Pittsburgh Ventures

Let’s start with an intro. I am Aaron Tainter, Alan’s colleague an Associate at Meakem Becker. I have been asked to become a part of this increasingly popular Pittsburgh Ventures blog. Hopefully I will succeed in providing some unique/interesting/candid thoughts relating to things I’m seeing in venture capital and the overall tech industry. Here’s the plan – I do a fair amount of reading on a daily basis; I enjoy reading many technology oriented blogs. As a young VC, I also have some strong opinions relating to these new companies and trends that are discussed in the blogosphere. I plan to post a weekly….eh, maybe bi-weekly (there’s nothing worse than a dormant blog, so I promise to keep it fresh) update that links to and discusses the week’s most intriguing tech/social media/other(?) articles. Let’s call it a weekly “best of” list with a little Aaron spin – I’ll work on the title! Suggestions and feedback is appreciated. Let me know if you like what you’re seeing, if I’m rambling too much or if you want to hear more, etc. Cool?

Ok, here’s my “Best-Of” – Week 1.

Google Latitude: Ready to Tell Your Friends (and Google) Where You Are?

This new feature that is integrated into the Google Maps app on all non-iPhone Smartphones has received a TON of press in the past week. As with most other seemingly interesting new apps, I gave it a test spin. I’ve been using it for a little over a week now. Three early takeaways -

1) My “techie” friends are willing to give it a try. My non-techie friends think Latitude is a sure precursor to zero privacy for everyone with a cell…soon Google, stalkers, and the government will know where I am, where I work, where I eat, where I sleep. It’s quite humorous.

2) My friends and my contacts are not on Google but are on existing social networks like Facebook and Twitter. I’m not interested in creating a new social network – too much work, not enough reward.

3) Sorry, I don’t care where you are. Furthermore, I don’t want my ex-girlfriend to know where I am! Long story, I’ll spare you the details. You can manually set your current location (lie about where you are) or disallow certain friends from seeing where you are at a given time, but it’s safe to assume that you’ll forget to modify your privacy settings.

I’ll continue to use the service just as I use LinkedIn – very passively. The “Smartphone only” and “creating a whole new social network” challenges make this hard to take off early in a big way, but we are talking about Google so you never know. There may be room in the market for one or two location aware social networks. This market is frothy – at Meakem Becker we’ve seen countless location aware social network services, the company Dodgeball has been shut down , Loopt and Brightkite are slick but have experienced fairly slow user growth. Give Latitude a try and but don’t forget that you can’t hide from Google!