And so: PlaceBook is now TripTrace. Officially. Which means, we’re shutting down this blog and hauling everyone over to blog.triptrace.com.

Over there you’ll see what we’re up to, hear musings on start-ups, user interface, and get the latest release notes and discussion. More than you could ever dream of!

(And as for this space? Maybe we’ll leave this here as the fanpage for PlacéBoök (plah-kay-buuk))

We felt the logo could give it a vaguely international flavor – it was for facilitating travel and exploration, after all. But there’s an issue of whether this name infringes on another companies trademark, and whether it would dilute the value of theirs and/or potentially confuse the public. I have heard the arguments, and I have my opinions; I think this is a cool and unique name and would be distinct – I also feel it is an “apt descriptor” as they say, of what we are.

But I’m too close to this matter, and the product we’re making is for the public –anyone who was reasonably frustrated with researching vacations, and booking trips online. I don’t want this name stuff to get in the way of the product, which is really all that matters.

So I want to know what you think. Should I drop the name? Do you think it infringes on other brand names?  Post or email your comments. I really want to know. Thanks.

I’ve only been in a few, so my experience is limited, but they are always idiosyncratic: each pretty unique. At Sonic Solutions there were four of us in a little apartment in the Sunset District in San Francisco. Thick cables ran down the hallway past the kitchen, connecting the workstation we set up (we had only one) to the Sun server in the first bedroom. I remember that the freezer was packed full of frozen burritos and we had day shifts and night shifts to keep the workstation running all the time. It was 1987.

It’s nicer today. Look at us all, each with a supercomputer on our laps… The days are unusually long, but it never quite feels like it because its so not-officish, it’s so homey… My dog Bodhi joined the team (advisor, mostly) which was a nice comic element to throw in the mix. And there we are, working away in the heat of the day. It wasn’t a meeting – but it was beautiful outside and we all found ourselves hanging out for awhile. We did notice that even sitting around each other working, we still Skyped back and forth; it was silent out there, except for the clicking of keys, but you could hear everyone’s voices in your head while typing. It reminded me of a Star Trek episode (the original seasons) where a race of telepathic beings were doing stuff to Kirk, et al. We were like those telepathic beings. Bodhi was Kirk.

When I was raising money for Petroglyph Ceramic Lounge – kicking off the “paint your own ceramics” craze in the early ‘90s – we had a handful of profitable studios and we were looking for capital to expand. The venture community couldn’t argue with the obvious popularity and rapid growth of our retail locations, but they wanted to be convinced that painting ceramics wasn’t a FAD. In 1992 there were perhaps 2 places in the nation you could do this kind of activity; by 1995 there were a dozen and 1996 a hundred… but there was nothing I could say to convince them that in five years anyone would care. I couldn’t know.

Well, hindsight is 20/20 as they say, and today it’s clear that Petroglyph wasn’t just a fad, but was kicking off a TREND. There are thousands of PYOP (paint your own pottery) studios in the world, and sales today – almost 20 years later — are steady.

Games are very faddish activities. Remember Trivial Pursuit in Time Magazine in 1983? – a hot new import from Canada. Within a year it exploded. Years later, we see that the game was a fad, but it still was a game changer – and it not only galvanized a new industry of board games (in general) and trivia games (in particular), but it still sells today, even if not the “hot thing.” Same story for other gaming “game changers” – Myst (a global phenom, and catalyzing CD ROM games), You Don’t Know Jack, and so on and on. With little exception, games –like rock stars — are faddish. Do they ever have staying power? Sure–D&D, WoW… or they spawn great franchises like SimCity… but these are unusual exceptions in the game kingdom, no?

Which brings me to GPS-enabled location games. What can I say?  They’re games. They’re fun. They woke us up to the power of pervasive GPS and I’m certain they herald a new era, a new TREND, in consumer location-powered tools. But the games themselves? Foursquare? Gowalla? MyTown? and the new ones? I hate to be a wet blanket but I would tend to be cautious to claim victory here. Games get big fast. Frequent reports of their viral growth are important, but also the wrong hook to hang your hat on. These games might never break out of certain demographic sectors (people who are game players) and sooner or later the fans will almost certainly begin looking for the next fun thing. They simply may not have staying power any more than any great game. The leader in the pack may find ways to move the millions of players to their next fun game – but for most players in the field, I believe audiences will be fickle. Is there money to be made? Probably. Not that anyone is asking me, but if I were Booyah and the others, I would be trying to evolve a slate of location-based games and toys, and not put all my eggs in one game-basket as if users will play it indefinitely.

And as for PlaceBook, all I can say is that we’ll be launching soon, and frankly I’d be thrilled to have Foursquare’s 2 million users…

But I’ve watched fads and trends for decades… from the trends of nonlinear editing,  ceramic painting, mobile computing; to the wonderful fads of PacMan, Miatas and Lady Gaga.  I am aiming PlaceBook to anticipate the TREND and not chase the FAD. I can’t wait to see what happens…

There’s Capital. Profit. Loss. Income. There’s Equity. Cash. Wealth. Funds. Earnings. Wages. Stock, of course. Sometimes even Currency. Notes.

You could go through a hundred business plans, and no one ever uses the “m” word.

It’s such a conspicuous absence, i wonder if it’s a joke. Maybe in my next plan I should push it. Start using other terms: wampum, greenbacks, dough, lettuce, moolah, bread, gelt, or, you know, scratch.

Anyway (and I really hope I’m wrong on this one) there is no money in business.

She pointed out two facts with which i could not argue. First — as she and I both know well in our roles as researchers and journalists — It’s really pretty easy to find out a lot about pretty much anyone given very little direct data. It’s happened on occassion that I’ve met someone at a meeting, only learned their first name and some other tidbit (like where they went to school or what they’re doing at work), and in no time found them on Linkedin or Facebook (or elsewhere) and pretty much had access to a solid docier on the person – vacation photos, favorite ice cream — everything. I’m good at working the system, but by no means expert. She was right: it’s unnaturally simple. I argued politely that for the most part it was all pointless information anyway, so it really didn’t matter to me or to them that the data is readily available. She articulated nicely how simple it is for drug companies or retailers to combine just a couple accessible data sources in order to take what would appear to be anonymous data and make it exceptionally revealing. Again, it’s not that I don’t believe her, it’s only that i don’t feel like i care that much, nor that I think its being used against me somehow.

But her second point struck a chord. She said that it’s true that the vast majority of data about us (our tastes, phone records, purchasing habits, etc.) are undifferentiated and banal. But every now and then, if you know how to look, there is something – a book here, a comment there, an angry call to a call center or a musical selection on iTunes — something, that reveals a bit more about who we are, and it’s generally not something we want people to know. Someone’s unhappy in a marriage or debating coming out of the closet, or sending money to an old friend in the middle east, or reading magazines with a conservative bend. Maybe it’s just that you eat junk food or buy knock-off products or watch porn, but whatever it is, our search habits, purchasing habits, travel habits, all can reveal it, sometimes without our even being aware.

Something about this info reminded me of our DNA. It’s often pointed out that 99.9% of our DNA is identical to that of our fellow human beings, 98% with our cousins the chimpanzee. Most of the code is just the stuff that makes us alive, but scattered among the trillions of bits are these small pieces that make us who we are. They are our differences, our uniqueness. They make us human instead of ape. They make us me instead of you. It doesn’t take much, but it’s all important.

We might feel like we have nothing to hide, and enjoy gleaning social and economic benefits from being so transparent, but leaving the info in the open might be used in ways we cannot imagine, and by the time we learn, it’s a bit late. Large corporations gather this data about us, and rarely if ever give it back to us.  They certainly don’t treat it like it’s ours, even though it represents our most personal preferences and private thoughts. Laws make it possible to see your credit score, but you can’t see your purchasing habits from Safeway or Borders.

I told her about what I was doing. PlaceBook will be as different from these things as we can be. All of us working on this project believe location data is both useful and unnaturally private. It should be every individuals’ to understand, to manipulate, and delete if they so chose. If there are benefits to be had, they should largely be ours. Protecting it seems rather straightforward, if there is simply the will. As much as I personally embrace pretty significant transparency, and find that nakedness both practical and empowering, it’s only because i feel in some control there. But i don’t think most people are like me, and don’t like living in the open that way. Better is giving over the control to the individual. We’re convinced that good privacy is good business. I guess we’ll find out.

By having real people being themselves, other real human dynamics naturally flowed in, and among those were exhibitionism and voyeurism. A lot of people liked living in the open, and even more people enjoyed poking around and getting a glimpse into other people’s lives. Truth is always so much more interesting than fiction. You can’t make that stuff up…

I’m reminded of a wonderful documentary I saw at Sundance ’91 about Coney Island; director Ric Burns went into detail about the success of the Steeplechase – it wasn’t how much fun the ride was, but that people gathered to watch the riders tumble off at the end – it became a spectator sport. This is the nature of “the social web” in general, and Facebook in particular. The addition of “location” into the social web pushes this even further toward an extreme that, while conferring a number of wonderful advantages, also introduces discomfort.

As I said, It used to be that you could have a number of personalities online (which, I propose is not always nefarious and often pragmatic – we are arguably different people with our workmates, our college buddies and our families – and pretending we could maintain a single persona is probably unrealistic.) It also used to be that we could work from anywhere, that we could be location-less on the Internet. I remember the moment I realized that with a laptop and a cell phone, I could be “at work” anywhere I happened to sit down, and that this wasn’t deceptive so much as utterly empowering. In that case, I had left California and was sitting in my brother’s office in Santa Fe, New Mexico… but as far as every single person I interacted with in my workday, nothing was different, nor should it have been. This continues to be true, of course, but now that location information can be tied to my online activities, my relationship with the social-web is changed, in many cases, for the worst.

But “geo” is a modern marvel; it’s only the connecting it to social and, particularly, my “real” identity on Facebook, that sends up warning flares. As has been pointed out by journalists with wonderful clarity, it’s not that I want to be deceptive, but there are times when broadcasting my location will be awkward. And turning off the tracking when I want to be stealth is sometimes just as bad, creating a conspicuous absence that demands attention, and looking all the world like the 18.5 minute gap in the Nixon Watergate tapes…

Maybe the problem is that on Facebook we tend to have hundreds of friends, most of which are only loosely “friends” – more like acquaintances than anything else (didn’t someone prove that we can only truly manage 3 or 4 “close” friends, and only a few dozen more that are anything like “real” friends?) This change in the definition of friends and conflating that with fans begins to alter the bedrock of transparency that makes social networks fun and useful. And not just that we have more people “watching” than we ever used to, in increasingly undefined kinds of relationships, but that by sheer number, the work it takes to manage “who sees what” increases beyond the point of practicality. We just toss up our hands and say “f*ck it – if they care what I had for breakfast, it won’t bother me” but that rationale breaks down with location. Where I happen to be and where I go is far more personal than what I think.  What I think and have to say is in the “No one knows you’re a dog” category; but where I am turns the internet into an intimacy lens, forcing me to make decisions I don’t want to make — “do i want them to know where i am?” Really? I am expected to answer that question with frequency? I don’t want to.

We don’t want to throw the baby out with this particular rejection of bathwater: the geo data itself isn’t the problem, just the platforms where it resides. Personally, I think we have a better way…

A social network is a social structure made of individuals which are connected by one or more specific types of interdependency, such as friendship, kinship, common interest, financial exchange, dislike, sexual relationships, or relationships of beliefs, knowledge or prestige.

I think that’s pretty good, but I thought i could add to it. To me, a social network at its core is a system that functions on the principles of a “network effect” — that is: as more people join the network, increasing value is conferred to the members. In other words, a social network has no value for one member, and has a lot more value for two… and as the number increases, the value increases faster. That’s a network effect. No network effect and it’s not a social network.

I thought at first that the activity of “sharing” information between an individual and others might be a defining attribute of a social network. I think that you might need to utilize a social network to share information (phone, email, etc.) but I no longer believe this is meaningful as a defining attribute. I can share a post from my blog, but my blog is not a social network.

No, I think that the foundation of a network effect is what defines a network, and the “social” part distinguishes the network as one for socializing, for meeting and connecting to people. As we spend our days building features and defining what PlaceBook is, we continue to find it useful to understand what we are not: we’re not a social network. We are enormously useful for one member, or millions. We are a safe and comprehensive service to manage your location information, and give it back to you with simple tools and powerful applications.

You’re right: it will be better when we can just show you…