With the world of location based services, including Foursquare and Gowalla, getting a lot of discussion of late, especially as news comes that Facebook will soon check in with its own offering, Louis Gray and Chris Saad discuss the purpose today’s services serve, and how we both leverage Foursquare – the current app of choice.

Are these services here to stay, and should they be used to show all of one’s comings and goings, or just major points of interest? Chris argues Foursquare should be used in a social way, while Louis is enjoying checking in from the mundane places in life. Meanwhile, we debate the true nature of “cheating”, and whether it is acceptable or not.

Much of this discussion stems from Louis’ recent post: Are You Filtering Checkins to Enhance Your Image?

Referenced in addition to Foursquare, Gowalla and Facebook are Twitter, Stalqer and The Cadmus. Chris is an advisor to Stalqer.

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Google Buzz, only a week old, is gaining a lot of visibility, and is seen as Google’s most direct attack against social upstarts Facebook and Twitter. Some really like it. Others are up in arms about perceived privacy violations. Louis Gray and Chris Saad discuss whether Buzz’s clear mimicry of FriendFeed and other existing sites missed a new opportunity to innovate – and become a true social network aggregation tool, including aggregation of gestures. Did Google make a mistake, and not really invent anything new with Buzz, making it immediately an also-ran?

Companies discussed include: Google, Google Buzz, GMail, Google Reader, FriendFeed, Facebook, my6sense, ReadBurner and Seesmic.

 

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Louis Gray and Chris Saad discuss and debate Apple’s approach to corporate communications and branding; keeping everything they do and say closed until absolutely necessary. How do we, as a community, reconcile this attitude with the open precepts of the web and social media?

We also discuss Microsoft’s leadership role with innovation, how RSS is not dead and the possible resurgence of Tablet PCs.

 

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This is our first discussion. We talk about @JoshElman, @Twitter and the incremental changes to the Twitter Suggested User List. In the conversation: @chrissaad and @louisgray.

Mentions of @joshelman, @gregarious, @scobleizer, @danielbru and more…

 

 EdgeTheory Conversation 1 [19:30m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (188)