My friend Scott Rafer and I had a conversation about geolocation and HTML5, and I decided to codify the points of merit below. I was also asked to give feedback on a recently launched local site, and that site needed to work in some lazy personalization, so that is covered below, as well.

Why would you use geolocation

• You, you make stuff, things on the internet.
• You can improve the presentation for a first-time user by providing a lens on to your site that takes into account that user’s location. If you have, say, a local restaurant guide, you would be much better served showing the restaurants in the local city, 9 out of 10 times, as opposed to showing a map of the United States with no content. Just make sure the user has a way to go to other cities.

Types of geolocation

There are four five types of web/mobile-based geo-location, in reverse order regarding accuracy.

1. Self-assigned. You force the user to click a map or choose from a drop-down, or, the horror, type in their location.

• Accuracy: highly variable, and usually city-specific.
• Really? There are several easier ways.

2. Reverse IP lookup. Use someone’s IP address to determine approximate location.

• Accuracy: slightly variable, and usually city-specific.
• When it fails, it fails horribly: any visitor using an iPad on AT&T’s 3G network will get placed in Kansas, the geographic center of the US, with this technique. Our offices are in Dumbo, Brooklyn, but reverse IP places us in Jamaica, Queens.
• The vendor of choice here is MaxMind, and you can do this with their free product.

3. Cookie-based. Used primarily by marketers/advertisers. You will have to buy this data or learn how to read others’ cookies (which you don’t want to do, to be clear.)

• Accuracy: variable, can be as specific as 9-digit postal code in the US.
• Not really an option for consumer-facing websites unless they want to be written up in the Wall Street Journal.

4. Browser-based. HTML5 can ask the user’s location, and then determines your location based on your proximity to known WiFi hotspots gleaned via Google Street View cars or Skyhook Wireless.

• Accuracy: excellent and usually building-specific.
• In urban areas, accurate to 20m.

5. Internal GPS. Uses a GPS device in the unit. Fantastic for mobile, non-starter for desktops.

• Accuracy: excellent and usually building-specific.
• Often gets confused by concrete.

Why HTML5 geolocation appears to be better than all of the others

Not only does it account for ALL of the devices that don’t have GPS devices, it is cheaper to develop against, and yields better results than reverse IP or Internal GPS. Let’s dumpster dive on those two thoughts for a moment.

Product Person 1: We should build an service that accounts for location.

#2: Yes, but we need to reach a big audience.

#1: Wired said that the web is dead and everyone is using apps

#2: While true, mobile is still is a smaller portion of all web surfing than, ah, oh, the regular web.

#1: So to reach the largest audience, with the lowest cost, right now, we should just use HTML5 geolocation

#2: There’s the rub. This may be true in two years, but right now, there are too many people not using HTML5-compliant browsers, so it isn’t the largest audience at the moment.

Which means that it is easier to develop web sites than mobile apps, but until you have most people using modern browsers, you will have to pursue a mix of HTML5 geolocation that degrades gracefully and uses reverse IP lookup as a backstop, and by all means, use the internal GPS device on smart phones that have them. The HTML5 geolocation accuracy is on PAR with GPS geolocation in urban areas, as these areas have a lot of WiFi hotspots.

How geolocation improves personalization for your website, service or application

When people come to your media or services based-site, having even the slightest bit of local content hits a pareto optimal for customer satisfaction/relevance that anyone building such sites and apps should exploit. Put another way, in a non-run-on sentence: geo-location helps you to personalize your service without requiring the user to do anything. I call this “lazy personalization” and it hits the sweet spot of convenience and relevance that all services need to be successful.

Example of HTML5 geolocation

Our HTML5 application: http://chrome.fanfeedr.com/

• Use an HTML5 web-kit based compliant browser: Google Chrome or Safari.
• Try this on Chrome. Make sure to ALLOW browser geolocation via the yellow pop-up that you will see.
• The change that you will see is that the teams in your FanFeed will be New York customized (or wherever you happen to be, because we realize that not everyone lives in NYC.)
• When we use JUST reverse IP geolocation in our Dumbo, NY location, we see team news from the NY Islanders included, because our IP is oddly based in Jamaica, Queens, and the Islanders are close to Jamaica.

Thanks, FanFeedr

Mobile goodness

All of our mobile apps are up-to-date and chock full of goodness.

Football/Soccer

We had a slate of improvements to our European football features, including adding players and rosters so that you can become a fan of your favorite players, like Leo Messi, Wayne Rooney, and Didier Drogba.

Thanks, FanFeedr

The numbers are pretty startling: our website visitors come for 1m 34s, and our iPad users come for just over 14m 20s each time they come to FanFeedr. I was recently asked why this was the case, and the usual answers came out:

1. We offer a personalized service, so viewing it on a personal device should increase the time spent per session
2. Using Facebook and Twitter, which we require for login, is easier on an iPad than on a work computer (our peak usage is around 3p ET (GMT -5).) Some workplaces restrict access to the social networks
3. The iPad application is an easier way to consume information than our web application

That explains part of the 10-fold increase in time per session, but it doesn’t seem like enough.

Perhaps it was timing?

1. We launched the FanFeedr iPad application on April 3rd, the day that the device launched.
2. We were a featured application for the first week in the iTunes app store
3. The 2010 World Cup began two months later, right after the 3G version of the device debuted in the United States.

That still doesn’t seem to full account for the difference.

The single answer that makes the most sense is that the iPad interface can’t multitask, and that single-threaded application behavior forces users to focus solely on our application.

Which sort of underscores that multitasking doesn’t make you smarter, and greatly impedes time spent on web sites, to boot.

Release 62 is all about giving you more control over what publishes to Facebook and Twitter from FanFeedr, and how frequently.

• With that in mind, we have a new pop-up panel that controls what gets pushed out to both sites. We also made it so that you can get notified whenever you have a new follower. We won’t ever send you mails without your ability to control them. The controls can be accessed via your profile page account settings, and it looks like this:

• Tweet limiting: on the homepage, you can hide tweets from your FanFeed (on the right of the column) if you don’t want to see them:
  
• We updated our press section with the latest articles about FanFeedr
• Our scoreboards now show the teams that you have picked:
  
• We fixed a bug for Safari users on our sports application for the Apple iPad that allowed for our share bar to float. You can now browse FanFeedr on your iPad without any display oddities.
• Additionally, if you are not logged into the site, you can see the FanFeedr Public Timeline without having to login.

As always, thanks for your support, and let us know if we missed anything right here.

Feedr of the Fans

Get v.1.3 here

The latest FanFeedr iPhone app is live on the iTunes App Store and available now as a free download.

What’s New

1. The app will remember the last page you were on and restore it after restart, including the last set of stories from your FanFeed. This gives you a second chance to read them before new content takes its place.
2. Added hot stories for MMA-Boxing, Golf and Tennis.
3. Hot stories are now limited to the hottest stories in the last hour.
4. Bug fixes.

Thank you for your interest in the FanFeedr iPhone and iPod Touch application.

Thanks, FanFeedr.

With Thanksgiving around the corner (at least here in the States) we kept our cooks in the kitchen over the weekend, combining R38 and R39 into a cornucopia. Here are some of the things we’ve prepared before the holiday:

• More relevant results for league content. With so many sources for league content, we decided to publish only the most noteworthy content items to make sure you can get the most important league news quickly.
• Standings for leagues, conferences and divisions. See where teams are in their conferences and divisions at a glance.
• Improved scores feed to the iPhone. We’ve added some special sauce to the way we publish scores to the iPhone push service, to make sure iPhone users get the latest updates without a fuss.
• And of course, ever more content sources.

Enjoy your Thanksgiving weekend, and check back with us next week for new features and post-holiday diet tips. And Giants fans, please make sure you’ve fully digested your turkey before the game. As always, thank you for your support.

Until next time,
Your friends at FanFeedr.

Get v.1.0 here

Version 1.0 of the FanFeedr iPhone app is live on the iTunes App Store and available now as a free download.

What’s New

1. Additional commenting options. You can now comment on activity feed items, like your friends comments, or fan and un-fan events. You can do this inline without losing your spot in the feed.
2. UI overhaul. A newer slicker theme for the app.
3. Over 30 performance improvements, bug fixes and interface tweaks.
4. Push notifications for scores, letting you get the action in real-time.

Thank you for your interest in the FanFeedr iPhone and iPod Touch application.

That’s it!

Thanks, FanFeedr.

Right to it . . .

Push notifications on the iPhone

• All iPhone users with version 1.0 of the application will now get scores sent to them when games are in progress, based on their FanFeed.

Better experience for first time users

• New first time user experience (FTUE) that has yellow boxes that shows new users exactly what they have to do to get a personalized FanFeed.
• To see this go to the site . . .

1. Log out if you are already logged in
2. Refresh the page
3. This only works on Safari, Firefox and Chrome
4. It doesn’t work on IE 6, 7, or 8.

Also . . .

• Scoreboards for all of the other games on each boxscore page, like the Lakers beat down of the Suns, last night, for example.
• Twitter feeds, like the one for my beloved Warriors, are powered directly off of our website, for reduced latency and real-time scores

More to come next week, and let us know what you think.

Thanks, the Feedr of the Fans

Get v.0.9.5 here

Version 0.9.5 of the FanFeedr iPhone app is live on the iTunes App Store and available now as a free download.

What’s New

1. Commenting! You can now comment on stories, photos and games.
2. Share to Twitter. You can share your status updates, stories, and comments with both Twitter and Facebook.
3. Improved Photo View, with scrollable caption support.
4. Many tweaks, improvements and bug fixes.

Thank you for your interest in the FanFeedr iPhone and iPod Touch application.

That’s it!

Thanks, FanFeedr.

Folks,

This week we have added Twitter integration using their super-transparent OAuth implementation. Which means that you can . . .

• Post your status update to Twitter as well as Facebook
• Send stories, videos and blog posts to Twitter

We have added the ability for you to follow your favorite teams ON Twitter, if you would prefer to do so there. So far we have all MLB baseball teams (like the Red Sox), and the top European football teams (like Barça). The NFL and colleges will be added next week, and the NBA and NHL in September.

We have also made some subtle changes to the typeahead box, so when you type any name, like, oh, say . . .

• Michael Vick (player)

We show you whether it is a player, a team, a college, or a news source.

Speaking of news sources, these are some favorites that you may not know about:

• Fantasy Players: Fantasy football news for the fantasy fan
• Wages of Wins: Insanely detailed basketball commentary based on regression analyses, and the level of discussions in the comments is also rarified.
• SLAM magazine: top-shelf hoops coverage

Also on the content side of things, we have added all of the NFL players who are tweeting.

Last but not least, a reminder about our iPhone application, for free, man, and a recent blog post about the company from our friends at Carrot, here.

Have a great weekend, FanFeedr