Facebook Takes On FourSquare 220
An anonymous reader writes "Facebook Places is similar to FourSquare. You can go to places, 'check-in' so your friends know you're there, rate them, comment on them, and generally spew your opinions all over the internet as fast as your fingers can hit the keys. It's an obvious attempt by the company to muscle in on FourSquare's block, casting its influence ever further over us all." Now the question is, who at FourSquare turned down the offer, and how badly are they crapping their pants?
Re:Four Square (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Four Square (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, I don't know about hip ... mine aches from time to time, but I don't think that's what you mean. :-P
But, some of us are old and jaded and don't get the whole social networking thing. Some of this stuff just reminds me of stuff I got bored with in the early-mid 90's and stopped using. Some of the technologies are the same, but it's largely the same inane gibberish as before.
Heck, even my 70 year old mother doesn't trust Facebook and has stopped using it. She finds it's more crap than useful. (I was more surprised she ever used it than that she had given up on it and largely stopped using it.)
Re:Question about Foursquare (Score:3, Interesting)
tl;dr: People are social animals and companies are exploiting social obligations(real and invented) to collect data.
Re:Question about Foursquare (Score:3, Interesting)
some idiots actually add their homes and cars to it and check in at home. one of these days if i'm bored i might start checking in at other people's houses just to see if they notice.
one annoying thing is that there is no real database of places. it's all community added and i've stood in front of a business and foursquare said i was 100 meters away or some other ridiculous distance. probably because someone added it while standing far away. foursquare needs to build a real database of locations and their coordinates
Re:Question about Foursquare (Score:4, Interesting)
My wife likes Gowalla because, at least at first, it was more of a geocaching game than a social networking application. She was one of their first users, starting with its premiere at SXSW two years ago. At the time you could go around creating sites everywhere (because none existed yet), collecting "items" that would be found at locations, and completing item sets. You could also create "trips" by linking together sites. She designed a trip to see the sights at a nearby university, and one to visit all the major public art installations in the city.
Now most places already have a Gowalla site, and she has most all of the items, so it's more about checking in to see who's been there. Believe it or not, when we were in Chicago last week for Lollapalooza, she found one of her Gowalla friends (another early adopter who she met because they kept noticing sites created by each other) had checked in at many of the same places we had the previous day, during an architecture tour. Turned out that he was in town, too, and when she thought she saw him on the street a few days before, she likely had. Oh, one of her old coworkers was there, too, and she saw his check-ins.
Meanwhile her tour of the university if one of the most followed public tours in the system. They now allow you to create private tours that only you and your friends can see, but if you're going somewhere new you can locate someone who lives there, temporarily get into their friend network, and see if there are any cool tours to visit. While in Chicago we really wanted to do the tour of Frank Lloyd Wright houses, all conveniently mapped out in Gowalla on her iPhone, but we didn't have a car.
Oh, you can also see what restaurants and businesses are nearby. You know all those small local restaurants that still don't have a web presence and thus still don't show up well in Google location searches? If they're good, someone has made a site for them on Gowalla, and you'll see them with reviews when you're nearby.
Anyway, that's why she uses it. Slashdot is as close as I get to social networking.
Re:Four Square (Score:1, Interesting)
I do the same with Twitter without worrying about all the privacy issues going on with Facebook. Twitter is the only "social networking" i participate in. I can update people I know in a broadcast fashion about things, and when i need to take something private I can use other methods that have existed forever, email, sms, a phone call. Photos can be posted on my own website and links sent via twitter. I just have no need for all the extra crap on Facebook.
I did play with foursquare for a bit but on several occasions I ran into issues trying to check in, with their servers either being down or overloaded. The app would just time out, after happening several times i got frustrated with it and just gave up. When im out and about i don't feel like fussing with the phone and hitting retry a bunch of times, im primarily there to spend time with the people im out with, im not going to spend a bunch of time fussing with your not ready for primetime service