They are centered on the power of the web, the Internet, to create bonds of unity that surpass echelons of establishment. For those attending the Web 2.0 Expo (#w2e), there’s nothing extraordinary about anything that’s going on around us. Over the last decade, we’ve been drivers of dialogue focused on the increasing “power” of the individual, of the disintermediation of traditional approaches and avenues to accomplishing things in less time and with thinking and resources that move faster.

In my presentation, “From Intent to Expression”, I spoke about how the payments landscape in the Web 2.0 world is changing, rapidly. What started more than a decade ago with e-commerce and then with the advent of solutions such as PayPal is now a systemic advance disabling traditional purveyors of payments and commerce. The web has, to a large extent, democratized the human voice across the political and the economic condition.

Today’s headlines are complete with rising discussions of indifference toward the norm. This comes at a time when the convergence of human commercial and media consumption has been fueled by digital enablement, giving further rise to innovations that strip away the skins of convention. Convergence is being met equally by disruption never experienced before in commercial enterprise. The time, and importance of, knowing one’s consumer has never been so great. And, at a time when dissatisfaction with the traditional firmaments of finance is overwhelmingly profound, the spoils stand to go with those bridge builders who have both the empathy and the energy to create consumer solutions that match, even exceed, the needs of their lives—emotionally, socially, commercially and financially.

The crux of my discussion is this: those spoils will go most to those who know their digital consumers best (despite having never seen their face, except by way of avatar). To those who know their consumers’ preferences and payments the best. To those, ultimately, who leverage the richness of the digital age to surround their customers through payments—the actual expressions of consumption, need and want. All of this is rooted in data. Data that I and my colleagues believe is the root of a new era we are calling payments intelligence. The cause and meaning of payments intelligence will become increasingly pronounced in the months and the years to come.

Here is a link to my presentation. I invite anyone to share feedback and observations.

So here’s my Sixth Photo Meme! This is a picture of the best game of baseball I’ve ever had the pleasure to attend – October 17, 2004. It was the 2004 American League Championship Series, game 4 at Fenway Park – Boston vs New York. This was the game 4. The one that resulted in the best comeback in sports history, the comeback that ended the Red Sox’s 86 year championship drought. I had the great fortune of attending this pivotal game, this pivotal moment in baseball history. I watched Dave Roberts steal second base – the single moment, the single play that changed it all. This is a picture of Mariano Rivera, perhaps the best closer in baseball history, on the mound in the midst of this game as it unravelled for the Bombers. Anyway, here’s my 6th photo from page 6:

So it’s my turn to pick 6 people to play this game. Here we go:

Ryan Sarver, Sean Coon, Nate Aune, Tara Hunt, Dana Zemack, CitySquares

I believe that this local search thing is quite early, and to keep up with the Jones’ I’ve started to refer to it as Local 1.0. Hear me out here, because I’m diving deep.

Web 1.0 was a passive web, about adoption and about moving to an interconnected digital medium, and Web 2.0 is very much about participation, creation, and transforming that interconnected digital medium into a platform. Just as Web 1.0 was static, passive, and largely about adoption, so is local, today, and as we’ve come to know it.

Resourceful Idiot does a pretty decent job of explaining the iterations of the Internet. He starts by saying:

“You can group each of the ‘Web x.x’ as a different movement when it comes to internet usage. Web 1.0 is the movement that took place during the beginning of the internet.”

Web 1.0 was about adoption, and about the movement of media, business, and commerce, to the digital medium that is the World Wide Web. Everyone was moving online to reach a larger audience and achieve better efficiencies. The first to move was big media like newspapers, news stations, music, magazines, etc. Everyday services and resources went online, like the post office, libraries, phone books, the dictionary, the encyclopedia, public transportation services, travel agencies, shipping services, mortgage companies, banks, day trading. Consumer services, business services, B2C, B2B, all of them were moving their data and content to the web. All of this content was mostly static, and that was fine.

Lots of everyday people got online, mostly through dial-up. They got online with their brand spanking new Macs and PCs, they tied up their home phone lines, they even planned their evenings around it. Most people, in mainstream America that is, went to chat rooms, which was about the coolest thing going at the time, before anyone ever heard of “social networking” or “social media.” The web was new and there was so much to be discovered and explored. People struggled with actually getting value though, in their daily lives. What was there to do on the web but conduct research and join chat rooms and maybe pirate some music? I’m oversimplifying it a bit, but to mainstream America, this was the reality.

If you were entrepreneurial and had an idea for a business, like lots of the companies I helped out in the mid-late 90s, meant that you also had to host your own website. To do that meant you had to have a domain name, you had to host the site, hire an HTML programmer, maybe even an application developer to do ASP, a database administrator if you wanted to have dynamic content, hire a graphic designer, even an IT person to make sure you’re site was hosted properly. Want your own server? Pay up and collocate it somewhere. Next thing you know, you’re into this website thing for a budget busting amount, with more overhead than you know how to pay for, and human resources coming out of the woodwork. Moving your business to the Internet seemed like a mad dash to the finish line – either you get there now or you’ll be lost in someone else’s dust and live to regret it. if you didn’t get online, you were going to die. It was simple. Move or die.

So, over time, lots of industries did this. Big companies, small companies, new companies, old companies. But not all companies went the way of the web. Small businesses, mom-and-pops, brick-and-mortars, Main Street USA businesses – they didn’t. They didn’t care and mostly couldn’t afford it. To a lot of them it was a flash-in-the-pan, a fad that would pass like so many other things over the years and decades that supposedly challenged their businesses. Construction on the street is about as bad as it gets, same with recessions. This Internet thing was a joke. And the return on their investments were practically negative too. They’d spend money on these websites, and for what? Just to have a web page? So what.

In those days there was a lot of hype about e-commerce, which was probably the most exciting and radical thing facing consumers and retail cash registers, depending on how you looked at it. E-Commerce was going to destroy mom-and-pops! It was to be the apocalypse of brick-and-mortars, of retail, of traditional commerce, and we’d all be transformed because of it.

Then, along came a company called Sidewalk.com. Started in 1997, Sidewalk was a city guide – the first of its kind. There were a couple of other city guides, notably Digital Cities, owned by AOL, but Sidewalk was different. Microsoft owned Sidewalk and quickly turned into a top destination site. The popular website featured businesses, events, and activities for your city, and they even showed some of the content in a neighborhood context. You could find lots of local businesses on Sidewalk.com too. I remember using Sidewalk regularly in the late 90s, looking for things to do in Boston, shows to catch, clubs to check out, and places to go on a date.

Some argued that Sidewalk was arrogant and attempting to put city weeklies out of business. Some thought that Sidewalk was a glorified database of listings. In 1999 Microsoft sold Sidewalk to Citysearch. In my opinion, this was a mistake. Apparently Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer agrees, as he recently stated,

“Sidewalk was really aimed at what we now call local search” and “Sidewalk is one we should not have gotten out of.”

In my opinion, this was the opening salvo of the Local 1.0 era. Everything until that point was irrelevant. Sidewalk made the first real impact and most people who know the local space, know Sidewalk’s story.

The burst of the bubble was in March of 2000 and the American economy entered a recession shortly after. If small businesses ever bought into this whole Internet thing to begin with, they certainly weren’t going to make the plunge now. Too many fortunes had been lost as a result of the crash. Too much hype around e-commerce destroying traditional retail. Too much hype, too much nonsense, not enough value. Business went on as usual for these guys. “Just a fad,” they all told themselves, “just a flash in the pan.”

For the next couple of years no one challenged CitySearch in the city guide space. The phone companies weren’t making much progress either, but they had traffic and they had the brand recognition. Yellowpages.com, Superpages.com, Bigyellow.com, they all had a huge opportunity in front of them. So did the newspapers. They all had a massive opportunity right in front of them and based on branding and market share and clout alone, they should have been able to do make moves. But they didn’t. They all stayed still and thought that print was the medium to stick with. When they did make the right moves, and started selling online ads to small businesses, they mostly sold them as add-ons to their print advertising products, which was their primary revenue stream for previous several decades.

So here you are – Local 1.0 at full steam now. The IYPs had a market to grab, the newspapers had a market to grab, and Citysearch had their piece. Right? No one could stop get in their way! Wrong! Out of left field, like a bat outta hell, came this new company called Google.

Google had been around for a couple of years already but it mostly appealed to techies who were plugged-in. The growth of Google usage was nearly entirely organic, through word-of-mouth. It was simply a better search engine, and soon, even soccer moms were using it.

By 2003, everyone was Googling. If you weren’t using Google, than you really weren’t using the Internet properly. Google simply provided a better experience when you wanted to find information on the Internet. The relevance of the search results was paralleled and the user experience was uncluttered. Suddenly, Google.com was the de facto search engine and if you were using something else you were just behind the curve.

Google then started monetizing by way of Adsense, and almost everyone jumped on board. Now, Google wasn’t the first to do this. Many folks used Overture long before Google was a household name, but through Google’s popularity, and through some differences in their approach, Google simply kicked ass. And ya know what else, they even started to penetrate the SMB advertising market. This meant the war was on!

Google also gave birth to entire industries, or, if those industries were already there, they were now exploding. Notable examples of this are Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing is another. SEO and SEM businesses are sprouting up all the time, mainly to help business get exposure on Google, lots of them are helping SMBs. Those very same businesses who didn’t want to get online.

Here we are now, in 2004, and we start hearing “Web 2.0″ being uttered from the lips of industry gurus, specifically Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle. Web 2.0 is still with us today, in late 2008, and it’s redefined our perceptions of what the Internet is, and shaped our ideas of what it could be. Web 2.0 has certain attributes that we could debate about, but mainly the core characteristics of Web 2.0 are participation, web based applications, community, lighter user interfaces, richer user experiences, openness in technology, and using the Internet as a platform, among other things. All of these things have lent themselves to new verticals on the Internet, like Social Networking (MySpace, Facebook), or the transition from static personal websites to blogs, or Software as a Service (SaaS, Salesforce.com), folksonomy oriented content and data sharing sites like Flickr and del.icio.us, and many more. But where are the small businesses? Everything in Web 1.0 and in Web 2.0 seemed to leave the small businesses behind. Why? Because they weren’t ready for an online identity, and they didn’t see a reason for it.

Like most people, you have some sort of online identity now. This is due mostly to broadband Internet access and affordable computers. The days of dial-up are behind us, and nearly everyone has a computer. To have a computer, to have broadband access, is to be a node on the Internet. Got an email? You’ve got an identity. Email is the linchpin of your online identity. Sign into any websites? You’re on the Internet. You’re only one small step away from joining a larger community, perhaps it’s MySpace, perhaps its Facebook, or Eons, or Jdate. You have an identity online, and more likely than not, you’re connecting with your friends there too, real world and virtual world friends.

All of this is appealing to some almost primal need that we all have as humans, and that’s a need to connect with each other in meaningful ways. It’s not enough for me to know that you exist, I want to know more about you, I want to learn about your attributes and characteristics that make you distinctly you. What makes Ben, Ben? Where are you? Where do you live? Where do you eat and hang out? All that is conducted locally. You life is conducted where you live, where you work, where you play. Your life is not conducted on the Internet. It’s conducted at home on the couch and at your kitchen table, but also at the subway station, at the local convenience store, at the library, at the farmers market, the bar, the ballpark, your cousin’s house. This is your life, your local life. Your local life is also, and greatly, where you spend your dollars, take your dry cleaning, find your plumber, and so much more.

So you have an online identity. Who’s left? Let’s see, users are online, and have been. Governments are online, newspapers, pornography – all online. More music is purchased online than any other method, thanks to iTunes. Even movies are online now, and if they’re not, you just add add a DVD to your Netflix queue. Enterprises, real estate companies, hospitals, libraries, everyone is online, well, that is, everyone except mom-and-pop.

What’s going on with mom-and-pop? The whole world is moving without them! Even the people who run these businesses, mom and pop, have online identities. You can find them on LinkedIn, on Facebook, but what about their businesses? What’s going on here?!

Here we are in late 2008, and Web 1.0 still feels like yesterday. Web 2.0 is moving fast, so fast that it’s simply leaving most people and most businesses in the dust. It’s hard to keep up with all this stuff unless your in the industry or just have a lot of spare time.

And SMBs are finally, finally starting to move online, but not on their own. They, like so many businesses in the 1990′s, need help, and they know that their customers use Google to find things. They, too, use Google to find things. They don’t have websites for their local businesses, yet 30% of all online searches (or ‘Googles’) are local searches – that is, consumers seeking local goods and services. I’ll say that again: 30% of all online searches are local searches!

This local search thing is very young. It’s still in its first iteration, not even close to a local 2.0. And just like with the early web companies, the early search engines, the early travel sites, there isn’t going to be just one winner. Citysearch has paved the way for folks like CitySquares. So have the traditional yellow pages, and the newspapers. This small business sector is always behind the curve, always behind the changes in the market. And for good reason.  But they’re moving now, they’re adopting the Internet because it makes sense for them now. Their customers are there, all of them. The extent of this today is limited to SEM (through various firms or direct with the search engines), their own website despite that only 55% of SMBs don’t have websites (and those that do are largely brochure sites, built long ago, and not SEO’d), and local search sites, city-guides, and directories.

Greg Sterling says it best,

“One of the most challenging aspects of local search is small business (SMB) advertiser acquisition. Everyone is aware, especially Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, that the US SMB market is where the advertiser volume is: almost 99% of US businesses qualify as small businesses (here defined as < 100 employees).

According to the US Small Business Administration (SBA), more than 20 million firms qualify under the definition above, with almost 19 million of those having no employees at all”

Greg even makes the argument that we’ll soon see the end of SMB websites. And I agree. As I’ve stated, these businesses can’t be bothered. The value does not match the expense. And ROI? Most SMBs don’t even know what that means.

Local search is so young, it’s Local 1.0. The shift to a Local 2.0 will only happen with the help, the encouragement, and the efforts of the IYPs, the city-guides, and local search players. No question the SMBs get it, no doubt about it, they’re just afraid. They understand the value of the Internet, and research is showing a dramatic shift in where they put their ad dollars. And it seems to be happening faster and faster, it’s really picking up  momentum. It only takes a few drips to start melting a glacier, and we’re seeing that drip become a steady stream now.

Circling back to my lengthy take on Web 1.0 and Web 2.0, what we saw then was adoption. That’s all it was about, adoption, and going digital, surfing the Internet, exploring the web. Web 2.0 is about engaging, participating, collaborating, building, platforms. Local 1.0 is no different, it’s about adoption, going digital, getting online in an affordable way, and in a way that provides value. Local 2.0 will be about engaging and participating, and openness, and most importantly, mobile, the next and most inherently natural medium for local.

This is local 1.0. The tectonic plates are moving, and opportunities are opening up. The plates are moving faster now, and giant masses of land are revealing themselves above sea level. CitySquares is positioned to plant our flag. Move or die!

Five years from now I hope to look back on this blog and some of the various entries I’ve made on local search, some of the speculating I’ve done, and some of the research that I point to, and that I subscribe to in RSS daily, and remind myself how wild local 1.0 was. How I was a part of it, how CitySquares was a part of it.

Local 1.0 is here and now.

Here was my list at that time in order of importance:

1. No enterprise email support. At CitySquares, we use a hosted MS Exchange service by a Canadian company called Sherweb (who’s fantastic by the way). If I can’t seamlessly sync my mobile device with my Exchange inbox, contacts, and calendar, than I’ve already lost total interest in the device.
2. Battery. Early reports of the iPhone, even before it was officially released, were that its battery-life stunk. At the time I could get about 2 full days out of my Pearl, which was pretty good for all the abuse it took. Also, the fact that the iPhone’s battery is fixed (i.e., cannot replace/swap it when necessary) was just a philosophical thing for me. That level of proprietary hardware really annoys me. Sony does the same kind of thing with their hardware and that’s kept me from buying Sony products for the past 15 years or so.
3. Keyboard: When I first saw the keyboard demo’d last year, I thought the iPhone would be a bust for sure. I just figured that no matter how intuitive the keyboard was people would still prefer buttons, something tactile. For example, when I’d drive around with my Pearl, I could actually type on it with one hand, using just my thumb, without looking at it, well, mostly (not recommended). But over time the critics were mostly silenced by the computer’s ability to interpret and correct your typing as well as the spacing of the virtual buttons.
4. AT&T: I just had a religious epiphony when I switched from Verizon Wireless to T-Mobile. Was I supposed to just jump ship again? Where are my loyalties? Also, AT&T long had a bad reputation. Cingular stunk in many ways, then AT&T bought them. To me that seemed like buying rotten meat, not young and healthy cattle. I just wasn’t willing to switch providers again, especially AT&T. Ew!
5. Bulk: The size of the Blackberry Pearl was just superior, and still is, naturally. It’s just tiny, but it packs quite a punch. The iPhone just seemed like a step backwards for me.
6. Wow factor: OK, the iPhone had a cool touch screen but aside from that it just didn’t excite me. I really enjoy playing stupid little games on my pearl, like Blackjack, poker, tetris. I also liked some of the apps I could run like the twitter app, the Facebook app. It didn’t seem that I could do those things with the iPhone, unless I unlocked it.

Well, here I am, well over a year later, with an iPhone 3G. What got me excited about this generation of the iPhone? All of this, in order of importance:

1. Enterprise email support: DONE! Totally solved in the new firmware. So whether you had the first gen iPhone or the new iPhone 3G, you could sync with your Exchange mailbox. It still needs a little work, like I can’t sync tasks, and I can’t contract folders when in my folder view, but those are very minor things. In fact, I get emails on my iPhone 3G quicker than I get them on my Microsoft Entourage email client. It works, and it syncs, wirelessly and seamlessly. Setting it up was no more than a couple minutes.
2. Browser: It’s just so sexy. When I first really used the browser, in conjunction with the keyboard, at Gaslight next door on a colleagues iPhone, I was hooked. It worked so intuitively and so intelligently.
3. 3G: What’s the use of a slick, sexy, and intuitive web browser if the network is slow? AT&T’s 3G network is fantastic. It’s actually 3.5G and it’s only going to get better and broader.
4. Location Based Services: With the baked-in hybrid LBS technologies, using GPS, WiFi, or cellular triangulation, the iPhone is really the first device to be able to provide truly mobile applications, like its built-in Google Maps app, or the various location-aware social networking apps, or the geotagging photo features, and even local search – CitySquares bread and butter.
5. App Store: This was really just the icing on the cake, especially once I saw the Monkey Ball demo on the WWDC 2008 broadcast. That was wild! So far I’ve downloaded (and removed) several apps. This was a pretty big reason for buying the iPhone 3G, availability of software to maximize my use and enjoyment.

On Saturday, July 12th, the day after the iPhone came out, Ali and I went to the Cambridgeside Galleria Apple store, stood in line and waited for about an hour. We walked out about an hour later with two 8GB iPhone 3Gs. I knew that if Ali wanted an iPhone something big, something revolutionary was taking place. I mean that too. Ali doesn’t like complication in her technology. She’s the typical user – neither a neophyte nor a geek. Just uses technology as it’s mean to be used – as tools to getting things done better and more efficiently. If her previous cell phone could place and receive phone calls from just about anywhere, than that’s just good enough. Ironically, though, what really got her excited about the iPhone was Monkey Ball. It was a silly game. That opened her mind up to consider it. Then once she realized she could use her gmail account on it, work email, browse the web, feed her zombie on Facebook, she suddenly leapfrogged the smartphone learning curve that I had to go through and just became an iPhone fanatic and expert!

When we brought the iPhone home, I was excited but hesitant. I was hesitant about the remaining concerns: battery, AT&T, and the keyboard. I actually kept my Blackberry Pearl activated for a few days before making the switch just to be on the safe side. My first couple of days with the device weren’t as amazing as I’d expected. It took me a little time to figure things out, customize things – I like customization. I want my own sounds, I want my own pictures, I want to fine-tune my devices. And after a few hours, I was doing just that.

30 days later…

Keyboard – Grade: A.: In those first few days I was careful not to become so enchanted with some of the iPhone’s bells and whistles that with the keyboard I just settled for less. It definitely took me a couple days to get used to it. I don’t want to be a one-finger smartphone typist – I want to type with my thumbs, and fast. Now, one month later, I’m nearly as fast with the iPhone keyboard as I ever was with the Pearl. Furthermore, the intelligence of the iPhone computer, and its ability to guess what I’m spelling and correct frequent typos is unparalleled in any device I’ve ever used. It’s far superior to the RIM’s proprietary SureType (which I grew more annoyed with over time). In some ways the keyboard is actually better than other kinds, just because its a software keyboard and the available keys are much more easily accessible and there are more of them.

Battery – Grade: B.: The battery isn’t great. And in those first few days I was actually really pissed off with the poor battery performance. One day I left the office at about 2pm for a string of meetings and networking events. When I left the office my battery was about 80%. When I got home that evening around 9:30 it was completely dead. I was really frustrated. How was I supposed to be truly mobile if I had to babysit this thing? Then I started researching how to optimize it. I figured out the following:

1. Turn off WiFi scanning. I only use the iPhone’s WiFi at work and at home so why have it scan everywhere I am? Sometimes I’d be driving down the street and I’d look at my iPhone screen and it’d ask me if I want to connect to a network, and it’d list out a bunch of WiFi networks within range. What an annoyance but more importantly, what a drain on the battery! Turning that off boosted performance quite a bit.
2. Lower the screen’s brightness. Out of the box the screen is quite bright, too bright IMHO, especially at night. So I took the brightness down quite a bit. Most devices like mobile phones and laptops can get a lot more juice from the battery if you just lower the brightness. It saves quite a bit of power. I believe the screen is the most battery intensive part of a device actually, but I could be wrong.
3. Limit Email Pull/Push: I don’t need my gmail account checked every 15 minutes. In fact, I don’t need it checked unless I tell it to check. So turning that off helps too. Same with my MobileMe email, which I just don’t use.
4. Turn off Location Services: You can turn it on from within an app, like Google Maps. Then turn it off later. If you don’t need it, turn it off. I don’t need it constantly, not at all, only on-demand.
   
5. Turn off Bluetooth: If you don’t need it, turn it off. I use it in my car, but if I know I’m not going to be in my car for a couple days, then I just turn it off.

There are other things you can do to optimize the battery too, like turning off 3G if you don’t need it, among other things. But the above steps are the ones I took, and now I can get more than a full day out of the battery, which is all I need anyway. I just charge it overnight, like I did any phone prior to having the iPhone. I also have a car charger too, which helps when on the road for a while.

AT&T – Grade: C. Verizon and T-Mobile are much better, no question about it, at least here in the northeast. At my house in Somerville where I’d typically have 4-5 bars on either of those providers, I only get 2-3 bars. If the weather is bad, like it was this weekend, I find myself with one bar, at times no bars, even on my porch. Then I experience dropped calls. Dropped calls has definitely been a theme with my new iPhone in the past month. In fact, one of my colleagues decided to opt out of her iPhone 3G and go back to her first gen iPhone because when she went home to the north shore she had no service at all! So I’m definitely disappointed. It’s not like that everywhere. I’ve driven quite a bit around New England in the past month and have largely been fine with the cellular service and mostly happy with the 3G service. When I’m not in 3G coverage, not terribly often, I’m on EDGE which is just fine for email and light browsing. So as it pertains AT&T’s cell network, I’m disappointed but I’m trying to be optimistic and I’m hopeful that it improves.

Bulk – Grade: B. I’m happy with the size of the iPhone 3G. I think the new curved backside helps too, as opposed to the more flat back in the first gen. I don’t find it a nuisance at all, like I did with all my prior smartphones, with the exception of the Pearl. I used to put my Pearl in the ashtray in my car when driving. It fit nicely in there and was easily accessible. My iPhone, however, does not. So I end up putting it in my cup holder, so it rattles around a bit more. Or I put it in a slot in the door handle, which I don’t like doing. I got myself a cigarette holder cradle for the iPhone but it’s far too tight and I can barely get it in/out of the cradle. Aside from those complaints, the size is not really an issue, especially because this device just packs such a punch. If it was just a regular, middle of the road smartphone, that’d be a different story.

Wow Factor – Grade: A. It’s simple really – I love my iPhone! I’m totally blown away by the stuff you can do with it. This device is not a phone, it’s not a smartphone either, it’s a mobile computer. OK OK, I can’t create and save MS Word or Excel documents, but I wouldn’t do that on a device like this anyway. In fact I don’t know anyone that edits or creates documents on their smartphone. For those that do, well, my hat’s off to you. I can still review a document on the iPhone, no problem. I can even make changes to it and send it back, I just can’t save it to a local file system.

Aside from that, I’ve fallen in love with the iPod and the storage capacity that I still haven’t used up with all my media. I’ve got about 4 GB of tunes, a handful of CitySquares and family movies, and a good portion of my Aperture photo library on this baby! That’s a lot of media and I’m still not using 8 GB. In fact, I don’t think I’m using half of it.

The user interface is stupid. No really, it’s stupid. It’s elementary. It’s so intuitive that if you can’t figure it out, than something is wrong with you. It’s that easy. It just makes sense. Flicking your finger across an app scrolls it left, right, up, down. Double tapping fits something to your screen, in most apps. Pinching your fingers together zooms in, and the opposite zooms out.

Customizing the iPhone 3G leaves little to be desired, although I still wish I could change some of the native sounds, like for new emails. I found a cool piece of software that allows me to create my own ringtones outside of iTunes, which is great. It’s called iToner (Mac only). I mean, screw you Apple if you think I’m going to pay a buck everytime I want to make a ringtone out of a song I purchased! Just, screw you!

Appstore – Grade A+. The Appstore is just terrific, especially if you’re not a dickhead who spends $1000 on an app that does nothing. I’ve spent less than $40 on apps and that alone is a good thing. I remember with my Handspring device, or any of the smartphones I’ve had in the past, I could easily spend $40 on a piece of software that helped me track my travel expenses. The Appstore has seemingly commoditized mobile software. Most apps are free, some you pay for. Here are the apps I’ve installed and my rating and review of them:

• NetNewsWire – Free RSS reader that syncs with your subscription. What that means is this: I have the desktop version of NetNewsWire that syncs with my NNW account and hence my iPhone app. This way the two are always in sync, which is very nice. The UI is OK, could use some work, but it’s an iPhone app and I’m really not complaining – it’s better than any other mobile RSS reader I’ve seen on any other device, by a mile. Grade: A
• NYTimes – Call me old fashioned but I still read the paper, specifically on Sunday mornings, the New York Times. I love it. I also love the NYT website. It’s my homepage. The app is OK, the UI could definitely use some work, and it doesn’t seem too stable. It crashes sometimes when I’m just scrolling through an article – the most basic function of the app. That’s really annoying. Also, I don’t understand why I don’t have an “Email this article” button or anything similar. There’s nothing – no calls to action. I hope this improves. Grade: D
• Bloomberg – It does what it’s supposed to – shows me domestic and international stock exchange updates, and shows me my own portfolio updates, as well as finance news. It crashes once in a while, but it’s slick and I use it often. Grade: B
• Twinkle – I just started using Twinkle after my friend Ryan Sarver at Skyhook Wireless showed it to me. I quickly moved from Twitterific, which I liked, to Twinkle. It’s just got a better UI and the location stuff might come in handy. Grade: A
• WordPress – Pretty lame. I’m able to review posts on this blog as well as the CitySquares blog (both use WordPress.com), but it shows my content in HTML, which stinks. I can’t review drafts that are on the server either, so that also stinks. But I can create local drafts and publish them. It needs a lot of work and I’m optimistic cuz WordPress rocks. Grade: C
• Mobile Fotos (previously Mobile Flickr) – It’s a good solid app that runs well. Yet to crash on me. I can upload/download to/from my Flickr account. It’s got some nice little bells and whistles and it keeps improving. I dig it but I’m hearing good buzz about Exposure and I may give that a try. Grade: A
• Facebook – Frankly it’s pretty lame. It’s exactly like the Blackberry version – just allows me to see status updates, view messages, profiles, and that’s mostly it. I can’t see any of my Facebook apps or do much more than communicate with friends. I’m already growing tired of Facebook, and it’s becoming nothing more than a way for me to keep in touch with long distance friends. They need to release a better iPhone app soon, especially if they’re worth that $15 billion valuation. Grade: F
• Pandora – This rocks. My friend Randy Parker tuned me into Pandora and I’m hooked! Great app! Listen to Internet radio from where ever you are. Create your own stations based on your favorite music and just listen. I love plugging my iPhone into my car stereo and driving around town listening to Internet radio – very cool! It does drain that battery though, but that’s what the car charger is for. Grade: B
• Salesforce – I have a big problem with this app – I’m paying a monthly fee for this app and I can’t view the company dashboard! All I can see is my own account. I don’t have much of an active Salesforce account but I’m constantly checking in on the company dashboard. I should have access to that through the iPhone app. Grade: D
• Google – It’s installed but I’ve yet to use it. I suppose I should just remove it. I just end up going to Google.com directly in Safari. Grade: N/A
• BofA – Bank of America app. It’s OK. All it really lets me do is check balances, make transfers and find locations. Once you’re signed in to the BofA app all it really does is take you to its mobile banking website, which is pretty basic. I suppose that’s a very good thing though, for security, so I appreciate that. I will say that the ‘find locations’ came in really handy a couple weeks ago with a friend. He needed a BofA banking center and I was able to quickly find one with the BofA iPhone app and then map ourselves to it with the iPhone Google Maps app. That was a nice surprise! Just handy stuff that you don’t realize how useful it is until you actually need it and use it. Grade: A
• Monkey Ball – I’ve played it like twice. I suck. I thought I’d like it better but when you suck you suck! I like to show it to people who’ve never seen it though. Grade: A
• HoldEm – Just a great app if you like poker. I wish I could play other poker games, but HoldEm seems to be such a big deal this decade that ya can’t get around it. The graphics are absolutely stunning! If you like poker as much as me, you’ll love this iPhone app! Grade: A
• BrainChallenge – I think this is my favorite iPhone app. It’s a nice little program that’s packs quite a punch. It’s got all sorts of brain tests you can take the help you stay sharp. I don’t know if it’s doing that for me, but it’s fun to take the daily brain tests in the morning and see how I progress in certain areas. I’m not very strong in logic and math, but I’m very strong in memory, vision and focus. So I can train in my weaker areas and hone my others. It’s actually a very intelligent little app and I use it daily. Grade: A
• MLB At Bat – Handy, but not overly impressive. I can see realtime boxscores and so forth. It updates at any frequency I specify (1 minute) automatically. I can even see video replays. But that’s about it. I expected more for $10. Grade: C
• Units – Helps me convert liters to pints, or miles to kilometers, dollars to yen, etc. But I don’t do that often. I look forward to needing it, cuz it looks promising. Grade: N/A
• Morocco – I grew up playing this game in school and I loved it. I’m on the expert level and I’m close to beating the computer. It’s a fun game, great for killing time at a doctors office or just for relaxing. Grade: A
• FiatLux – Silly, just a blank white screen (or whatever color you choose) in the event you need a light. This actually came in really handy a couple weeks ago in the dark while trying to unlock a bike. Grade: A?
• PhoneSaber – Silly, fun, dorky, fun, nerdy, fun, dweeby, fun, pointless, fun. Grade: A
• eBay – I don’t use eBay often, but when I do I’m all-in. I’ve yet to use the app. Grade: N/A
• iBeer – Silly, fun, sad, fun, signs of a problem, fun, obnoxious, fun, pointless, fun. Grade: A
• Bubblewrap – a screen of bubblewrap, pop them. Stupid. Removed it.
• Loopt – I want to use it, I really do, but no one does and it’s buggy and cumbersome. Gave up, removed it.
• More Cowbell - A cowbell you tap on. If it wasn’t for the guys voice I’d still have it installed. If it was Will Ferrel especially. Removed.

Sure, I’ve had some issues with the iPhone too, but they’re small, nothing that’s ever caused me to curse loudly or feel my blood pressure rise. Mainly that includes the occasional app crash. I’ll be in Bloomberg looking at my stock prices, or in Facebook looking at status updates, or in MLB looking at scores, and bang – it just crashes. But starting up the app again and going through the same process doesn’t result in a crash, so it’s sporadic. I tolerate it because, well, it’s tolerable.

I’m impressed with the push services built into the iPhone too. I can see when I get Facebook messages even though I’m not in the App. I can get emails and SMS when I’m on the phone. But I can’t swap from one app to another without killing one to get there. That’s a little annoying, but it helps a lot with the performance of the device. On a typical Windows Mobile smartphone you could have 10 programs open, and when you do that the device just slows to a halt. The iPhone doesn’t allow you to get there. Still, though, I wish I had some flexibility with being able to run more than one app at the same time.

Well, this was a very long post but I needed to get all that up here! I feel much better now!

Do you know of any other iPhone apps I should look at? Am I missing anything?

Do you have an iPhone? What do you think?

What about AT&T?

A long while back I declared myself done with Myspace and for good reasons. I even went so far as to state that when I saw others hunched over their keyboards pecking away on Myspace, I found myself repulsed by them. I still feel that way about Myspace, and without quite as much disdain I’m starting to feel that way about Facebook and twitter. I’m quite active on both, however, which makes this a bit of a catch-22. Or rather, am I just the pot calling the kettle black? I don’t know, and I frankly I don’t care. I’m an opinionated SOB and that’s just that. (If you’re repulsed by me it might be for reasons that far exceed my participation in the social web.)

I do find some guilty pleasure in social media participation. It even has some SEO value. That can be detailed by my participation on YouTube where I’ll find videos that I enjoy for one reason or another and mark them as Favorites, or I might post a video, typically something that relates to CitySquares somehow. But you definitely won’t find me on YouTube uploading my friend skateboarding off of his 3rd floor balcony, or of my cat fighting his own shadow. Maybe that sort of thing isn’t my generation – the “me” generation seems to be doing much more of that stuff. I think it’s noise and a waste of time. I try to sift through it all quickly and with my eyes closed.

Facebook is another guilty pleasure. Interestingly enough, the three things I use the most in Facebook are 1) status updates, and I use the twitter app for that; 2) Zombie app/game and that’s mainly because my wife uses it and really has fun with it, so I play along and honestly I just want to be the baddest zombie there is and bite chumps (again, stupid guilty pleasure);  and 3) keeping in touch with some friends. Many of my friends don’t do email very well and some of them don’t do phone well either, but they do Facebook well, so I meet them there and we message each other. I actually find myself more in touch with some of my friends, especially long distance friends, through Facebook more than any other medium in a long time. It’s kind of like the new pen-pal? Oh, I also use Facebook for the CitySquares Page. We use it to upload pictures, events, videos, and other random updates and also our blog gets fed to the CitySquares Page. I like to see us rack up more fans of CitySquares, especially total strangers – that’s cool!

twitter is just a phenomenon isn’t it? Who can really articulate what the hell twitter is all about. OK OK yeah I get micro-blogging, and I get character-limited streams of consciousness from a community of like-minded people. Sure, fine. But I equate it to sitting in a room with a bunch of people I hardly know, with a few friends, who are all just blurting out whatever stupid thing comes across their mind. Hey, I’m no exception. Twitter is probably the loneliest social media there is. I’d be willing to bet that twitter users mostly tweet when a) they’re alone and wish someone was there with them to talk to (loneliness – a human thing) or b) when they’re bored and in bad company. And that’s twitter. Yet I use it. Cuz it’s so easy, so available. It’s on my iPhone and it’s on my Mac.

I love Flickr, on the other hand. Love flickr a lot, and I think it’s because unlike Facebook or twitter, it’s totally passive content. I use Flickr to share pictures with the world, or with just my friends, or just my family. I can put them up there and if/when they want to look, they can. I don’t care much more than that. I like the web 2.0 components there like tagging etc, and sure comments are nice. I also like how easy it is to use Flickr through the uploadr, and certainly the site is powerful and more intuitive the more you use it. YouTube is in a similar category.

There are a few others I use too, like ma.gnolia, or LinkedIn, or Last.fm (which I am still not quite sure of) but I think I’ve made my point. Actually, maybe not…

Here’s the thing: I found myself so distracted by this stuff in the recent weeks that I was becoming more and more afflicted with a self-induced Attention Deficit Disorder. And even though it wasn’t because of my own content publishing, it was simply because it was there and I just had to watch. Again, like a drunk at a bar fight, or like watching a car accident, or like a fly to a light, I was drowning in it. So I hinted at taking a sabbatical. Well, that was too extreme. I don’t need a methadone clinic, I just need to do less dope! Well that’s one way of looking at it right? So I took a break last week – a total break. I didn’t tweet, I didn’t login to Facebook, I didn’t do anything that related to social media. I even instant messages less. I used less email, more phone, and I didn’t even cheat once. I just stayed away from it. For the first day or two it was hard, and then was a piece of cake. I could totally do without it! And last week was just down-right productive! It was me doing what I do best – getting shit done, knockin’ em down.

The lesson here is that in a society where there’s already far too much noise, be it TV, be it advertising, the city, those flourescent lights above your desk, be it your family, be it your own neurosys, there’s just too much noise already. Social media is just one more awkward minor chord in the symphony of day-to-day life that I, for one, can do with less of.

So without further ado, here is the final product:

You can find the original Flash version of the movie here on CitySquares.com. We also threw it up on YouTube and the CitySquares Facebook page.

What do you think?

Lots of people have asked us (CitySquares) to build a mobile app. One of our board members asked Bob and I this last week actually, at the TieCon East conference, after a panel on mobile. He turned to us and said, “So, when is CitySquares going to build a mobile app?” Bob and I looked at each other, and almost in sync we answered, “when we can free up some resources and when the mobile interface problem is solved.” Here and now I find myself ready to find an iPhone app developer to build one for CitySquares.

It’s my opinion that what we’re finally seeing is a real convergence, for real now. I remember back in the 90′s the buzz and hype (and the underlying cause of the bubble) was the convergence and voice and data. Everyone and their grandmother seemed to be dropping cable in the Earth’s crust, or talking about running voice over the same line you run data over, like a T-1. Wow! Imagine that. Data and voice, on the same pipe? Do you remember that? People were talking about digital voice lines, VoIP, video over ISDN. The Internet, on every computer! Some places were doing it, and they were nuts for it too, cuz it cost so much money. I remember very well!. Anyway, we’d been talking about it for so long that it seemed over-hyped. Then, the bubble burst, the shakeout occurred, and here we are today with Comcast (or insert cable co) digital voice, bundled with HDTV services, bundled with DVRs. Analog? What’s that?! I digress, as usual.

We’re totally there again, here and now. OK, maybe not to that degree, but this is just as exciting to me! We find our ideas of media being challenged every day. Be it YouTube, Last.fm, or the iPhone, it’s converging man! Mobile has clearly already converged with data, that’s nothing new, but now that resulting product is converging with the Internet. This is nothing new to those who’ve thought about it, but if you haven’t – think about it. And I don’t mean that Treo running PalmOS, or Windows Mobile with some WAP browser. I mean, the iPhone + Internet + 3G + social media + local and the revolution that combination is about to ignite. iPhone 1.0 was cool, but it was barely the tip of iceberg. In fact, it was just a glimpse. With the iPhone SDK, the new firmware, the new hardware, 3G capability, that sweet interface, the Internet, plus social media, plus local, we are at the dawn of a new era.

Afterall, social is dynamic, it’s transient, not static. Local is relative and it’s medium is mobile (it’s just not there yet). These concepts are often discussed at the conferences I attend, but the 3G iPhone makes this reality. With the price drop, and with Apple introducing this into 70 countries, I don’t think it will be an explosion however, but a slow and steady trickle that carves a wide canyon. I know, I know, mobile in other parts of the world is way more advanced than it is here in the US, I get it, but I think the convergence that we’re about to see hasn’t even begun, the revolution is just beginning, and it will be global. That’s for another blog entry.

I will be getting a new iPhone on July 11th. I will be switching to AT&T. I will be browsing web pages on my mobile device like never before. I will be watching video on it, and interacting socially through apps I install, among other apps, and geotagging my location and sending geotagged pics to the web. My wife will be joining me too. She’s finally upgrading from her ancient LG VX8100. She’ll be playing MonkeyBall on it, and she’ll be using Facebook to chomp zombies and update her friends, and she’ll be taking pictures and emailing them to her family. Afterall, if my wife wants an iPhone, it’s gotta be cool.

Check out what Walt Mossberg says about the 3G iPhone, already.

Check out what Engadget has to say, they got their hands on it.

So, the launch has been moved back 1 week. We’re switching the flip (flipping the switch) on Sunday night, October 21.

Go ahead – take your best shot – we can take it!