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

Yes, we are behind with our product releases, and it is because the writer of this blog has been focused on the revenue-generating aspects of the business to the detriment of clear communication about product releases and the hard work of our engineers. Situation remedied today, as . . .

Sprint 7

• Supporting Champions League soccer as an independent group, and this wasn’t easy
• Formally created our HTML5-compliant application, which you can check out here.
• Deployed our customized FanFeedr for Athletes product for Visanthe Shiancoe. You can check it out on Twitter or Facebook.
• Added standings to all of the soccer/European football leagues. Check out the Premier League.
• Added rosters for all of soccer/European football. This means that you can also follow individual players, like Leo Messi.

Bugs

• Fixed the way ties are displayed for soccer/European football results
• Changed “soccer” to “football” wherever we could to least offend your sensibilities
• Posting comments to Twitter on the website was not working, but it is fixed now

Sprint 8

• Redskins Feedr now live for the iPhone and iPod Touch (previously iPad, Android only.) Yay!
• Added live updating to the FanFeedr HTML5 application
• Integrated Google Authentication for the FanFeedr HTML5 application
• Made it so that fans of a league, like NFL or NBA, will see more popular stories when using their FanFeed
• We added in videos that we aggregate, so you should see more of those

Bugs

• Deleted preseason NBA games so that they didn’t show up as betting opportunities
• Fixed team records to show record for Champions League vs. national league, in context.
• Slate of fixes for the Chrome application
• Our aggregation of Tweets fell down, go boom, so that is back and functional
• Fixed caching on team records, which made them seem slightly out-of-date
• Fixed schedules for soccer/European football teams. Check out FC Barcelona’s schedule, for example.
• Comment notification emails now linking to the right place.

As always, thank you for supporting us, and let us know what we can do to make your experience better by using the big red “Feedback” tab on the left-hand side of every web page at FanFeedr.

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

A bunch of fixes and improvements . . .

iPad/iPhone users

• We released our brand new official Redskins Feedr iPad application, with all of the best Redskins news and information, served up directly to your iPad. You can get the official Redskins Feedr application here.
• If you have experienced authentication problems with FanFeedr since upgrading to version 1.6.3, we traced the error down to a server side API error on our end and it has been promptly fixed. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.

Facebook Pick’Em game

• First, do you know that we have a killer Facebook Pick’Em game? You can predict the outcome of English Premier League, La Liga, Bundesliga and Serie A games, directly on Facebook, with your friends.
• We are using Facebook Credits directly, and you don’t have to go hunting for currency to play the game
• We added live scores to the game, so you can check your scores as the games take place

First-time user experience

• We deleted the welcome pop-up screen, because many of you complained about it. She’sa gone.

There were other bug fixes. We hope that you are enjoying your Summer, and remember, if you like the website, you can also get FanFeedr for your iPhone, iPad, and Android.
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

There are three themes for this week’s release.

Mobile

• We have made it so that our links work on mobile devices. If you want to follow your favorite teams on your Blackberry, Android, Palm or Windows Mobile device, just add follow the team on Twitter.
• You can find your teams’ Twitter account by going to the team page, like this one, and clicking on “Follow on Twitter.”

Gaming

• New and better badges, you can see them on the Leaderboard.
• We added a FanFeedr Pick’Em page that allows you to pick all of the games on a given day. You can access this from any page on the service using the “FanFeedr Pick’Em” link above the search bar.
• Adding a user’s winning percentage after their picks on the Leaderboard, so you can see who is a “volume” winner and who is picking accurately
• Reduced posting a user’s picks to Facebook and the service so that you don’t get overwhelmed with updates (and neither do your friends.)

Service

• Revamped our schedules pages so that you can see upcoming games and refer to past games as well, easily.
• Fixed sharing by email so that the links work properly
• We are up to 6,500 content sources for your reading pleasure

As always, thanks for all of your support, and please tell your sports-enthused friends to try out the service, Feedr of the Fans