This probably qualifies as so obvious as to deserve responses of “duh,” but a recent business trip really brought home to me one of foursquare’s biggest problems. The Places database makes my Outlook Contacts folder look like a model of organization. Its cluttered state makes the process of checking in to a new Place pretty tedious. I stayed at the Waldorf Hilton Hotel on Aldwych in London. Right now, there are at least three different entries for this hotel. There is The Waldorf Hilton, Hilton Waldorf hotel London and Waldorf Hotel. Figuring out which one to check into is particularly awkward on the Blackberry app because there is no way of knowing which of several duplicate entries might be the “right” one. You can’t tell that the first entry has been around the longest and has had the most number of unique visitors until you look them up on the main foursquare site, which you are probably not going to do on your phone. All told, three of the places around my hotel where I wanted to check in had duplicate entries. foursquare needs to improve this if they want their business to scale beyond geeks and early adopters, particularly given looming competition from Yelp and Facebook.

Given how common the problem is, you would think that there was an easy way to propose merging duplicate entries. Being a lean, crowd-sourced startup, foursquare relies on “superusers” to do this work for them. Currently, the only way to report duplicates is to go to Foursquare’s Get Satisfaction forum and enter it into a duplicate merge request thread. I’m not very familiar with Get Satisfaction, but their bulletin board system doesn’t strike me as a good tool to manage this process. My first quibble is that you can’t log in using your foursquare credentials. Second, only the most recent fifteen entries in a thread are visible, so the odds are high that your merge request will get bumped down off the page before a superuser sees it. The coup de grâce? You have to figure out which thread to which you should post your duplicate merge request. That’s right, they have duplicate threads to report duplicate Places!

When I was a sophomore in high school, my fundraising activities were limited to buying things at bake sales.  Even my more motivated peers were limited to looking for walkathon sponsors, organizing car washes or selling cookies, wrapping paper or citrus products.  While some of them may have wanted to aim higher, they were limited as to the number of people that the could reach in the time that they had to devote to the cause.  Nowadays, the ambitious kids are not content to raise a hundred dollars from neighbors and co-workers of parents.  Instead, they are leveraging technology and social media to raise millions.

Monica Oxenreiter is a sophomore at her high school near Pittsburgh, and she would certainly be counted among the ambitious crowd.  She was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes at the age of thirteen months.  Her brother also has diabetes.  As a result she has been active with the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation.  When she was in middle school, she had the idea that perhaps she could raise $100 from every zip code in the United States, and her project, Zip The Cure, was born.  ”My brother and I were both JDRF Children’s Congress delegates in 2005, and while we were there we met so many amazing people who were really dedicated to finding a cure that we wanted to find a way to connect everyone,” said Monica when I spoke with her the other day.  ”Zip codes seemed like a logical thing.”  Part of the appeal of the zip code aspect was that it would lend itself to having a national map that could be colored in as each zip code hit its goal.  At the time, Monica didn’t know much about Google Maps or even how many zip codes there were in the United States.  It turns out that there are over 42,000, making the idea potentially worth as much as $4.2 million in donations to the JDRF.

Starting when Monica was in the eighth grade, she and her family began the process of setting up a not-for-profit corporation and gaining approval from the JDRF to act as a fundraiser.  She then had to get the Web site built.  While her father could get it going, they needed someone who could use the Google Maps API to build the map.  When Monica had no luck finding help at university computer science departments, she cold-called a programming consultant and was able to negotiate a substantial discount to his normal rate.  PayPal then provided the mechanism to collect donations, and zipthecure.com was ready to go.

“The most difficult thing so far has been getting the word out,” said Monica. Zip The Cure currently has over 900 members of its group on Facebook. Twitter is lagging behind with only about 80 followers.  ”I am more familiar with Facebook than with Twitter, so that was the natural place to start,” according to Monica.  She also feels that blogs have proven to be a potent source of interest,  ”While we have had attention from the traditional press, getting coverage in diabetes-related blogs has been the most successful in driving traffic to the site.”

Although technology and social media have made projects like this feasible, they haven’t become easy.  Monica estimates that she spends about 35 hours a week working on Zip The Cure, including maintaining the site, generating awareness, soliciting donations and keeping volunteers in the loop.  She has to put this time in after school and on weekends.  Monica has also learned “that she shouldn’t take ‘no’ personally.”  All of the hard work is beginning to bear fruit however.  Currently, over 150 zip codes have been sponsored generating more than $15,000 in donations for the JDRF.

What advice does Monica have for other young people looking to do something meaningful?  ”The most important thing to do is to concentrate on the positive and not get discouraged,” she says. “There are so many really generous and great people out there that are willing to help you, and you can make a difference.”

Last week, I was able to attend a session with Seth Godin in New York.  While Seth had some prepared remarks, most of the time was spent reacting to real-life business situations that members of the audience brought up.  The audience consisted of about 50 people from as far away as Australia.  Anyone who reads Seth’s blog (you do read his blog, don’t you?) knows that he has an incredible ability to convey valuable insights in remarkably little prose.  If you think that you get a lot from two paragraphs of his writing, you can imagine what I got out of spending seven hours listening to him talk.  If you ever have the opportunity to see Seth speak, I highly recommend taking advantage of it.

One of my favorite observations that Seth made was that people have specific “worldviews.”  You can either try to change these worldviews or leverage them.  Needless to say, changing them is very difficult.  One example he brought up was advertising.  When he was in the business, he presumed that people wanted to buy advertising in order to create awareness, inspire trial usage, generate revenue, etc.  In other words, he thought people bought advertising because it worked.  What he found out was that people bought advertising for many reasons, many of which had little or nothing to do with whether it “worked.”.  As an example, how many Super Bowl commercials really make sense as an economic proposition?  Still. there are plenty of people making lots of money leveraging the worldviews of advertisers who feel they have to be part of the big game.

It seems to me that one of the challenges about worldviews is that our own so often get in the way.  We fall in love with what we are selling and how we are selling it.  If it doesn’t sell, it is because the customer doesn’t “get it.”  The best mousetrap won’t sell well if using it does not fit in with the worldviews of the customers.  Acknowledge this and don’t let your own worldview cloud your judgment.

Thanks Seth and the members of the audience for a remarkable day.

My friend Tom Corddry recommended Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives.  Since Tom knows more about this stuff than anyone else I know, I expected great things, and I was not disappointed.  Note that this is a book about social networks, not social media.  While much of the information can be applied to on-line communities, the book is not about them in isolation.  If you are looking for something about Facebook, keep going.

This fascinating book provides a lot of insight into phenomena that are otherwise difficult to understand.  For instance, the authors demonstrate that the motivation to vote derives from social networks.  From a purely rational, economic perspective, it does not make any sense to vote.  Let’s say you would pay $1,000 to be the only person who chooses the winner in an election.  An economist would say that by voting you are buying a lottery ticket with a potential payoff to you of $1,000.  You “win” the lottery only if there is a tie between the candidates and your vote becomes the deciding vote.  Guess how often that happens?  Given situations like Florida 2000, you might think it happens from time to time.  Well,  it has never happened even once in any election, Federal, State or local, during the entire history of the United States.  This is a lottery that you have no chance of winning.  Economically, it is literally not worth the gas to drive to the polling place.  So why do people vote?  The authors suggest that citizens know something instinctively that economists do not.  They know that by voting, they will influence others to vote as well.  As a result, there does not have to be a tie in order to win the lottery.  Voting is, to some degree, contagious.  It turns out that this is the case with most things, whether it is the urge to yawn, one’s emotional state, disease, weight gain or loss, attitudes, information or an idea.

The authors call the likelihood that the act of one person will influence others “amplification.”  In the case of voting, a conservative voting might inspire a liberal friend to vote because the liberal friend might want to “balance” his conservative friend.  Not surprisingly though, amplification works best in networks of relatively similar people.  A single liberal voting will influence many more liberals to vote than conservatives.  The distance and rate at which things spread through a network are a function of the network’s structure — how “transitive” the network is.  In networks with high transitivity, most of the members know most of the other members.  In networks with low transitivity, most of the members only know a few of the other members, but all are still connected — just in a more linear way.  You might think that things travel farther and faster through networks with high transitivity, but the authors state that is not the case.  Highly transitive networks can have insular clusters where individual participants can’t influence individuals in other clusters of the network.  People who are more moderately transitive are more likely to act as bridges between clusters in a network.  In other words, transitivity needs to be just right.  When you have the right mix of amplification and transitivity, the results can be dramatic.  The authors talk of voting “cascades” where one voter influences hundreds and ultimately perhaps thousands of others to vote.  This is possible because you can be influenced by people in your network that you don’t even know.  You may have a friend A who in turn has a friend B whom you do not know.  Friend A is apathetic about voting, but friend B votes and, as a result, friend A feels that the act of voting is more important than before.  Friend A communicates this new attitude to you, and you run down to the polling place to vote because of the influence friend B exerted upon you.

The potential applications are many.  Consider this recent Bloomberg story on how the SEC is deploying novel techniques to identify insider trading:

[T]he SEC began using computer software about two years ago to sift hundreds of millions of electronic trading records, known as blue sheets, attached to the stock exchange reports about suspicious incidents, according to people familiar with the project. By looking for patterns in the library of data, they identified groups of traders who repeatedly made similar well-timed bets.

Once investigators find a cluster of correlated trades, they tap other sources of information to unravel how its members obtain and share tips, the people said. For example, if a group profits on trades before a series of corporate takeovers, the SEC may check so-called league tables listing which investment banks or law firms advised the deals. If one firm was involved in all of them, an employee there may be the source of the leak.

Can you find more customers the way the SEC is finding inside traders — using their social networks to detect them?  Even better, can you create a cascade of new customers voting for your product or service by finding more effective ways to influence them by understanding the structure of their social networks?