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Today at the RealTime CrunchUp, representatives from some of the top companies involved in location based services came together to talk about the current state and future of geo-based services. I’ll be taking some notes about the top themes to come up during the panel, and we’ll have a full transcript available soon.

Participating in the panel were:
Matt Galligan, co-Founder of SimpleGeo
Ryan Sarver, Director of Platform at Twitter
Tristan Walker, VP of Business Development at Foursquare
Steve Lee, Group Product Manager Google Maps for Mobile and Google Latitude
Justin Shaffer, Founder of Hot Potato
Elad Gil, CEO of Mixer Labs
Moderators were our own Erick Schonfeld and MG Siegler.

Early in the panel, the conversation turned to SimpleGeo, the new infrastructure for location that was revealed earlier this week. Shaffer spoke about how excited he was about the new service. When asked if anyone could copy what Foursquare was doing, Walker talked about Foursquare’s efforts to filter content (which is harder to reproduce).

MG then steered the convesation toward briding the gap between social networks and the real world, noting that mobile devices are paving the way for this change. But he wondered how services other than Foursquare (which has a game mechanic) would entice users to share their location on a regular basis.

Lee addressed concerns over Latitude’s continuous location sharing, explaining that you can share your location with certain people who you specify, but that Latitude’s approach to constant tracking leads to the ability to offer interesting services. He says that without continuous sharing nearby alerts wouldn’t be possible (or at least as effective). He says that the check-in model and the continuous model will likely coexist (and that check-in can even help give more context about where you are) but that there’s things you can’t do without continuous tracking. Regarding Checking in verus continuous mapping, Elad Gil says he’s seeing about a “nine to ten” relationship between them.

Galligan chimed in by saying that there will be a point when we know where everyone is, but that the context won’t necessarily be known. Galligan then revealed a new technology called “four dimensions” that SimpleGeo has created, which allows them to compress location and time stamps into a datapoint, allowing apps to look into the past for the same location.

Sarver talked about why Twitter was interested in location, describing how it would help filter through the noise. He mentioned TrendsMap.com as a great way to visualize geotagged tweets.

Shaffer said that HotPotato is looking to integrate location into their service, but that another key element is what brings conversation together. He says that just location data isn’t necessarily enough (he points out that people watching a baseball game may actually be at the game, or watching on TV.)

In terms of advertising, there seemed to be a broad consensus that geo-based advertising had the potential to be extremley successful. Galligan brought up the potential of special ads and deals, pointing to Yowza as a great example. Saffer later commented that there’s a fine line that these services have to work with — it would be a negative for ads to actually feel like ads (instead it would be better for them to feel like deals).

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Rippol, the video discovery site that combines both complex algorithms with user suggestions to surface interesting content, has launched to the public at today’s RealTime CrunchUp.

We recently took an in-depth look at the service, but for those who haven’t seen it yet, here’s a recap: Rippol looks at your video watching activity on the site, as well as that of your friends and people in your demographic. It then looks at meta data from video content ingested from sites like YouTube and Hulu, and uses machine learning to identify videos it thinks you’ll like. From there you can browse through various genres to look at recommended videos

But the site also has a social component, allowing users to identify each other as friends by importing their social graphs from services like Facebook and Gmail. You can use Facebook chat to talk with these friends in real-time. And today, it’s launching a new feature: Friendcasting, which allows users to share a interesting video in real-time with your friends on the site. There’s also a ‘global view’ that lets you see a stream of videos that are being watched by other users on the site, which helps surface content your friends haven’t come across.

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Today at the RealTime CrunchUp Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff took the stage to talk about the social enterprise with Erick Schonfeld and Steve Gillmor (he also introduced us to a new real-time Salesforce Chatter platform). Benioff has also signed a pair of copies of his book Behind The Cloud, which we’re going to be giving away to attendees of today’s conference.

To win one, just tweet out your favorite moment of the RealTime CrunchUp so far, and include the hashtags #CrunchUp and #Cloud in your tweet (#CrunchUp is the conference hashtag, and #Cloud will let us know who’s entering the contest).

We’ll announce the winners in this post later today, and you’ll be able to pick up your signed book at the front table. Obviously you’ll have to be present to win.

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Professional social network LinkedIn has long had a feature that lets users update their status on their profile. But it’s plainly obvious that LinkedIn users don’t nearly use the status feature for mass communication as frequently as they use Twitter or Facebook for the same purpose. In fact, I surveyed a sampling of LinkedIn users who avidly use the site for networking but never update their status on their profile. Many didn’t even know that LinkedIn had a status update feature. Starting tonight, LinkedIn will integrate with Twitter, letting users sync their LinkedIn and Twitter accounts to broadcast LinkedIn status updates on Twitter and vice versa in real-time. So how does this work?

LinkedIn will now allow you to update your status on your LinkedIn profile and then share the message automatically to Twitter. To enable to enable the cross posting feature, you just need to click the new Twitter box under your Network Updates box on the homepage and sync with your Twitter account (via oAuth).

The integration works the other way as well. You can also share Tweets to your LinkedIn profile from Twitter or any other client by adding the hashtag “#in” or “li”. As part of the setup process on LinkedIn, you can choose to either send all your tweets or select tweets that have the hashtag “in” from Twitter back to LinkedIn as a status update. You can also import your Twitter stream into your profile now, which is also an op-in feature. So your profile will show a “Recent Tweets” section that will include a real-time stream of your Tweets. The ability to show your Twitter stream in your LinkedIn profile no doubt provides a compelling social media context to your professional CV. As Twitter co-founder Biz Stone says in a video about the harmonious integration, “the business use case of Twitter is turning out to be very important.” He adds, “The persona they create for themselves on the web is part of their resume.” Stone also said LinkedIn and Twitter are as complimentary as “peanut butter and chocolate” (hence the logo).

It makes sense for LinkedIn to integrate with Twitter considering that its own status update feature isn’t tremendously popular. The ability to Tweet directly to your LinkedIn profile will add a good amount of fresh content and perhaps new traffic to the site for social purposes as well as for professional interests. And perhaps the Twitter integration will breathe new life to LinkedIn’s status update feature. AIM and MySpace also made similar moves by adding the two-way sync with Twitter. As my colleague Erick Schonfeld eloquently wrote recently, LinkedIn, like other social media sites and networks, is realizing that it’s better to swim with the stream than against it.

The odd man out in this announcement appears to be Facebook, who has yet to add Twitter syndication to its functionality for all users. It would also make sense for LinkedIn to sync with Facebook, but LinkedIn’s co-founder and VP of product strategy Allen Blue says it something that the site “may consider in the future.”

Blue says that for now, LinkedIn is concentrating its efforts on Twitter thanks to the “great amount of business conversations” that are taking place on the microblogging platform. But LinkedIn’s other founder and executive chairman Reid Hoffman, who recently joined VC firm Greylock as a partner, was an angel investor in Facebook, so it would make sense LinkedIn will play nice with Facebook in the future.

When asked about the possibility of a URL shortener being added to LinkedIn’s status update feature (which would be useful given the integration with Twitter), LinkedIn spokesperson Kay Luo said that would make a lot of sense and could be a possible addition in the future. Luo declined to say whether LinkedIn will be creating their own URL shortener or integrating with one of the billion other shorteners out there.

LinkedIn is no doubt growing, reaching 50 million users a few weeks ago and innovative features like this should only add to the social network’s popularity. And as Twitter continues to globally, this will compliment LinkedIn’s considerable international presence.

It’s important to note the Twitter feature will be gradually rolled out over the next 24 hours to all LinkedIn users.

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You’ve been waiting for it. You’ve been talking about it. You’ve sent long, rambling letters to Jodie Foster about it. You’ve been calling your local Congresswoman about it: It’s the Sony Daily Edition e-reader with built-in wireless.

Erick Schonfeld is on the scene live and we’ll be reporting once the doors open at 10:30am EDT.

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South Carolina has the dubious distinction of being the first state to secede from the United States, in 1860. You could say that they had very strong feelings on the issue of slavery. If they’re still up for it, I say let them leave. Craigslist is way more important than they are.

Congratulations to Craigslist for standing up to South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster and demanding an apology. The situation they find themselves in, facing threatened criminal prosecution, is absurd. I stand by my post last night that Craigslist should simply shut down the South Carolina site permanently, and discontinue any negotiations with the state. McMaster has no basis for threatening civil or criminal action, and this is clearly just a way for him to get press in his bid for governor. A Facebook group has sprung up around this as well.

But as an aside, this whole drama has made me wonder, just how important is South Carolina anyway? If it really came down to choosing between South Carolina and Craigslist, how many people would rather have South Carolina?

South Carolina a former slave state that has less than 4.5 million people and a median income of under $40,000/year, 39th in the U.S. 92% of the state’s residents are Christian, and the gross state product is around $150 billion. A main driver of economic activity is tobacco. On the upside, I hear Myrtle beach is nice, and my co-editor Erick Schonfeld’s mother lives there.

Compare that to Craigslist, which doesn’t have any physical territory but boasts 46 million monthly visitors in the U.S. alone, making it nearly ten times the size of South Carolina. The site has been a significant factor in disrupting old media, particularly newspapers, by making classified listings free. Craigslist has made the lives of tens of millions of people better by helping them get rid of unwanted couches, find a new job, or rent an apartment. And it has never charged much for what it does - it is a classic case of giving more than taking.

If you really had to choose, which is more important to you, Craigslist or South Carolina? Which has the bigger positive impact on our culture, and which adds more utility to your daily existence. Craigslist wins hands down.

That’s why I’d be very upset if McMaster has his way and puts Craigslist management behind bars. Or even if his attacks have the effect of chilling the freedom-loving Craigslist community. Kick South Carolina out of the Union (we can add Puerto Rico or Canada afterwards if we really need a nice round number of 50 states). Build a wall around it stop the inflow of federal dollars. We don’t want to do this, but the dangerously self-serving and backwards thinking of the state’s elected leadership leaves us no choice.

But don’t touch Craigslist. It’s too important.

What do you think? Take the poll below. And remember, even though what I’m proposing is absurd, how would you really answer?

Which is more important to you - Craigslist or South Carolina?(web polls)

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