What Websites Are You the One True Fan of?

When someone mentions “location-based services” to you, what is the first thing that pops into your mind? If you’re like me, you’ll immediately think of the different services that are available such as Foursquare, Gowalla and Facebook Places. They all allow you to check-in to different locations and, some of these applications, have gaming features to keep you hooked with sharing your location with everyone. To date, location-based services have focused on physical locations such as a restaurant, office, library, or a school. They are, after all, a location and these applications are location-based applications. What if you changed your thought of what a location was though and instead of a physical location thought of a location as a website? These are all virtual locations that, in theory, you could check-in to, right?

That is exactly what Eric Marcoullier and Todd Sampson have developed with their new service, OneTrueFan, which was launched during TechCrunch Disrupt. If Eric and Todd’s names sound familiar, they were the co-founders of MyBlogLog, which was the visitor tracking service that was used across the blogosphere and was acquired by Yahoo! in 2007.

How OneTrueFan works is pretty simple. As Louis Gray explains:

“To participate, you install a browser extension (for Chrome, Firefox or Safari) and a browser bar will track your Web visits. Each time you go to a new domain or subdomain, you get 10 points. For each visit to a subsequent new page, you get an additional point. So, for example, if you visit six different pages, you have 15 total points. Once you reach 20 points on a domain, you are a fan. If you have more points than any other fan, you are the One True Fan.”

As with many of the location-based services currently available, you can win different badges and also the OneTrueFan ownership of any website.

I’ve been using OneTrueFan for the past couple weeks to see how it worked and whether I would find value from using it. That’s always the ultimate question with all of these services: What value will the user derive from using the service?

So far, I’ve found that it makes browsing and working on the web more fun, which when you spend all day sitting in front of your computer, anything to add a little more fun is always welcome. Also, it provides you some insight into what sites you’re visiting and how often you frequent them. Of course, you could get that information from your browser history but how many of us actually use our browser history options that often? Yeah, exactly.

The real value for OneTrueFan will be for the website owners once OneTrueFan launches their dashboard and API. According to TechCrunch:

“OneTrueFan will eventually launch a dashboard that allows web sites get a multi-dimensional view of their readers based upon frequency of visits, amount of content read, regularity of shares and traffic sent. Web site owners can use existing channels, such as Twitter and Facebook, to communicate with readers.

In the future, OneTrueFan will be releasing an API so that publishers can customize the experience for their visitors. In the end, the aim of OneTrueFan is to help publishers increase engagement amongst everyday users and time spent on their sites.”

What’s different with OneTrueFan over other location-based services, besides the obvious difference between virtual and physical locations, is that OneTrueFan doesn’t require any additional work on my part to participate. It just hangs out in the bottom of my browsing window slowly tracking my stats and I can stop by my profile whenever I want to see what’s going on. The service leverages your Twitter social graph so there’s no need to go out and seek followers all over again, which is always an annoying feature of many new social networks.

One concern that has continually been brought up with location-based services is privacy. I even spoke about it for an entire segment during a recent NMLTV episode that focused on location-based services. The same concern exists with OneTrueFan because it is sharing your browsing footprint with your entire social graph. There may be websites that you don’t want to share with your followers that you’re accessing. For example, if I’m doing research into a potential New Marketing Labs client, I may not want to share the 2 hours of clicking around all of their web properties with the rest of the world. Luckily, OneTrueFan has thought through that and allows you to hide any specific visit and block any domain from being tracked.

I’m having fun with it so far and will keep playing with it. It’s still very early on for OneTrueFan so it will be interesting to see how it grows up over the coming weeks and months. But, it does have me wondering if we’re going to see a new breed of location-based services that focus on virtual locations as opposed to, or in addition to, physical locations.

If you want to try OneTrueFan, you can find them over at: http://www.onetruefan.com

Have you tried OneTrueFan yet? What are your thoughts of checking-in to websites that you’re visiting?

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