Much of the talk from LeWeb and other Silicon Valley get-togethers of late has centered around geolocation and the future of how geolocation is going to be integrated in social activity, search, advertising and communication. To date, the most visible company centered on geolocation has been Foursquare. But Gowalla, based in Austin, Texas, has gained significant traction over the last three months, and today, announced the completion of a Series B funding round for more than $8 million, bringing their total funding to date to more than $10 million.

According to the company's press release, Greylock Partners led the round, which will be used to accelerate the company's growth and enable future development.

Despite Foursquare's share of voice, Gowalla has managed to attract 50,000 active users, who have checked in at 150,000 locations in nearly 100 countries. Unlike Foursquare, which requires the service to support specific cities, Gowalla users can participate anywhere they are connected. Gowalla is available for both Apple's iPhone and the Android platform, and all this growth has taken place in only ten weeks.

In contrast, Foursquare raised $1.35 million in September of 2009.

As Twitter grows from early adopter curiosity to full-fledged mainstream phenomenon, the company is undergoing a much-anticipated and much-welcomed maturation process, one that comes following the company's highly-visible raise of a significant venture capital round, which valued them at a billion dollars, the hiring of well-respected team members from Valley titans Yahoo!, Google and Facebook, and the recent roll-out of new features to the platform, including Retweets and Lists. Today, at LeWeb, Ryan Sarver, Twitter's director of platform, unveiled even more proofpoints that show the company is moving beyond its shaky relationships with developers (and uptime) and looking forward to a more public, more robust experience.

Over the last two years, some of my more public criticisms of the service have centered around the company's struggles with uptime, and lack of transparency with developers, who often got short shrift as Twitter worked to keep its products stable, throttling API access or changing functionality, often with no warning. The results, in some cases, were drastic, leading to products being delayed, canceled, or simply rendered ineffective.



Though it seems like ancient history now, it was just July of 2008 when Tweetmeme relaunched after struggling with Twitter's API. (See also from July '08: Twitter Chokes Unauthenticated API Requests By IP, Sites Gasp for Air) It was June of this year when TweetStats was taken down for 24+ hours for other issues, and April when Twitter reduced the functionality of auto-follow services.

This history was a major reason I started out so sour on Twitter, saying Every Time I Try To Embrace Twitter, They Push Us Away in January of this year and noting in May that Twitter's Search Engine Is Very, Very, Broken. But the Web moves fast, and there's little that some great talent and serious money can't fix. By October, I mentioned that the Web is effectively Twitter's world and we all just live in it. Today, at LeWeb, Sarver took some of the major issues I have seen in the developer community and approached them head-on.

As summarized elsewhere, including by TechCrunch and ReadWriteWeb, Sarver announced some major initiatives, including the opening of the firehose to all developers, a new Web site dedicated to developers to leverage others' activity and search on known issues, the increase of OAuth requests to Twitter from a mere 150 an hour to 1,500, a 10x increase, and the introduction of a Twitter developers conference, called Chirp, in San Francisco in 2010.

Following his presentation, I talked with Ryan and told him that it was a pleasure to see Twitter growing in front of us, saying the developer moves are aimed at the holes I have seen in their interaction with the community and the platform. I have been very pleased with Twitter's publicly telling users about upcoming features in advance, and today's announcements do more to cement this company as one that is to be respected and trusted.

As Ryan said multiple times in his presentation, much of what makes Twitter a success today originated from its users, and the success of Twitter depends on the success of the users. Now, developers are going to be increasingly part of the team, and not on the outside looking in.

Social networking aggregation, taking in all your content from around the Web to a central service, as well as seeing updates from around the Web by all your friends, was among one of the biggest trends in 2008, with services like Socialmedian, FriendFeed, Profilactic and others. In 2009, this process has been embraced by another trend - realtime - the goal being that one's updates from around the Web would flow into these sites practically instantaneously. Many of those services, including FriendFeed, are turning to Pubsubhubbub to make this happen. This week, Cliqset, a growing site for social conversation, threw its name in the ring, and its feeds, both in and out, are Pubsubhubbub-enabled.

In a quick note to the Pubsubhubbub Google group, Darren Bounds, creator of Cliqset, said that "all Cliqset user activity feeds are now publishing to the Google hub." In addition, services feeding Cliqset that are Pubsubhubbub-enabled, such as Google Reader and Blogger, are also accelerated.


Now, if you go to any user profile, such as that for Chris Brogan, Holden Page or Robert Scoble, their updates are pulled in from the Web in real time. Also, if you are following any of them on Cliqset, your main page will flow in real time, just like FriendFeed's similarly-accelerated platform does today. With Facebook also moving to real-time, users are getting more and more comfortable with new updates flowing from the top of their site downward, and they aren't tolerating delays.

As Superfeedr recently demonstrated, Pubsubhubbub is gaining traction. That Cliqset added support is the right direction, and I hope to see more and more networks making similar announcements soon.

Many social networks are working on ways to improve the relevancy of content - either through finding shared relationships between people through common people they know or through similar likes and dislikes. Simler, which I first talked about back in September, and opened in October, launched an array of new features this last week that offer the service's growing user base faster ways to interact with shared content, and improved abilities to discover new areas on the site where activity is happening.

As outlined in a post on Simler by the company's CEO, Ryan Goodwin, Simler updated their site to include a new homepage, highlighting friends, tags and most recent content. But more interesting to me are the two new items they added - the first being the addition of "likes", a feature you have seen on FriendFeed, Google Reader, Socialmedian and Facebook, and the second, being "Favorite Tags", which lets you pick your favorite topics of conversation, and highlight them in conversations that take place on the service.

Now, as you make posts on Simler, about any topic, you can tag other users by adding a tilda in front of their user name (such as ~louisgray) or you can use the well-known @ sign to link out to Twitter. And topics can be highlighted through brackets to link to other topics on the site. (Such as [Simler] or [Apple])

The service is also highlighting its most active users, by topic, as the SimKing, which users will be given a badge on their profile page if their content is liked by other users.


The addition of likes, as with other networks, will enable users a more lightweight way to interact with content and show what the find interesting. The improved options to highlight other users and topics on Simler should also accelerate the activity there. I also hope to be talking with Ryan and team to help them gain more traction, as part of my role with Paladin, as Simler is a very new client. The efforts that went into this release were in place prior to our working together, and I'm looking forward to helping more going forward.

Disclosure: Simler is a new Paladin Advisors Group client. I am Managing Director of New Media for Paladin.