Tag: foursquare

  • Location 2012

    • users are smart and motivated enough to figure this out, and don’t mind sharing all of their location data, all the time, with everyone — this is consistent with Scoble’s belief in the end of privacy
    • carriers will sit back and just let this happen; carriers have been screwing up location based services since the dawn of the mobile web — they could easily interfere and botch this, too, by pushing their own solutions and making it difficult for users to use alternatives
    • device manufacturers and users will continue to let all of the logic move to the cloud; phones are incredibly powerful computers, and will get even more so — why not have my handset decide when to disclose my location, for whom and why?
    Nevertheless, this is the most complete description of the future that I’ve seen to date, and is worth a read.
  • Check-ins are a hack.

    Now that the f8 keynote has passed, everyone is wondering why Facebook didn’t launch a check-in feature. The reality is that check-ins are just a hack — a workaround for the fact that smart phones are still pretty dumb when it comes to location — at least in terms of the features that App developers can freely use. Smarter devices, near-field communication (NFC), better applications and more savvy advertisers are going to revolutionize how we go about our daily business. Mike Melanson at ReadWriteWeb just nailed it:

    This sort of technology would be a different take on location-based checkin systems, wherein the user has the onus of owning the proper technology. Giving users RFID chips and having the venues bear the burden of expensive technology (in the form of RFID readers in this case) – as long as the incentive to purchase this technology is there – approaches location-based services from the opposite direction and could potentially bring location to a large number of users.

    Steve Chaney also runs through the limitations of current devices, and what it will take for products to succeed in this space.

    Facebook realizes that they don’t need a check-in feature – what they need is reliable, in-store location detection. And they now have the heft to push device vendors, carriers, app developers and retailers into rolling this out.

  • When Location Matters

    Wow, what a few months. A wedding, a trip to Africa, and a tumultuous return to work that included a last-minute invitation to sit on a panel at the semantic web conference.

    Unrelated to all of this I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about location-specific mobile applications. Foursquare, Gowalla, MyTown, Yelp! and other apps have people checking in, buying places, and generating a lot of structured data tied to location and community. Having this data – and the basic services, like check-in, that you need to collect it – is only the first step. Owning a collection of users with locations, friends, and interests gives you the foundation of a useful, location-based mobile service. The exciting question is what gets built on that foundation. (Chris Dixon dubbed all of this the geo stack.)

    To make a real business you’ve got to build something on top that someone – a consumer, advertiser, or both – will actually pay for. There are a few different approaches already in use:

    • The Listings Business (Yelp and others)
    • The Local Coupon Business (foursquare, Yelp, Aloqa…)
    • The Search Ads Business (Google Local Search, Yahoo!…)
    • Virtual Currency / In-Game Items (myTown)
    • Premium Services (Skout)
    • Subscription Services (Traffic.com, Inrix, and others)

    What’s interesting is that we’re seeing innovation in both the free to consumer and pay-per-use models. Unlike the wired web, mobile web is taking off after users are already used to paying for services used on their phones – even if they’re just buying ringtones. Apple and Google (and, arguably, Microsoft with Zune) have removed a lot of the friction by setting up online payment platforms and providing strong incentives to get users connected. So all you have to do is tap buy.

    That said, relatively few of these applications are really enabled by the mobile context. Local search, most mobile games, and traffic information is almost as useful on a PC as it is on a phone. The most interesting apps – like Skout – make immediate use of your location to provide something of value. They’re still limited by hardware – for example, you can’t do location-based notification on an iPhone – but you can see where things are going.

  • foursquare – Like twitter, but Useful 🙂

    foursquare launched their API yesterday (Mashable, Techcrunch). With it, developers can:

    • identify what city the user is in
    • read/write user and friends’ check-in data
    • look up information for a particular location
    • make/send friend requests
    • retrieve venue data
    • perform a local search that includes information from your friends’ check-ins
    • add venues, tips, and to-dos

    This enables some pretty cool applications. For example, what about an AR app that shows me where all of my friends are? Or a navigation app that automatically checks in when I arrive at a location? It also opens up some interesting possibilities for advertisers. Want to create a location-aware application that can target relevant local offers – build a foursquare-aware version of Urbanspoon.

    You could also use it to push foursquare data out of their own user base and to the public at large. For example, I could build an uber-app that would allow me to tell my family that I’m running late for Thanksgiving dinner, bundle in some traffic data to estimate an ETA, and push notifications out to foursquare, twitter, or even plain old SMS.

    The comparisons to twitter are obvious but understated. Unlike twitter, foursquare has a historical record of high-value, targetable, structured data. It’s hard to make sense of a single twitter stream, let alone millions of them. But location data has structure – it can easily be parsed and sorted; relationships can be identified between people, locations, times – and that can be used to target advertising, tailor mobile services or even implement discretionary pricing.

    Unlike twitter, an open foursquare solves a user, carrier, and advertiser problem with ready, revenue generating implications. As much as I hate to admit it, maybe Scoble was right – foursquare will be bigger than twitter.