Archive for January, 2011
Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg talks about the magic of Serendipity
The Atlantic magazine reports that Facebook and FourSquare are planning to drive increased serendipity.
Mark Zuckerberg, in interview with Time magazine as 2010′s Person of the Year, stated: “We have this concept of serendipity…a lucky coincidence…you bump into a friend that you haven’t seen for a while. That’s awesome.”
http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/printout/0,29239,2036683_2037183_2037185,00.html
It’s nice to see the other guys beginning to get it. 
He must have read the Irish Times coverage of the launch of Locle’s own Serendipity feature in June 2009!
http://www.locle.com/wordpress/2009/06/12/locle-launches-serendipity
We should have trademarked “Serendipity”! The benefit of hindsight. Alas, the limitations of boot-strapping.
Serendipity will be the killer application of mobile social networking. You heard it here first.
Locle’s Predictions for 2011
It’s that time of year again when we assess our soothsaying abilities, compare what we thought would happen last year to what did happen and make a few predictions for the next year.
Well 2010 certainly turned out to be the year for location based mobile apps.
- FourSquare was offered $100 million by Yahoo! and turned it down.
- Facebook launched Facebook Places, with all the checkin fever of a wallaby skipping to avoid outback traffic, but none of the fun of the mayor fair.
- Location-based advertising took off at last, in the form of City Deals, Groupon and Living Social.
To counter all this fervor we predict for 2011 that
- FourSquare will regret not accepting Yahoo!’s offer. Seriously guys, one hundred million!
- Facebook Places will get the gammy “gamification” it so rightly deserves.
- Groupon groupies will bore of spa discounts as the economy pulls out of recession.
But more seriously, we predict that 2011 will see the rise of a new type location based app, an app based around one and only one location: your television.
People spend more time in their homes than they do out-and-about. The check-in to “Home” may earn you +1 FourSquare point, but it certainly doesn’t earn you social cred. The social networker (that’s you) needs a way to get check-in fun when doing nothing and going nowhere.
Television is without a doubt the largest geo-located venue . It’s in everyone`s living room. And there’s lots to talk about “in” television. Even though TV audiences can be seperated by large distances, television (live television) synchronizes viewers and brings them together into one venue-event called The Show.
Stay tuned this year as we take what we’ve learned from geo-social and expand into social television — our mission: to change the way that couch potatoes channel surf forever.
Turn on, check in, drop out. Again.
Happy New Year.
