Are you finding geolocation to be useful to you or your business? Let us know how you’re utilizing it.

Foursquare and Gowalla have been largely responsible for popularizing the idea of geolocation-based services. They combine many elements of other social networks such as the real-time functions of Twitter, the review aspects of sites like Yelp, and the social gaming of many networks, but they add location into the mix, which creates a completely new and exciting space.

Although location-based services are still in the early stages, they appear to be having an influence that is similar to the one that social media has had. According to Jay Adelson, the CEO of SimpleGeo and former CEO of Digg, there have been very few trends that have had relevance across multiple platforms and industries. He believes that social media falls into this select few, as well as location.

“Many of us believed for a long time, even throughout the social media revolution, that location also was one of those topics that would really act like a layer, as social has, on top of all these different applications,” he said.

Because he believes so strongly in this idea, he began working in the location space with SimpleGeo, a company that enables developers to easily make location-aware apps. The company has released 3 products since its launch last year including SimpleGeo Context, SimpleGeo Places, and most recently, SimpleGeo Storage.

The Storage platform ties the products together in a way that supports any type of location-aware app. Through Storage, SimpleGeo offers developers a complete infrastructure solution to build location apps.

“Applying that same technology theory that was used to solve some of the social media problems of real-time data in the social Web from companies like Facebook, Twitter, and, of course, Digg, we’ve been able to take some of those lessons learned… and apply it to a geo-spatial problem,” he said.

As SimpleGeo further innovates, we will likely see more location-based apps and developments emerge and integrate into our lives. With this in mind, do you think that location has the potential to impact us in the same way that social media has?

Today Digg announced that the Digg iFrame Toolbar is dead. "Framing content with an iFrame is bad for the Internet," said Rose. "It causes confusion when bookmarking, breaks w/iFrame busters, and has no ability to communicate with the lower frame (if you browse away from a story, the old digg count still persists)."

"It’s an inconsistent/wonky user experience, and I’m happy to say we are killing it when we launch the new Digg (sign up for the beta here)," added. "That said, we will continue to iterate on our browser extensions for Firefox, Chrome, and IE. Look for seriously revamped versions of those in a few months."

The Diggbar was the subject of a great deal of controversy among webmasters as soon as it was launched. There were a lot of questions about where traffic was going, and Digg ultimately had to make changes to appease the crowd.

Rose also announced today that the new Digg will be unbanning all previously banned domains. "While we will apply automated filters to prevent malware/virus/TOS violations, no other restrictions will be placed on content," he said.

To re-iterate, the changes will not take place until Digg v4 is launched. According to Mike Arrington, Rose has expressed some amount of dissatisfaction with the new Digg in the past.

It should be interesting to see how much change actually comes to Digg with this new change in leadership.

"With the new Digg getting ready to launch, Digg Ads doing well, our sales force growing, our hiring ramping, and the company maturing well beyond its startup phase, I feel that now is the right time," Adelson said in a statement.

"The entrepreneurial calling is strong, and I am ready to incubate some new business ideas over the next twelve months," he added. "As the economy exits a very deep recession, I believe that it is an excellent time for new companies to develop."

Rose offered a statement of his own. "While I’ll miss working with Jay day-to-day I am excited to be taking on the role of Chairman and acting CEO, driving Digg forward on our promise to enable social curation of the world’s content and the conversation around it. We’ve been super busy on the product side getting ready for the upcoming Digg redesign and delivering our mobile apps for the iPhone and Android." More about these here and here.

Adelson will continue to served as an adviser to Digg.  The company is not offering any more details beyond what’s in the announcement at this point.

The changes are all aimed at making the company more profitable, and one new area that they will be looking to hire in is a direct sales team. The company cites the following as its major priorities for the year:

- Rolling out new features to grow and engage our community

– Building on our advertising infrastructure

– Building on our successful partnership with Microsoft

– Ongoing sponsorship opportunities

– Ongoing publisher and trade partnerships

"I’m confident that with commitment and focus on these priorities, Digg will be an even stronger company in 2009 and will continue to create innovative features for our more than 35 million community members,"says Adelson. "I want to thank you all for your continued support and commitment – helping us achieve our vision of the democratization of media, and revolutionizing the way people consume and discover information online."

Adelson cites the company’s agenda as a "conservative approach" to its expansions plans and an aggressive plan to reach profitability within the year.

It will be interesting to see what comes out of the Microsoft deal, and how Digg will improve on its community engagement factor.

When we saw the rumor this morning at TechCrunch – “Google, Microsoft Said To Be Preparing Bids For Digg” – we thought, wow, that bidding could be pretty impressive if this is true.

But the memory of another hot TechCrunch rumor, about Fox possibly rethinking their search and advertising deal for MySpace with Google, which Fox categorically denied to WebProNews, made us skeptical. So we kept an eye on this nugget of Digg goodness to see what would happen.

Our patience proved correct. In a rare move for anyone in tech in general, where comments on rumors simply don’t happen, Adelson publicly disclaimed the rumor:

Normally our policy is to not comment about things like this, but this morning

]]> http://www.webpronews.com/adelson-dismisses-digg-sale-rumors-2008-03/feed 0