topics of the evening.

Steven Feldman raised some valid concerns about the current lack of consumer awareness regarding location privacy, and the possible implications of openly geo-tagging data. For example, a geo-tagged photo of your neighbours new Ferrari is posted online and a few days later it vanishes. Will there be a high-profile divorce case based upon evidence obtained from a locaton-aware service? (Maybe location isn’t the real problem in the latter?)

There is now an immense potential to openly share information, and it might not be immediately obvious why and how to be selective about the level of information to share openly. Among the benefits of sharing “private” location information are more dynamic social and contextually relevant services.

Sharing doesn’t always occur across completely open channels. Here are some ways in which location privacy is/should be managed:

• Gary Gale and Ed Parsons explained that Yahoo! Fire Eagle and Google Latitude both work on an opt-in basis. In other words, by default your location isn’t shared with everyone. Most traditional holders of private information instead require you to opt-out.
• Granular privacy controls should be easy to use and tightly integrated with leading location provider services. Per application, this should include:
  • who – which groups or individuals (similar to Facebook friend groups).
  • location accuracy – exact location, current town/city or hide location.
  • time – colleagues can find you within working hours, but not on evenings and weekends.
• Information about places you’ve been is usually less sensitive than your current location. A location “trail” is however quite sensitive, but could be the key to more contextually relevant services and hyper-local advertising.
• Rummble CEO, Andrew Scott, pointed out that the location-based service industry should avoid fuelling (often inaccurate) tabloid horror stories by continuing to develop a solid privacy foundation while focusing upon the benefits of sharing information with location-aware services and how to use them effectively.

Thanks to the entire mashup* team including Tony Fish, Simon Grice, Emma Jell; and to Robert Jones from Bluefire Consultancy for taking photos of the event.

The event has also been blogged by Gary Gale, Ed Parsons, Steven Feldman and mashup* event.

And finally, here’s Mr T’s view on mobile (unfortunately embedded video isn’t yet supported by SlideShare):

Well actually it’s not quite that hardcore – you don’t have to give a presentation (I jest – of course you can keep your shoes on )

I’ll cut to the chase and say that BarCamp fits the bill for the tech startup world. There are many people with brilliant ideas, businesses and a passion for what they do who want to share and learn in a relaxed environment. It’s a lot like most good networking events, but with free presentation opportunities.

BarCamp is a well self-organised free “unconference” where all participants are encouraged to give a presentation about their chosen topic. At the start of the proceedings all participants are encourages to wrestle over a few stack of post-it notes and sharpies (marker pens) in order to scribble down and stick their preferred topic on the schedule.

Despite the apparent scotch tape and toothpicks, BarCamp is now attracting sponsorship from tech heavyweights, so don’t be surprised to find people from Yahoo! or Google lurking amongst eager bootstrappers.

The Twitter back-channel keeps everyone posted on what’s happening – #barcampmiami rose to one of the most popular Twitter trends during the event. There are a number of sporadic talks running in parallel, so keeping in sync via Twitter helps catch the buzz.

There are no glossy schedules, hopefully fewer headaches for the organiser and less unnecessary costs. If someone backs out of a talk you can count their slot being taken quickly.

I learned new things from some awesome people and was delighted to share by presenting in the courtyard sun about Agavi PHP Framework. It was fun, despite there being no hope of the projector working.

Sales pitches are discouraged and against the whole BarCamp ethos. Thanks however to @alexdc for making an announcement about Total Hotspots for iPhone during his introduction – people from BarCamp and FOWA should find the app genuinely useful since it enables them to find the best nearby free and paid Wi-Fi hotspots.

I can’t believe that I went to BarCamp Miami before doing BarCamp London. I’d love to be involved in bringing this fantastic concept to UK shores, however it appears already to be a massive success, with the first 50 BarCamp London tickets selling out in under 30 seconds. Wow!

I recommend that my friends back home sign up to the BarCamp London mailing list and follow @barcamplondon to keep a close eye on their next ticket release. Be quick!

Were you @ BarCamp Miami or do you have plans for BarCamp London? Get in touch via email, Twitter, Linkedin or comment on this post. Thanks.

After a few days of remote working beside a pool (why not?), and Sunday hanging out at BarCamp Miami, my final destination will be Future of Web Apps (FOWA Miami). My mission is to spread the word, gain and share knowledge, and of course seek out serious partnership opportunities over cocktails with silly names on South Beach.

As discussed in a recent post, a partnership between Rummble and Total Hotspots began at FOWA London 08 and lead to the recent launch of an essential iPhone app – just one example of the benefits to be gained from getting out and networking at quality events. Andrew Scott and some of the Rummble team are currently making waves in Barcelona at Mobile World Congress, where they hit the ground running by picking up the TeleAtlas innovation award on the first day!

Wi-Fi is huge in America, and Total Hotspots for iPhone has Miami covered – including some of the best free locations. I’m sure it will come in useful for people attending FOWA and BarCamp Miami.

Unfortunately Wi-Fi is still non-existent on transatlantic flights. Gogo launched Wi-Fi services on some busy domestic US routes late in 2008, having received over $265 million in financing. Their aim is to make inflight Wi-Fi a reality with a roll out across over 2,000 commercial aircraft by the end of 2009.

However, at this time, the lack of connectivity isn’t necessarily a bad thing for me. Eight hours is an unusually long time to sit with a notebook (analogue) crammed with new ideas and a to-do list (digital) in need of pruning; all without the distractions of email, Twitter or real work. My appreciation for the RTM iPhone app has reached new heights (no pun intended)!

Please do Tweet or email me if you’re going to or @ FOWA or BarCamp Miami!

Twestival

This is an awesome achievement for Amanda Rose and all other organisers, and also testament to the power of Twitter as a platform for connecting people and making things happen. Rummble and Total Hotspots together pledged to donate £1 for each of our iPhone apps downloaded during Twestival and will soon figure out exactly how much was raised. A big thanks to everyone who helped spread the word and downloaded the app.

The big news is that Rummble and Total Hotspots have entered into a strategic partnership,  to release a hotspot finder for iPhone that’s based upon a combination of the Rummble’s LBS platform, Rummble API and The Global Wi-Fi Hotspots Directory.

The Concept

There’s no other mobile device on the market that’s caused such an enormous impact as iPhone. The platform enables developers to go wild with a blank canvas at their disposal to create dynamic new interfaces and applications that harness to power of the iPhone SDK, with commoditisation of location and “all you can eat” data. The App Store also presented a unique new distribution platform for mobile apps.

Gioel Molinari

During one of the most exquisite lunches of my life at The Fat Duck, courtesy of Micol’s techno-finance wizard brother, Gioel Molinari; we discussed the idea of creating Total Hotspots for iPhone. Our conclusion: that it would be massively useful if the the entire Total Hotspots database could be made available to millions of worldwide iPhone users, in an app that leveraged some of iPhone’s unique new capabilities. The challenge was turning this great concept into reality as quickly as possible without forming a black hole around the company finances.

Making It Happen

Total Hotspots isn’t a big business and unfortunately doesn’t have a bulging R&D budget waiting to throw at the next “blue sky” project. It never received VC funding when bootstrapped in 2004, by me, and a small but experienced team of mentors/advisors, whilst I finished my degree in Business Computing at City University. Consequently Total Hotspots has been forced to remain profitable year-on-year in order to survive.

We could afford to outsource the development of an iPhone app, but certainly couldn’t afford for the project to fail. Raising extra finance really wasn’t an appealing route considering the looming economic crisis.

Whilst in the middle of writing specifications and exploring a variety of outsourcing options, I had a chance encounter with Andrew Scott – Rummble’s cracking CEO – aboard the all signing, all dancing, beer-swilling MySpace bus at FOWA London. (I wonder how many other new start-ups/partnerships emerged from this bus? We should start a Facebook group! )

There isn’t much to separate the large number of local search start-ups, however there are certain unique things about Rummble that really blew me away. With Rummble the focus is upon far more than the quantity of ratings and reviews, and more upon building a solid “trust profile” that taps into your social network; which becomes more accurate as you “feed” it more information. The output is a set of results that better fits your personal taste. Why receive a rating of  9/10 for The Ivy when I only eat at Dallas Chicken? Relevancy is a great way of rewarding users for taking the time to share their opinions.

Intelligent social data filtering is especially important in the mobile world. Even the iPhone, with all its visual funk, shouldn’t have to relay an untamed information “spray hose”. It should intelligently find the best nearby places for you, not a list of top rated aggregate scores from the masses. I had been dreaming of this kind of functionality but thought it would be overkill for Total Hotspots, but  certainly fascinating PhD topic if I were ever to venuture back into academia.

Not long after sitting down with Andrew, and agreeing to push forward with the project, we all went home for Christmas. On the 5th January, probably the most lethargic Monday of the year, I tried getting in touch with the person who had promised to feature the app on the Gadget Show. The program was originally scheduled to film on 19th January and broadcast at the start of the new series in March. They were already in Scotland shooting short sequences – suddenly our deadline seemed to be a ghost!

Rummble are one of the few teams that I’ve come across who have the right combination of talent, agility and motivation; to shuffle everything at the start of a new year and dive head first into a new project with such an outrageous deadline. Our plan was intelligently restructured, quick technical decisions were made and the “things you can’t do” book torn up. Everyone involved worked overtime to have a prototype ready for filming in Edinburgh on 12th January.

Since then the app has been thoroughly tested to make it launch stable, and the Rummble API is being more tightly integrated at Total Hotspots. It’s been very exciting being the first third party to explore the Rummble API over the past few weeks.  What started as a limited set of requirements to support the iPhone app has turned into a much deeper service integration plan that will continue over the next few weeks and months.

The Total Hotspots application has now been rebuilt from the ground up using the latest version of the excellent Agavi PHP Framework, so the development cycles can be cut down to rapidly roll out exciting new features that Total Hotspots users want. To avoid writing War and Peace, I’m going to save the details of for my next post. What I can announce is that our plan (although still not finalised) is to release the PHP REST client that was developed to interact with the Rummble API on an open and non-restrictive license. This should make it much quicker for future projects to harness the power of Rummble’s API with PHP.

The Launch (work in progress)

I will follow up with another post that covers the launch in more depth. We still have some tricks up our sleeve and Andrew also saved me the effort by beating me to the chase on the Rummble blog. The highlights are:

• Apple approved the app less than 48 hours before the Gadget Show broadcast, but reviewed it faster than usually reported. Thanks Apple!
• Within minutes of entering the App Store, various website had automatically listed the app and tweeted a link using an XML/RSS feed from Apple. At this point we wanted to keep the news quiet for a few more hours and hoped that nobody would chance upon these feeds too soon.
• The news was first leaked on Twitter.
• TechCrunched on Friday evening – a big thanks to Mike Butcher for responding quickly to the late breaking news.
• Gadget Show appearance – now available on the FiveFWD website. Total Hotspots helped Wi-Fi to win in a head-to-head vs. 3G at Hadrian’s Wall.
• After 72 hours the app is the 4th most popular iPhone utility! Well, at least it is over here in the UK.
• Plenty of related activity on the website, via email and all over Twitter. A new Facebook Page and UserVoice Community were created.

I’d like to extend another huge thanks to the entire Rummble team. It’s going to be an exciting few weeks and months ahead! I will post all major developments and ideas right here on this blog, and on Twitter. If you’d like to get in touch to discuss the iPhone app and/or Total Hotspots then please don’t hesitate to email or skype me. Your comments are also welcome below. Thanks for reading.

Click here to get Total Hotspots for iPhone from iTunes

Like millions of people across the world, I would love to be a part of history on the ground in Washington or a packed bar. However I have some work to attend to, and will therefore be watching it on TV, with one eye on the internet – where never before has an event been so well covered.

Qik enables people to stream their experiences live on the internet via their mobile phone; however, given phone networks should be pushed to full capacity, the quality of these feeds will probably leave a lot to be desired. Nevertheless, Qik have partnered with a number of traditional new organisations, including BBC and CBS to distribute spectator footage.

Ustream.tv also has an inauguration channel, which is now also access also available via their new iPhone application.

Even the traditional news networks are covering the event in true realtime social 2.0 style! CNN and Facebook have collaborated to create a mashup whereby live status updates from all viewers appear streaming in realtime next to the live inauguration footage. Your status update may optionally be shared with all viewers, which will easily be quite a few million people! The screenshot to the right shows my 2 seconds of inaugural fame.

Another staggering inaugral experiment comes courtesy of Microsoft Photosynth. This revolutionary software enables a number of photos to be stitched together automatically to create a 3D scene. Both Microsft and CNN will shoot many thousands of professional photographs and combine these with submissions from spectators! Given the scene is refined and improved with each additional photo that’s fed into the system, I’m expecting a fully immersive inaugural world to be created! [UPDATE: here's the finished Photosynth]

We can all play a small part in history; even from our desk – just send a Tweet with the hashtag #inaug09, and you can be sure that message will be archived forever as a personal thought connected with the event. This level of engagement in a political event is unprecedented, whilst somehow managing to blur the boundaries between global and individual participation.

And finally, on the eve of his inauguration Obama started tweeting again, after remaining silent since 5th November! Earlier this month, I wrote about a security breach at Twitter that lead to a number of high profile accounts being compromised. Thankfully this hasn’t prevented @barackobama becoming active again, along with a new @obamainaugral account. It would be a shame for Obama to abandon the new social tools that played such a major role in him winning the election. Twitter CEO, Evan Williams, will be pleased as he tweets his experiences live from Washington!

Here’s a more comprehensive list of live Twitter feeds to follow; and an excellent inauguration guide from TechCrunch.

UPDATE 21/01

• for the above CNN / Facebook mashup, there were 13.9 million live video streams globally between 6am and 11:45am, and over 200k Facebook status updates – via mashable. I wonder how many terabytes per second that is?!
• according to the Twitter blog, there were up to 5x the number of tweets-per-second, compared to last week. Some people experienced a slight delay, but the service remained active throughout!

No doubt there are more examples of enabling new technologies being put to use on this historic day. Please do share your comments below.

This comes at the same time as a phishing scare in which thousands of people complained about receiving obscure direct message from people they know. Chris Brogan posted a warning asking all bloggers to change their passwords, which links to a post from Chris Pirillo that describe a number of rogue direct messages with links to a fake Twitter sign-in pages.

In reality, no communication channel is impervious to phishing attacks, as long as scammers are capable of sending messages, and some people can be fooled into following rogue links. Once a few accounts have been compromised, the “conversion rate” should be much higher since it’s possible to send direct messages that appear to have come from a trusted source. The same thing has been plaguing Facebook for about a year!

Given the timing, it would be easy to assume that both of these incidents are connected. However, according to the Twitter blog (thanks mashable) it appears that the high profile accounts were:

compromised by an individual who hacked into some of the tools our support team uses to help people do things like edit the email address associated with their Twitter account when they can’t remember or get stuck.

So, what does this mean for Twitter? Most regular users probably wouldn’t cancel their account unless they had been directly compromised. By now most people should know better than to blindly follow random links from emails to login screen, however this is the first widespread phishing campaign conducted via direct messages on Twitter.

Would high profile individuals such as Obama trust, or will they continue to trust, Twitter with their voice after such incidents?

In this case, the hoax tweet appear to be light hearted:

What is your opinion on Barack Obama? Take the survey and possibly win $500 in free gas.

However a more malicious message timed to coincide with a specific event could be much more damaging, even if it quickly surfaces as a hoax? For example, what would it say about Obama’s grip on national security if change.gov had been replaced with some photoshopped propaganda shortly after November’s election? The new administration takes their online identity pretty seriously – it’s been reported in The Economist that Obama’s team are to endure a grueling online background checks in which all social network and aliases will be scoured for potentially damaging information.

Putting up with the odd fail whale and the inevitable phishing scams is one thing, and the community have on the whole accepted this; but there is a more significant loss of trust when accounts are being compromised out of the blue. This would not only be a huge problem for Twitter the company, but also a loss for the Twitter community. It would be a shame if high profile users, who add real value, chose not to use the service for these reasons.

Fortunately Twitter were very quick to pull the offending admin tool services, and should make damn sure it doesn’t happen again. But are there other undiscovered back doors waiting to be opened?

As a top priority Twitter should finally start using OAuth – a project which, according to their intro, was conceived by Blaine Cook whilst working on an OpenID implementation at Twitter in November 2006. OAuth would enable applications that consume the Twitter API services to authenticate a user without directly handling user passwords. This would put an end to users having to entrust their credentials to random services; for even if these services aren’t the work of an evil programmer, hiding out in some untraceable basement, there will usually be reason for suspicion and certainly some caution.

Last November the twitterank service was developed overnight as a personal hobby by a Yahoo developer, which quickly went viral extremely quickly, and caused a great deal of suspicion after a bogus claim that twitterank is being used to steal passwords. This wouldn’t happen with services that consume APIs from services such as Facebook and Flickr, because API authentication tokens are issued via their own secure sign-in pages. For example, the iPhoto Facebook Export plugin requires that you sign-in and approve the application, via a secure web interface managed by Facebook, before the application can gain access to your account data.

All this may also be another sign that 2009 is the perfect year for Twitter to be acquired by an organization such as Google, that already have the infrastructure to scale, as well as the security kudos to restore any lost confidence for the long term.

If you enjoyed this post then please say thanks by Digging, share using the button below and/or leave your comments. You may also follow @ahousley on Twitter, on the condition that my direct messages remain spam free!