Foursquare Checkins Reveal Holiday Travel Patterns [INFOGRAPHIC] Click image to enlarge. In honor of Thanksgiving travel, Foursquare has posted an infographic on the company's blog showing checkins related to travel in the United States by plane, train, and automobile, covering a period from Halloween until just after Christmas in 2010. For airplane and train travel, data is pulled when someone checks in on Foursqure at two different airports or train stations in the same day. Automobile traffic, according to the graphic, is based on checkins on highways and roads, which sounds more ambiguous and harder to correlate specifically to travel, but it does show quite neatly the major interstates across the United States.
There's also a timeline component showing the peaks and lulls of travel around Thanksgiving and Christmas, some of the busiest travel times of the year. The timeline shows a greater spike in travel right before Thanksgiving than before Christmas. Foursquare Continues Monetisation Process With Personalised Coupons. What Is the Point of... Foursquare? Whenever a trendy app comes along, there are people who ask, “What is the point of this?” If millions of people are using something, there has to be a reason. In our What Is the Point of... series, we’ll explain it to you. This week, we're asking, What is the point of Foursquare? Yes, we know. The check-in is dead. Why, though? But turn all that off.
Use Foursquare Quietly Seriously, you can ignore all the gamification in Foursquare. You can (and should) also turn off the auto-broadcasting to Twitter and Facebook. More importantly, only be Foursquare friends with people whose tastes you trust. Use It to Explore There are lots of apps out there to recommend local stores and restaurants, because that's where all the mobile money is. In addition to getting recommendations from your friends, which is the basic use case for Foursquare, there are two killer features: Explore and Radar. You can even use Foursquare Explore on the Web, and it looks awesome on an iPad.
Foursquare Partners with OpenTable for Reservations. Foursquare has been pretty busy lately and is bringing more features to us that make dining out a simple and seamless experience. I’ve noted in the past that I’m now using the foursquare “Explore” feature to find restaurants and bars far more than I’m using Yelp. That could mean bad news for Yelp if that trend holds true for anyone else. Today, the company announced a new partnership with OpenTable that will let you make reservations right from the desktop version of the site: Now, when you’re using foursquare.com on your computer, you can make a one-click reservation, too. We’ve partnered with OpenTable to offer reservations at over 15,000 places in major cities across the US, with more to come. By bundling offers with reservations, foursquare is quickly becoming the best friend of all of the venues who rely on it for exposure.
It will be interesting to see how long it takes foursquare to put this feature into the app, which will of course require everyone to update it. Foursquare Launches $10 Instant Verification Service For Businesses. Foursquare is enhancing its feature set for businesses today, with the introduction of a new verification service for merchants. The company says that for a one-time, $10 fee, owners and managers will now be able to instantly verify their business in order to start using Foursquare’s business tools, which include the ability to offer specials, update the business listing, and access data about their customers and visitors. For those businesses that can’t register online, there’s still an option to verify the business via snail mail, but this is a much slower method. Foursquare says the mail-in option can take anywhere from three to four weeks to complete. In today’s age of instant gratification, that may as well be forever.
Business owners and managers have typically needed to provide Foursquare with their ID, the URL of the venue and links to the venue’s website, and/or page on Yelp, Google and CitySearch. Foursquare Adds Restaurant Menus, What About Food Check Ins? Less than a week after unveiling the Explore section of its website, Foursquare announced a nice addition — restaurant menus. The Foursquare mobile app has included an “Explore” tab for while now, but last week’s announcement marked its expansion into a full-blown city guide, personalized based on your check ins and those of your friends. Foursquare called it a “big leap” toward its vision of “adding an ‘interesting’ layer to your whole world,” while TechCrunch’s Alexia Tsotsis suggested it was a return to CEO Dennis Crowley’s roots as a product manager at mobile city guide Vindigo.
Now, Foursquare says it has partnered with startup SinglePlatform to add menus and pricing information for almost 250,000 restaurants in Explore. This seems like a pretty natural addition, and a way to make Explore a viable alternative to a site like Yelp. (It seems only appropriate that Foursquare is becoming more Yelp-like, since Yelp took a page from Foursquare by adding user check ins.)