This looks to be the year that all sorts of location-based startups are coming out of the woodwork that let people do crazy things with their phones and locations.  And, incidentally or not, they’re also collecting a huge amount of interesting data. 

Outalot is one such resource:  We help people make decisions about where to go, at home or on their phones.  Without being too creepy (we take privacy very seriously, as everyone in this space should), there are some interesting trends that arise from anonymous data about how the service is used.  Below are a few questions an LBS service may be able to answer in broad terms.  Each one has a long list of possible commercial opportunities, sociology lessons, and city planning implications.  And anyway, it’s just interesting:

1. How far do people travel to get what they want? Do people trek farther on the weekends?  Is there a particular lunch area that people will travel 20 minutes to get to?
2. What day of the week do people go out, and in which neighborhoods?  Is Thursday a good night to go out downtown?  Is Sunday better for Astoria?
3. What different crowds overlap in the same neighborhoods?  That is, where are people from the Upper East Side mingling with people in Williamsburg.. and what disaster awaits if they find out?
4. How do trends change as the seasons change?  We figure people stay closer to home in the freezing months of winter, but how big is that effect in real terms?
5. How do trends change as the weather changes?  Do people stay at home more during cold days, or on hot and humid days?  How much does the appeal of outdoor space draw the crowds?  And what if the forecast is wrong — how far ahead are people planning?
6. What’s the disparity between how much a place is liked (or disliked), and how popular it is to actually visit?  Gramercy Tavern has a lot of positive ratings, but not many people seem to be regularly going there.  Why?  In this case, it really is a great place, but a tad pricey for a spur-of-the-moment dinner decision.  For what other reasons might this disparity appear?
7. Do iPhone users and BlackBerry users hang out in the same areas?  What does that say about the places they’re seen together — or separate?
8. How does the crime rate of an area affect people’s habits?  Is everyone steering clear of the dangerous areas, or is all the hot stuff getting started out there on the seedier side of town?
9. How much does cleanliness impact a place’s popularity?  The Dept. of Health provides health inspection reports for businesses, which one could overlay on popularity data.  Imagine if you could provide hard evidence to the sketchy neighborhood diner that their business would double if they just, er, got rid of the vermin. 
10. What are people searching for that they can’t find?  This is the most important one to us at the moment: it represents either a failure in our system and an opportunity to improve the information in our database, or a failure of the city to actually provide what someone wants.

This is just a starter list of possibilities.  Any others?

We’re extremely excited to announce that we’ve integrated with Twitter for sharing your location with your friends. If you’re headed out, look up your destination on Outalot and click “Check in Via Twitter”. Outalot will send a tweet to your Twitter account, so your friends can find out what it’s like, and where it’s at. Also, Outalot will update your location to the place you’re headed, so when you’re leaving the bar and need a late night snack, we’ll help you find the one that’s just steps out the front door.

Many people have asked us how we’ll make it easier for users to let others know where they are through Outalot. Will we introduce a category called “Friends”? Will we push alerts to let you know that a friend is within a few miles of your current location? The release of several GPS-enabled phones, including yesterday’s announcement about the 3G, GPS-enabled iPhone, stokes our and other developers’ imagination with possibilities.

The issue, of course, with letting others know your whereabouts through an application is privacy. In a simple interface, how do you set limitations on what level of detail people can see about your current location? Which social networks do you tie into to let people know where you are? Once you start listing out all the possibilites, you see that a  complex interface is needed to handle LBS friend-finding. We’d hate to introduce unnecessary complexity into Outalot.

One step, we feel, in the right direction is not asking users to re-create a social network. We believe that the last thing someone wants to do at this point is reconstruct the network they already have in Facebook or Friendster. In addition, we are not convinced that a push alerting system is user-friendly, so we wanted a service where users would pull information about their friends’ location.

That’s why we decided to work with Twitter’s APIs in order to integrate sharing your location with others via Outalot. Here are some benefits to checking in via Twitter:

• You can control who sees your location through your Twitter privacy controls. In other words, you can elect for the whole world to see where you check in, or have your updates only go to select friends.
• You can also use the Twitter Facebook application in order to update your status in Facebook. The daisy chain of Outalot » Twitter » Facebook again prevents users from having to recreate any social networks or privacy controls within Outalot.
• Finally, we don’t even require that you have a registered user account with us to take advantage of this feature

Please let us know what you think about our Twitter integration!

One of the most difficult things about using any location-based service is setting and maintaining your location. Lots of forces are working to simplify this: in particular, location-sensitive devices like the iPhone and GPS-enabled handsets will shake things up, but one cool software-only simplification is Yahoo! Fire Eagle.

We just launched synchronization with Fire Eagle. If you haven’t seen it yet, Fire Eagle is a location brokering service that allows you to share your location beyond the boundaries of an application. That is, if you set your location in one app, your location will be propagated out of the app into any other location-aware that you use.

If you have a beta invite to Fire Eagle, click on your username in Outalot to edit your settings, and enable Fire Eagle to get your location synchronized across Outalot and any other Fire Eagle-enabled site.

We’ve put together an experiment with Google Mapplets that will show you the most recently rated restaurants, bars, and shops.  Mapplets are overlays that you can apply to Google Maps, so you can now get Outalot data directly at Google.

Give it a try: Click here to add the mapplet! And feedback and ideas are most welcome, as always.

Yesterday, we pushed two big changes to the service.

We now offer Outalot for the San Francisco Bay Area. Like New York City, you can simply enter your address/ZIP/intersection to set your location in this area, or you can switch the neighborhood view to the SF Bay Area:

We also launched a Shops category for both NYC and SF Bay Area, which includes categories like Clothing & Accessories, Eyewear, Home & Furniture, Pharmacies, etc.

Yesterday afternoon we pushed yet another huge set of updates out the door. You’ll see changes in the way we display ratings, search results improvements, a lot of stylistic tweaks, and a few other things we’ll talk about later.

For some reason I feel compelled to highlight one pretty important but minor change: moving search functionality up to the top of every page on the iPhone.

We talk about ourselves as an being app for browsing what’s nearby (as opposed to searching), but search is nevertheless one of the most important features on the site and we’ll continue to make improvements to it.  We’ve already seen the number of searches done on the iPhone app more than double in the last day, which seems like a pretty good sign.

We just pushed out some great new changes to the site.  The most noticeable new feature (for now) is Google mobile maps, now embedded in business details.

Enjoy!

It’s been a fun and fast first month out of the gate. A lot of things have surprised us — one of them is the hundreds of cities that people are requesting that we cover in the future. Some of these people are where I expected: Around the SF Bay Area, Boston, Chicago, Austin, etc. But the many international requests for coverage sort of caught me off guard. Here are some examples:

• Mexico City, Mexico
• Antwerp, Belgium
• Tel Aviv, Israel
• Heemstede, The Netherlands (I had to look this one up)
• Brighton, Australia

One of the things we are balancing internally is whether to build deep (make and improve a lot of features into Outalot NYC), or build broad (cover more cities). Of course, the right answer is somewhere in between these two, but it’s very encouraging to see the breadth of people who are asking for coverage. Thanks for all the requests, please keep it coming, and stay tuned, we will be expanding into more metro areas soon.

		Introducing Your Network
We rolled out a very cool feature on Outalot today called Your Network. Your Network allows you to add other users’ bookmarks to your own, and to see users who are fans of your bookmarks. When you add a user to your network on Outalot, his bookmarks are aggregated with your own, in effect creating a personalized guide based on your friends’ recommendations.
		The benefit of Your Network
Combine all your friends’ bookmarks on Outalot in one place Find recommended places easily, online or on your mobile phone, when you’re in an unfamiliar neighborhood. Use thumbs up/down, comments, and tags to describe what’s great, or lacking, about a restaurant or bar. Like another user’s comments? Become a fan by adding her to Your Network.

How to add a user to Your Network

To add a user to Your Network, simply click on that person’s username. You’ll be able to see this person’s list of bookmarks, and will be prompted to add this user to your network.

TIP: To view your network
To view Your Network, visit your own bookmarks at
outalot.com/users/<yourusername>

Note you won’t see an option to view Your Network until you add others to it or others add you.

TIP: Understanding Arrows
Your Network
You→AnotherUser (You added this user to Your Network)
You↔AnotherUser (You and this user are in each others’ networks)

Your Fans
You←AnotherUser (This user is a fan of your bookmarks)

TIP: To add a bookmark
When you click on next to a restaurant, bar, or movie theater, it adds it to your own list of bookmarks.

It’s been only a couple weeks since our launch, and we already have some cool data to share. Here are the top five most popular places (rated by number of people who bookmarked them):

1. Babbo
2. The Odeon
3. Republic
4. BXL Cafe
5. East Side Company Bar

You can bookmark the restaurants and bars by clicking the heart next to a business. Use this to keep track of where you go, where you’d like to go, and share your bookmarks with your friends. Here’s mine.

We’ll periodically revisit this kind of data to keep our eyes on the up-and-coming and down-and-out places to go in NYC. More users are hopping onto the service, and this information is really starting to get interesting.