About two weeks ago, Google launched the MyTracks application, which purpose is to track your whereabouts through your smartphone, and share this itinerary through a Google Maps or a KML file.

In a more recent discussion, Corvida from Shegeeks writes about the importance of location-awareness services. She states:

“With money becoming tight around households it’s no surprise that people may be spending less time traveling from city to city and more time exploring the options available in their own city thanks to the “recession”. [...] With people venturing out more in their own city, they’re more likely to use location-awareness services to find new events and venues to explore.”

In other words, when short on cash, we tend to look for the closest and most affordable solutions for our daily consuming needs. A geolocation search is the appropriate tool for this type of demand, and today’s well-geolocated businesses are grabbing an increasing number of market shares. If you are a professional and seek to grow your geolocated presence, consider these powerful tools to successfully reach your objective. They will help you build a strong presence on Google Maps.

Another one of Corvida’s bullet point about the importance of location-aware services is the resulting social networking potential. I am not entirely convinced by the ‘meet-new-people-in-your-area’ potential of location-awareness services, unless it is in a given context like a conference or a concert. However, I believe that mapping your whereabouts - with MyTracks for example - is a way to bring people closer in a more meaningful way.

Here is an example: My wife lives on the other side of the globe, and we also have an 18-month-young son. For practical reasons, my son is now staying with me in San Francisco where he was born. There is no need to say how tormenting it is for the mom to have her little boy live 5576.4 miles away from her. Thanks to new Web technologies, it is becoming easier to be constantly connected to one another, share our daily activities, and therefore feel closer to one another.

The location-awareness tool MyTracks dramatically helps us enhance this long-distance connection. Tonight, I took my boy on a walk around my neighborhood. I turned on the MyTracks app on my phone, and slowly headed to the Safeway to purchase diapers. When I got home, I stopped MyTracks and sent the itinerary to my wife by email, with a little message attached saying: ‘hey Mommy, I went for a walk with Daddy, here are all the places I saw today!’ With the Streetview feature, my wife can literally replicate our walk around the neighborhood. Now isn’t that the most value you can get out of location-awareness services?

Here is the itinerary:

View Larger Map

2008 is closing down on us. Unlike what the eighties movies predicted for the future, we are still running cars on gas (even though Prius sales boomed this year), world poverty keeps being the hidden guilt of the rich minority, and we haven’t found an instant cure for a simple cold.

A lot happened on the Web though. The mobile Web is becoming mainstream at a faster pace than we can imagine, thanks in part to the iPhone 3G. The interesting aspect of the iPhone (and other smartphones like the g1) is its geolocation feature. The phone can detect your location and guide you around.

GPS is not a 2008 technology, but associated services related to this feature are opening up new opportunities. Loopt was the most advertised iPhone app heading towards this direction this year. I was personally more impressed by the g1’s zombie run game, even though the features are still pretty basic so far.

Of course, here at Click2map, we are interested to see how Google Maps evolves in this space:

(in 2008) Google Maps continued to increase the coverage for Street View, which is now available in the US, France, Italy, Spain, Australia, New Zealand and Japan. You can now get walking directions, car directions enhanced by StreetView, traffic estimations and explore places by looking at geo-tagged photos and videos.(via)

A few days ago, Google Maps launched a translation feature for all Google Maps reviews. The launch of the Google Map Maker also opened the option for anyone to contribute to the effort by bringing their own pieces to the puzzle.

There is a lot going on around geodata. By locating entities, and criss-crossing different positions, the web is making it possible to better connect individuals with other individuals, and with businesses. The question remains: Even though the technology is being developed, are people adopting it? Do people use maps more often? What is the trend for 2009?

Here are a few insights from the Google Search Insights site:

Of course, here at Click2map, we believe that those numbers are not innocuous. For example, we have seen the high demand for driving directions and have responded to it. Those curves are also showing how the pioneer Mapquest has lost its leadership to Google Maps. Finally, it shows how the technical term geoweb is gaining awareness and is pushing curious minds to search for it.

In 2008, we have seen a lot of geolocation features spreading onto widely-used Web applications such as social networks. In 2009, based on this article from the Boston Globe, I think we should expect to have more info delivered to us based on our location.

For a great review of mapping in 2008, read this article: Loci 2008: Matt Cutt’s Important Local Articles of 2008.

Happy New Year!

Are SMBs confused about new online marketing strategies? A recent article on the Sf Chronicle sparked up quite a few reactions on the blogosphere. At the center of the debate is Yelp, a San Francisco-based platform for user-generated reviews of small businesses:

Last week, Yelp purged an undisclosed number of accounts after finding that the business owners had swapped positive reviews with other business owners. Yelp also regularly deletes reviews it believes are phony. The move sparked an outcry among local businesses, and has even led some entrepreneurs to band together with thoughts of a class-action lawsuit. Their reasoning is, if they legitimately spend their money and patronize a service, why can’t they review it?

Will Scott from Website Promotion is not Voodoo thinks this situation reflects the overall confusion that most SMBs are facing with social promotion tools. For Will, times were simpler for SMBs when the major online promotion tool was YellowPages: Buy ads, get more exposure, sell more.

Today, with the new online social trends, SMBs have to push people to talk about them, and this kind of public relations is hard to handle when you are not a killer online PR pro. How do you tell your customers to spend half an hour on a website to create a profile and rate the transaction they just made at your store (something customers automatically do if the transaction went bad btw)? When it comes to reviewing a business, the incentive is small for customers, but extremely high for merchants wishing to increase their exposure. Therefore, it becomes much easier to create strategic partnerships with other merchants who profoundly understand the benefits of writing positive reviews about each other.

Greg Sterling calls this a gray area:

The reviews may be entirely legitimate in many cases. But, as the (SF Chronicle) article points out, it underscores the influence and impact of Yelp. It’s very much like Google and people trying to game or improve their ranking on Google because of how that maps directly to the bottom line.

If this is a gray area (and I agree it is), then the whole Web 2.0 is a gray area: The line between power users and system gamers is too thin. The PageRank fiasco that hit Google a few month back reflects the same problematic. Is Robert Scoble gaming the system by being omnipresent on Friendfeed? Is Friendfeed gaming the system by sucking up all of Twitter’s juice? Let’s not get too excited here…

Back to SMBs: if small merchants’ strategic alliances are not permitted, then how do you boost your online presence? What do you do if your customers are not user-generated review enthusiasts? Here at Click2Map, we are very SMBs oriented. We do not provide a solution for businesses to improve their ranking on user-generated review sites, but we surely help them build their presence on Google. How? When people search for a specific location on Google, a Google Map is the first organic result that pops up on search result pages. Here at Click2Map, we make Google Maps creation a breeze: It’s easy to upload spreadsheets of geographic data, to manage a wide number of map markers, and to publish it on the Google Maps platform. This is a valuable tool to help you optimize your natural presence on an increasingly popular medium (Google Maps). Check out Click2Map’s free version to see how easy it is to be mapped in.

Xavier Vespa
http://twitter.com/xavierv