Location Is The Missing Link Between Social Networks And The Rea. Imagine a world where you sit at your computer and you never go outside. Where you never see another human being. This is the world that sites like Google and Facebook want you to live in. Though they’d never admit to such a thing, the reasoning should be obvious: The longer you’re at your computer, the more time you’re spending on their sites. The more time your spending on their sites, the more ads you’re being served.
Thankfully, we don’t quite live in that world yet. Social networking has been perhaps the most popular trend on the Internet over the past several years. Ever since the term was born, countless people have debated the implications of taking social interactions virtual. If you’ll allow me to be embarrassingly obvious for a second: Sitting in a chat room all day, even if all of your friends are in it as well, is not the same as being in the same physical room with them.
That’s where location comes in. Social networking up until this point has been great. Last Night's Check-ins. Foursquare Firefox Add-on | ul.timate.info. Overview foursquare is a simply a ton of fun. Built by ex-Googlers, they merge the idea of telling your friends where you are with winning badges and even, in cases, real world things like free drinks. foursquare to-date is a purely mobile experience and why should it be limited to just that.
Now enables you to check-in from any computer using IP and wifi based location services. This means that you can enjoy the pleasures of foursquare even if you don't yet have an iPhone, Blackberry or Android phone. Even cooler, allows you to not just update Twitter when you check in on foursquare , but Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and FriendFeed all at once! Why? I loved the idea when the guys sold their previous foray (dodgeball) to Google. FourTap - Checking in to Foursquare using an Oystercard. Peek Maps - Show off your where! Mobzombies iPhone. Foursquare Lets Others Play With Its API. Up until now, Foursquare, the hot location-based service, has only let a handful of developers play around with its API. Starting today, the company is formally unveiling it, hoping that a robust app community will form around their data.
Here’s the way they’re describing it: The foursquare API enables developers to build applications that interact with the foursquare platform. You can use the API to create new ways to check-in to foursquare or visualize the data generated by the foursquare community. Our API is still a work in progress and we look forward to your feedback and suggestions! In announcing the API, Foursquare has also created an app gallery to show what’s already been built ontop of the API so far.
Included in this gallery are: Another third-party app just announced is Layar with support for Foursquare. That’s a pretty good list of third-party support considering that access to the API has been very restricted up until this point. [photo: flickr/indienate] Cougars, Yuppies, And Sugar Daddies, Oh My! Ex-Googlers Working. Ever wanted to see where your city’s highest concentration of frisky, mature Cougars was located?
How about a list of locations in town that offer free meals when it’s your birthday? Two ex-Googlers have quietly launched a site called TownMe that’s looking to answer these questions and more. In fact, the site is aiming to become a comprehensive guide to pretty much everything that’s relevant at the local level, from restaurant reviews to the best schools and hospitals in town. Co-founder Elad Gil says that TownMe is still in “very, very early stages”, so there are still many features to come, but the core of the site seems to be in place, with local reviews and guides available for plenty of restaurants and events like San Francisco’s street fairs.
While Gil ackowledges that there are other major sites like Yelp in this space, he points out some key differences. The site also leverages an array of publicly available information like census data and hospital ratings. The GeoAPI Launches For Places, Tweets, Flickr Photos, And More. Location, location, location. With the growing ubiquity of GPS-equipped phones, there is a virtual land rush going on right now to put geolocation capabilities in every mobile app.
Today, Mixer Labs, the folks behind TownMe, introduced the GeoAPI, aimed at developers who want to add geolocation features to their apps in a plug-and-play fashion. The GeoAPI is built on top of what was previously called the TownMe GeoAPI, which offered a reverse geo-coder for lat/long coordinates and geo-database of 16 million businesses and points of interest. But now it is its own separate product, and with today’s release the GeoAPI now includes geo-coded Tweets and Flickr photos, improved search, a dedicated short URL (http//:geo.am) for location-specific links, an iPhone SDK, and better intersection data. To get a basic feeling for how this works, check out these simple demos for geo-coded Tweets and Flickr photos in San Francisco. A review of location-based networks — and how they can grow fast. Meet New People Near You Using Your iPhone and Loopt Mix. Geolocation is one of the big current trends in social networks and mobile applications.
And why not? Being able to find out what's going on around you and what your friends are doing nearby is pretty awesome. It's one of the reason apps and services like Foursquare are gaining traction. Today, Loopt, one of the early players in connecting users to their friends based on location, is launching a new app that helps you meet new people, called Loopt Mix.Loopt Mix (iTunes link) is a free app for the iPhone that lets you connect with people nearby that you don't already know, but might want to meet. With it, you create a profile (your e-mail address is never shown and you can choose to hide or show your age) and you can search for people nearby. You can post status updates showing what you're doing - so if you are playing basketball and looking for someone to join in, you can include that information so that would-be ballers can know to message you to join in on the fun.
How to Hype Your Tiny Social Network in the New York Times - Fou. Foursquare, a Social Network Site, Puts Users Face to Face - NYT. Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey invested in Foursquare | The Soci. Twitter just closed a massive funding round that reportedly has given it a billion-dollar valuation. Meanwhile, co-founder and chairman Jack Dorsey is making investments of his own: he's one of the undisclosed angel investors in geolocation start-up Foursquare, quite a few sources have told CNET News. News of the New York-based Foursquare's venture round, led by Union Square Ventures, leaked earlier this month via an SEC filing. A source with knowledge of the deal's terms said that about $200,000 of that $1.35 million in funding was taken up by the angel investors, including Dorsey, but that there are quite a few hats in the ring so none of them has a particularly huge stake in the company.
Foursquare's executives have chosen to keep the names on the list quiet. Twitter and Foursquare already have an investor in common: Union Square Ventures, which participated in Twitter's Series A and B rounds but sat out on the most recent one . But back to Foursquare. Publications When Mobile Apps Go Social 09/22/2009. Foursquare Beats Twitter to Local Advertising Goldmine. Foursquare is the mobile social game that you play by checking in at various locales while out and about. The location-based application has managed to strip the fat out of other location-aware mobile ideas, find just the right formula for encouraging check-ins, and hit at the right time. Now, they're sitting pretty with funding and a trajectory that resembles Twitter's rise to glory. Foursquare, however, isn't wasting any time on monetizing and has just beat Twitter to the business services market. Today marks the launch of their beta advertising platform — Foursquare for Businesses — designed to provide retailers with an opportunity to highlight specials to Foursquare users who check-in nearby and get data based on the location-based campaigns.
Foursquare for Businesses is a natural extension of the product that we knew was coming. It's absolutely genius and here's why. Social Great / Where's the Crowd? Foursquare. Foursquare gets past the man power problem by crowdsourcing its. What do startups strapped for cash — and time — do when they want to expand their brand into new places? In the case of Foursquare, they're letting their users do it for them. The location-based messaging service, begun by Naveen Selvadurai and Dennis Crowley in New York City, has been getting a lot of positive press lately. (I've written previously about the company here.) But keeping up with all of that attention is a different story. While many online companies can easily push their web presence globally, Foursquare is currently only available in 22 cities.
The technology is capable of working anywhere, but making it useful takes work on the ground. And in Vancouver, users are willing to put in those hours themselves. Foursquare works by letting users "check-in" to different locations in a city and broadcasting that info to their approved friends on the service. Crowley and Selvadurai have made their product incredibly popular by turning socializing into a game. Image: 6S. The New Restaurant Bribery - yelp - Gawker. Free Beer! Foursquare Starts Alerting Users Of Nearby Mayor Deal. Last month, we wrote about Foursquare’s potential from a business perspective thanks to its location data. This week, the service has started actively tapping that potential by alerting users when locations close to them are offering special deals. As you can see in the image, a large blue alert now appears at the bottom of check-in pages on Foursquare’s iPhone app to let you know if there is a deal at a place close to the place where you currently are.
With the headline “mayor offer nearby”, these deals reward mayors of particular places. Users can become the “mayor” of a location on Foursquare by checking in at a place more than any other user over a 60 day period. For businesses, that’s obviously something that would be good to reward. And something like a free beer seems like a very small price to pay for getting people excited about coming to your place more often.
And Crowley sounds excited about the new Twitter geolocation API announced today. Foursquare: Why It May Be the Next Twitter. When we first wrote about Foursquare back in March it had just hit the web scene at SXSW and was taking the social media community by storm. We instantly saw the potential of a location-based service based on your Twitter network with an added layer of social gameplay. Now we're starting to see the app get adopted by more and more of our friends, finding traction in San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Chicago, San Diego, and several other hyperlocal metro hubs. These breeding grounds of Foursquare activity are creating quite a frenzy, and we thought it appropriate to take a step back and survey the surrounding location-based social networking space as it applies to mobile apps, look forward to the future, and break down the beauty of Foursquare.
While no service is likely to achieve the same scale as Twitter in the coming months, Foursquare has all the right ingredients to be one of this year's big hits. The Long and Short of LBS Google Latitude falls in the same boat.