ENGAGE

While reading chapters 6-12 of Engage, something caught my eye on Chapter 9. Chapter 9 had a section titled "Geo location/mobile networking" and has been a topic that has always interested me.

In one of my previous posts, I have talked about the beauty of social media tools such as Gowalla, FourSquare, and Whrrl and of how much social media can really benefit a person. (Of course, by benefit, I mean save me some money!)

The section started out with how Twitter came to be a dominant social media tool. Being a college student in Austin, I was interested to find out that Twitter debuted in March 2006 and got a kick start with Austin's famous South by Southwest (SXSW), which is a huge Austin event combining music, film, and interactive all in one!

When SXSW 2007 finally rolled around, Twitter became a primary tool SXSW attendees used to keep up with one another. Of course, I cannot also forget to mention that Twitter wasn't the first social media network that connected people with geo location...apparently a social media tool by the name of Dodgeball was a competitor.

Now, why haven't we heard of Dodgeball before? Twitter just outpaced Dodgeball and Google (of course Google) stepped in and shut the service down. From there, tools like Gowalla and FourSquare started to appear and attempt to show people how they could benefit from geo locating. All these would perform as apps on people's phones, allowing users to easily update their location, and of course get them awesome deals on some places there were in.


In order to not repeat myself from a pervious post, I recommend checking out my post from February 27 to get more information as well as more of my take on tools I've talked about above.