There is a new trend on the web and both startups and investors are taking note. Fred Wilson has called this trend, “taking the web offline”. Others call it the challenge of “local”. Companies like Loopt and Foursquare are taking this problem head on. As the only web nerd amongst my group of friends I love applications that are appealing to the non-techies (makes me feel normal). I really like the notion of using the web as a tool to improve life, not just keeping eyeballs and activity on the web, and I do think there’s serious lifestyle change and revenue potential in it. The key that makes this all possible is that the web is now mobile.

With the combination of smart phones with decent web browsers and the ability for developers to make applications on these machines, people can “check in”, connect with each other, and find reviews on the fly. I love seeing the Yelp stickers in bar windows because it tells me that the owners care what customers think and if that’s important to them than my experience at that venue is sure to be better. The web is moving away from just the office or home pc and moving into the actual establishment, into the venue, via our pockets. Because we now have the web in our pockets we can interact with a business via the web in real time.

Consider this: Prior to walking into my local pub, I “check in”, pub tender is monitoring Twitter or Foursquare, she see’s that I’m coming, she pours my drink without me even ordering it yet, it’s ready upon my arrival… yea I’d pay an extra couple bucks for that. Extreme example I know, but the information that venues can now access is awesome and will continue to increase. IMHO, they’ll definitely pay for it.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how and when this transformation will really pick up speed and I’m going to write about it a bit over the next week or so. I think that local is already big and going to increase in importance. Companies like Everyblock who was recently acquired by MSNBC bring you hyper local news, and other services make exploring your city and meeting people close to you easier than ever before.

What location based applications are you using? Everytime your iPhone or BB asks, can we use your location, how often do you say yes?

The GetGlue team has done an awesome job of listening to their user community to figure out how to make the experience better and better. Here’s what they said about listening to their community.

We’ve heard consistently from the community that one way to improve the Glue experience is to break free from the small overlay and provide a richer experience for browsing a user’s collection of books, movies, and music.

Today, with the launch of Profile and Object pages on GetGlue.com, we’re taking the first of many planned steps to address this.

Here’s a view, a description and some *thoughts on the value that these new features provide to it’s users and the web in general.

Profile Pages:

Profile pages allow you to review and share your collection of movies, books, and music. The pages highlight your activity across popular websites and show the books, movies, and music that you have visited, liked and commented on.

*There are other social networks that help define a person by seeing who their friends with, who they follow, and their thoughts (Twitter), but Glue for the first time allows the content to define the person, maybe the most accurate measure yet.

Object Pages:

Every object now has its own page. Whether it’s a book, movie, restaurant, or person (see above), everything is represented.

Each object page shows Glue-rs who have visited that object around the web. It front-loads the information to show your friends first. You can also access the best links for that object and discover similar items.

*The reason I think that this is so powerful is that it creates a very visible community around anything. Sites like Yelp, CitySearch (for restaurants), or even RottenTomatoes (for movies) will soon realize the value of pulling in the information Glue holds to make their sites more user oriented and dynamic.

What I’m most pumped about here is that this is just one step that the Glue team is making towards improving the usability and experience of their product. As they do a better and better job of displaying the mass amounts of data that they are collecting with their technology, the value of it will become more and more obvious and usable.

One of the most fun things for me is to figure out new opportunities and applications for the technologies that are being released. If you’d like to help out the Glue team with your feedback get in touch with @fraser on Twitter or send me your thoughts and I’ll pass them along.

Check out my profile and access yours by going to www.getglue.com/yourGlueUsername

via world economic forum

Why THE DREAM IN ACTION Has A Forum

I’ve decided to add a forum to THE DREAM IN ACTION because I want the site to be more than one to many communication. Simply put, I think putting your dreams into action on a daily basis is as much a group thing as an individual thing. I truly believe that the inspiration you can get from other peoples change is powerful and can serve as a catalyst for change and action in your life.

Also, I think that the readers of this blog are powerfully intelligent and it would be foolish of me to not provide an outlet for other readers to benefit from that collective insight. With a forum anyone can ask a question and anyone can provide an answer.

Why Forums Are Beneficial

Forums are very beneficial for collecting and filtering he wisdom of crowds. Blogs like Zenhabits and 4-Hour Work Week that center around ideas that can change your life are perfect examples of how a solid forum can provide great benefit to readers looking for a little more than on author/blogger can provide. Here are a few more reasons why Forums work.

• Forums encourage a wide variety of contributors. Many popular forums with large audiences have members who are experienced and enjoy helping other people solve problems or get inspired.
• Forums drive discussion. Blog comments are great but it’s still difficult for one commenter to speak directly to another. Disqus commenting system helps but I still see value for group discussion in a forum environment. Discussions get people thinking and challenged, and more discussion is never a bad thing.
• Forums allow YOU to participate. The forum will be moderately moderated. Most discussion will be open and free within reason so the least experienced entrepreneur can dialog with VC’s or corporate CEO’s, anyone can join, no go out and recruit!
• Forums allow branding/promotion. Our forum will allow you have a signature — which is like a form of advertisement. Intelligent comments will drive traffic to your blog or website, this is a reward for valuable participation.

10 Steps To Dominating Your Forum

Now that the forums are setup, how are you supposed to use theme. This 10 Step Guide To Forums will help you use the forum effectively and participate in a more direct conversation with other readers.

1. Use The Forum With Purpose - While forums are an excellent resource for deeper discussions, they can also be a huge time-consuming activity if you aren’t careful. Be intentional with why you are joining the forum at any specific time. Are you getting a question answered? Or, are you helping out other readers? Either is a legitimate use but make sure your careful because time flies when you’re having fun.

2. Be A Resource. This is the best way to get your questions answered quickly and thoroughly, you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours. Make sure to ask your own questions from time to time though (be human), by focusing on helping out other readers you will quickly increase your value to them and drive traffic to your site.

3. Use An Avatar. On this blog we have Gravatar enable so you’ll be able to post  message and have your personal avatar show who you are. If you don’t have this setup through Gravatar it’s very simple, go hear to sign-up.

4. Use A Signature. You will have a signature on each post and we encourage you to include a link to your blog! Write a short blurb that will tell the forum participants of who you are, be honest to gain credibility.

5. Focus On The People Not The Traffic. In order to be effective using the forum, focus on building relationship with other bloggers. Build your network before you need it! Although you can drive traffic to your site if you become valuable to the forum it is a much more effective tool for meeting people. Forums may not be a huge source of traffic but relationships with blogger can prove to be extremely valuable when trying to get the word out. This is when forums really become valuable and what you should focus your efforts.

These 2 tips below are from Tim Ferriss, author of The 4 Hour Work Week on how he reached out to bloggers to promote his NY Times #1 Best Selling book. Both of these strategies are perfect for implementing when you start using the forums.

Start Before You Need Something

“I reached out to certain bloggers as far as a year in advance of the book being published,” Tim told me. By building his connections ahead of time, he never had to start a relationship with a blogger by asking for a favor.

Don’t Be A Promoter

Nobody wants to get to know a guy who does nothing but promote himself. “Your job is to convince them of the messenger, not the message,” he told me. “Don’t try to push your message until you establish yourself as someone they’re willing to listen to.”

6. Take Your Contacts Outta Here. Follow up with people via email or Twitter when you chat with them in the forum. Although it’s a great method of communication we don’t ant it to be your only method. The name of the game, relationship building.

7. Be Respectful. This one is obvious, but sometimes you still have to say it. We will not ban but we don’t encourage anonymity. Be real, authentic, and nice and you’re good to go. If you goal is to help or be helped then be cool, otherwise peace.

8. Ask For Feedback. Our forum has a category ‘misc’- for general Q’s & A’s . Feel free to ask for feedback on your blog or startup by providing a link. Be careful to solicit this feedback with the right attitude and in a respectful manor. Also, although we are accepting some forums are not friendly towards this type of communication.

9. Focus On Your Core Competencies. This forum will cover a wide variety of topics. If you are looking to network by helping folks out, you’ll be most effective by focusing on what you know. The forum ranges from Marketing to Economics to Entrepreneurship to Travel, you may be an expert at all of them (in which case I look forward to chatting, but if you’re not, help where you can and learn where you can.

10. Find Win-Win Opportunities. One of the keys to effective networking is finding win-win situations. If you meet other bloggers that write on the same topics as you, try to find areas where you can help each other. Maybe you can write a guest post for another blogger and a particular topic that you know well. This would be good exposure for you and it would provide valuable content for the other blogger. Link exchanges are also common.

Send Off

I’m really looking forward to seeing what comes of this community. I hope that the 4-5 thousand readers a month of this blog take the time to sign up for the forum and give it a whirl. But, in the end I’d much rather have a passionate community of 30 or 40 than a passive community of 400. If you find value from this community or even see potential value I would ask and encourage you to share it and promote it with me! See you there.

image via aknacer

“We will be looking for someone with public company experience who can help take (Facebook) to the next stage in our growth.” – Mark Zuckerberg, an internal FB email

I just finished reading Kara Swishers post on AllThingsD (from 2 weeks ago) about Zuckerbergs announcement that Gideon Yu’s departure, their now ex-CFO. I don’t think it takes any stroke of genius to realize that FB is planning to go public. I’m not sure of the terms or the relationship between Yu and Zu(ckerberg) but as FB continues to turn down HUGE acquisition offers it’s obvious that Yu’s departure had to do with his experience, and going public is in FB’s near future.

Investors and some employees have dumped roughly $455 million in to the company, according to VCExperts.com Inc., not to mention Microsofts contribution to the party at a valuation of $15 billion. Eventually investors will force this exit event to occur. As the IPO markets starts to turn upwards from the bottom, as Fred Wilson claims, and as FB’s 1Q financials surprised them positively I’d argue that as soon as they find a new Chief of Finance the clock to an IPO starts clicking. I think this stop watch is set at about 2-3 months.

I also have a hunch (not based on to many facts) that if they really made $300 million last year and expect to reach near half a billion this year, that the public perception of FB is more valuable than a individual entities perception of their value. Basically, I think that they would have a higher value to the “market” than they would to a larger entity looking to acquire, ie. General Atlantic or Google.  I should disclaim that I am not at all an expert in corporate valuations and would love to hear why my thoughts/logic is off base.

So, Facebook IPO in 2009?

Today Ross Kimbarovsky, co-founder of crowdSPRING posted a very good post titled ‘Talk with people, Not to them’ on the startup’s blog. He used Chris Brogan and Tim O’Reilly, two highly respected individuals in the technology space, as great examples for how they Twitter and converse with people on the web. His point was that so many people are focused on increasing their follower number that they lose focus on what the hell they are actually saying. (I have fallen victim to this school of thought, but I’m getting over it)

I met Ross for dinner last night after originally connecting on Twitter. We had a conversation about this topic. I wanted to piggy back off his thoughts and our conversation last night and use our dinner as a perfect example of social networking vs. noise-making.

It comes down to this, what are you actually doing with Twitter, Facebook, or your blog? Are you social networking or social noise making? I’ve focused a great deal of effort recently to turn noise-making into actually networking that is valuable. How have I done that? By actually meeting the people I’m talking to. No, I don’t have any grandiose plans to meet everyone, ala Gary Vaynerchuk (he probably will btw, stud), but I just want to make the relationships that I’m investing in real and valuable. I understand you can’t meet everyone in person, especially when you’re in a place like Milwaukee! But a phone/skype conversation is sure a hell of a lot better than 140 characters.

Over the past few months there are many individuals that I’ve met via Twitter and now have real relationships with them. (List below) Twitter, more than any other social web tool has been phenomenal in how accessible it makes individuals who would otherwise be very inaccessible. I’ve  been able to contact CEO’s of companies, founders of huge organizations, and individuals like me who are on their way. I’m met people who are experiencing the same entrepreneurial anxiety that I am and desperately trying to find a way to cure it.

The relationships I’ve created by connecting on Twitter and meeting in person will last, they will be of value to me and the other person, and they are what make me continue to use Twitter. When my Tweets are answered by many people sure it makes me feel great. But, when I’m able to sit down to dinner with guys like Ross and have a meaningful conversation about life, career, startups, and other topics of substance it makes all my Twittering well worth it.