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?
@Facebook (Score:5, Funny)
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Foursquare is cool.
But you should give Kickball a try.
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Not as long as #Twitter is still around.
Four Square (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Four Square (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Four Square (Score:4, Funny)
I hear every bar that you go to is more relevant than every bar I go to.
Re:Four Square (Score:4, Funny)
That's true. You should totally try my favorite bar, but it's pretty underground, so trust me, you've never heard of it.
Re:Four Square (Score:5, Funny)
I listen to bands so obscure they haven't been formed yet.
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That's so 2001. The new hotness is to listen to bands that only released one album, and then broke up after the lead singer's death by heroin overdose.
It's pretty specific criteria, that's how you know the music must be good. And you can spend hours speculating on your blog about how amazing the music would have been, if the guy hadn't died.
Shit, I just spilled vanilla soy chai on my hoodie.
Re:Four Square (Score:5, Funny)
I had a conversation with a hipster the other day... Keep in mind I grew up in the 70's and 80's:
Hipster: "I had LCD Soundsystem's debut album before they recorded it."
Me: "i liked LCD Soundystem better when they were Gil-Scott Heron."
Him: "I stopped listening to the Arcade Fire years ago."
Me: "I liked Arcade Fire better when they were The Cure."
Him: "I listened to 80's music in the 90's."
Me: "I hated 80's music in the 70's."
Him: "I buy demo tapes on CD and transfer them to vinyl."
Me: "In 1981 I bought a Sony PCM-F1 and recorded digital on VHS."
Him: "I bought a $3000 Mac to run an NES Emulator."
Me: "I hacked my Atari VCS to make international phonecalls."
Him: "My other computer is an Amstrad."
Me: "I sold my Amstrad to some hipster shmuck for 10x what I paid... Hey..."
Him: "Back in the day we only had 8-bit colors."
Me: "Back in my day, we didn't have colors. We had A color... Amber, white or green."
Him: "I watched Ninja Warrior when it was called Sasuke."
Me: "I watched Power Rangers when it was called Voltron."
Him: "I was the first kid on my block to play Mortal Kombat."
Me: "I was the only kid on my block to own "Pac Man Fever" by Buckner & Garcia."
Him: "I played the first popular FPS, Wolfenstein 3-D."
Me: "I have Silas Warner's original Wolfenstein... in 2-D."
Him: "I listened to Massive Attack before House made their music popular."
Me: "I listened to Massive Attack when they had lyrics."
Him: "Oh yeah, I buy corduroy pants from the thrift store."
Me: "I gave my corduroy pants from third grade to the thrift store. You're wearing them."
Re:Four Square (Score:5, Funny)
Someone should totally open up a bar for programmers. Just call it the Progress Bar.
Re:Four Square (Score:5, Insightful)
Someone should totally open up a bar for programmers. Just call it the Progress Bar.
That's more like a bar for the IT workers that install software on corporate computers all day.
All the cool programmers drink at the Foo Bar
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With all the soldiers, sailors, and airmen who don't particularly think that geeks making cutesy geek words out of their acronyms are amusing? Great plan!
I'll take the Seal team on the left, you take the Ranger battalion on the right.
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All the cool programmers drink at the Foo Bar
Whatev, static void. The #- is where it's at.
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Nonsense.. It's merely encapsulated to prevent casual observers from seeing what's going on inside.
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They have time to get a drink waiting for software to install because of the amount of crappy software that cool programmers produce.
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Someone should totally open up a bar for programmers. Just call it the Progress Bar.
Fail.
I won't tell you the correct name.
I'll just note that Mr. T would pity it.
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My favorite bar is so popular, no one ever goes there because it is too crowded.
Re:Four Square (Score:5, Funny)
Q: How many hipsters does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A: It's some obscure number, you've never heard of it.
Re:Four Square (Score:5, Funny)
I have an iPhone 4, I have no bars whereever I go.
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.)
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No, but I read the articles that seem like they'll be interesting and respond to the salient points that people make.
Counting old and jaded folks like myself as "hip" seemed interesting enough to respond to. I mean, I've never been lumped in with the hipsters before, so the assertion just seemed ... unusual.
I was merely pointing out that some of us really are old and jaded, an
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If you're jaded, to me, it means that you were interested at one point and you've lost touch with that interest. The indifferent person never cared in the first place and simply doesn't give a damn.
I choose to skip over the stuff I think is pointless. To bother to sit around and debate over something you have no interest in makes me wonder about how much free time someone has. Sorry but I'm ust being
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Definitely jaded. Sunk way too many hours into usenet and IRC in the 90s, completely lost interest in it. All of the stuff that came afterwards just seems like variations on a theme that doesn't really bring anything new to the table -- except for a new generation of users that never used it in the last iterati
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I can understand where you come from with irc and usenet but those reall
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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.)
For some of us, it reminds us a lot of the technologies we were using in the 80s, except with a slightly higher quality of gibberish because you could ban the dumbest users from BBS's and gain loyalty from those that were left.
I'd be more surprised that your mother stopped using it than started. The fact that a lot of AARP type folks are on FB should say something about how hip it is.
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Yes, I guess I'd forgotten the old BBS days. And, there was a higher level of discussion going on, that is true. And, generally those people were locals who I might actually know and stand a chance of meeting at some of the parties.
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People are pretty much waiting for a replacement to current social networking. I give it 3-5 years tops for something ad-hoc to replace facebook.
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Maybe around here but not the population in general. Facebook has been on a steep curve of growth over the past year. More and more people are eating it up.
And as far as what people around here want? Don't make any bets on it. I've been here a long time and if I put money down on what the future of most technology would be from the majority around here I would be broke today. I've been hearing for years about replacements for A
Re:Four Square (Score:4, Insightful)
Slashdot would be the worst possible indicator of a technology which would be successful in the future.
If Slashdot could predict successful tech, we'd all be using ogg-vorbis, the Year of the Linux Desktop would have happened by now, and Apple wouldn't have sold 3+ million iPads. :-P
We see technology through an entirely different lens than the consumer public. And we're have really bad tunnel vision.
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Finally, I am ahead of a trend on the interwebs!
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Acting like you're too old school to give a crap about anything used by the social networking folks is now hip.
Cool! Old-fogey is the new hip! I knew it would loop around eventually! Now get off my goddamned lawn.
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Be aware though, that the motivation required to write a Slashdot post is pretty low.
Re:Four Square (Score:4, Insightful)
Still as much of a pain as it is to block all the annoying features of facebook, it becomes a useful tool in the end.
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Agreed. That's how I got into it - had a baby and most of my family live a six hour drive away. By posting updates to FB, I'm not inundated with phone calls of, "how's the baby?" or "send more pictures!"
Re:Four Square (Score:5, Insightful)
As someone who ostensibly cares about technology, being here on Slashdot, why would you not be interested in hearing about geolocation applications, what they can do, and why people are using them?
Is it that you're "too cool" for anything that might involve (or even *EASE*, for those of us who are a bit awkward) social interaction, even if it is one of the more interesting recent developments in consumer tech? Take a look at all of the "Augmented Reality" type apps out there, and tell me there's not some interesting technological potential in them. The idea that you can have a device in your pocket, pull it out, and within 30 seconds be looking for "cool shit to do near where I'm standing," is amazing, because if it's built up enough to have data, you're going to start seeing more and more of the cool local shit that never gets much advertising, but is still really cool to experience - think little local restaurants that don't advertise, but have a rabid local following - wouldn't it be neat to be able to find those places easily, no matter where you are, instead of another bland steak at Friday's, because "Well, I recognize the sign, and I don't know this town."
There are obvious privacy and security concerns relevant to these kinds of apps - those are interesting technological challenges. The apps themselves are a really fascinating application of multiple technologies in a novel way. So really, the question is: why would you NOT be interested to hear a bit about the apps, and how they're being used, if you're interested enough in technology to be here reading this stuff?
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Also this isn't how they're being used, this is just coverage of a new implementation, and bad coverage about it since it's just overblown hysterics about how Facebook is going to end our lives and take over DHS and the Eurozone.
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I agree, the article doesn't do much to advance any sort of debate other than saying "OH NOES, FACEBOOK R TEH EVILZ!"
But services like FourSquare, and even Facebook, are fundamentally interesting pieces of technology with lots of interesting technological problems to solve. They have potential, and ignoring them in favor of "email - the way god intended for us to communicate" is a little short-sighted.
You want to know the problem with all this stuff? (Score:3, Insightful)
You.
i.e. People.
The technologies may be cool. The potential may be amazing. But you know what? They have to make it for the average person. And that means the lowest common denominator.
You think you're going to be able to find that little local restaurant among all the shit that people think is wonderful when the masses arrive in droves on those systems? No. What you're going to see is Mcdonalds, Starbucks, TGI Fridays etc etc because they are the ones paying to be on the first lines your screen when you se
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No, these services continue to exist because people find them useful, and so continue to use them, despite their flaws & risks.
You may have noticed that I followed that statement about concerns with a qualifier: "those are interesting technological challenges."
How do you build a system that gives people the interesting functionality they're looking for while allowing them to maintain some privacy and keeping their info secure? Why would this sort of a question not interest a geek who is interested in
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You're an idiot. You just summed up the entirety of human technological innovation, and discarded it with an offhand, "Your life was fine before you had it, you won't ever miss it."
See, when you say things like this, you sound like an idiot, and nobody takes idiots seriously when they state their firmly held opinions about things they'
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I felt the same way until I got my first CueCat, a fresh breeze of progress across the rotting mountain of human endeavors.
Heh! (Score:3, Funny)
Kinda funny when you think about it. A Slashdotter seeming to poke fun or have a bit of disgust for people who babble on and on about something... Doesn't sound like this place at all. Oh no.
Re:Heh! (Score:5, Funny)
The difference is, on /. we only babble about stuff that matters. It's written on the top of the page, so it must be true.
Question about Foursquare (Score:5, Insightful)
I know what people do with it, but why do they do it?
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I know what people do with it, but why do they do it?
They long dreamily for the stalkers the rest of us have and don't want.
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Wait ... so, the electric sheep are the ones dreaming now? ;-)
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I've never had a relationship you insensitive clod!
Easy Answer (Score:5, Insightful)
I know what people do with it, but why do they do it?
The same could be said of that post you just posted. I know what you do on Slashdot but why do you do it?
And I think the answer is very simple: communication with a nominal reward. People love debate and communication and giving advice and the like. Just because FourSquare focuses on restaurants and eateries doesn't make it any less pointless than our banter and talk of tech here on Slashdot. It simply has a different target market. It might be bigger, it might be smaller but it's something evidently.
"I'm Mayor of the 1st St. Chipotle" vs "I just got a +5 Insightful on this post!" Simple meaningless reward that means something to the user.
Think of it like a game. Personally I think it's worthless but I wouldn't consider myself very keen on the internet if I didn't realize what it does effectively and how it appeals to the users. Of course that means eyeballs and of course Facebook wants their users to lock in and stay. Maybe they'll make a native FourSquare to Facebook to appeal to that market?
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"I'm Mayor of the 1st St. Chipotle" vs "I just got a +5 Insightful on this post!" Simple meaningless reward that means something to the user.
Ah, but there's a difference here .... A Foursquare Reward is merely a consequence of pressing a button on your phone when you are in the same place often. Anybody can do this. A Slashdot +5 Insightful is (usually) a sign that you've used your brain to assemble and share a coherent thought, and that others found it interesting enough that they want others to see it, too.
And what would you rather be known for -- Having interesting ideas that get read by thousands of smart people, or being the guy that eats
Re:Easy Answer (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a pretty rare sight to actually see something Insightful modded as such.
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The posts that are after a +5 whatever are frequently not worth reading. Sometimes they are though, simply because, when it works, the moderation system encourages at least some useful content.
The "checkin" scheme doesn't. All it requires is that you be at a place. Knowing that Eldavojohn is mayor of 1st St. Chipotle can I tell if it's a good place to eat? Can I tell if Eldavojohn likes it, even? No.
You're right, it's a game. But it seems very much like a useless one. Free advertising, I guess. I su
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I know what you do on Slashdot but why do you do it?
For the chicks.
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tl;dr: People are social animals and companies are exploiting social obligations(real and invented) to collect data.
Re:Question about Foursquare (Score:4, Insightful)
because it's OCD addictive like Farmville for a few weeks until you get tired of it
few months ago Robert Scoble wrote a column about Four Square, Blippy and a few other services where he actually took it seriously.
but it's fairly useful. i found a few lunch places due to foursquare reviews
in the end it's one of those kiddy everyone wants to know what i'm doing internet thingies. i've noticed my soon to be 3 year old son acts out when he wants attention. same thing with all these new location services. a lot of kids didn't get enough attention so now they are trying to get it via the internet.
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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 c
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.
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It's a daredevil thrill. Announce in real time to all your friends, acquaintances, and wellwishers that you're 30 miles from home, then see if any of them are nervy enough to burglarize you while you're out.
It's like a lower-stakes Russian Roulette!
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Because it's there - and why not?
Also, to let my friends know where I am and what I'm doing. I don't bother checking in at work, at home, at the shops, etc, but if I'm actually out (and I remember) then yeah, I'll check in on it.
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You joke, but one of my coworkers is in some kind of competition to be the Mayor of the nearby Starbucks. Apparently they offer some kind of discount to whoever is the current Mayor.
She thinks she's saving money with that 10% discount on the 3+ lattes she's buying there everyday.
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You do realize that 90% of something 100% of something... right?
You're free to claim that you believe the cup of coffee she's buying isn't worth the 100% price in the first place, but a 10% discount is still a savings for her, regardless of whether or not you consider it a worthwhile expense.
Foursquare? Never heard of it. (Score:2, Insightful)
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I use Facebook all the time. I've never heard of Foursquare. Is this another one of those "I use it, therefore I assume everybody uses it" kind of things?
No, it's been all over CNN and the rest of the major news outlets. They have big deals with tons of different big name museums, etc. It's "another one of those 'If you read the news you should know what it is' kind of things". But hey I totally agree with you. While I know what it is, I choose not to use it even though I was a pretty heavy Dodgeball user
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s/If you read the news/If you watch advertisements and infotainment/
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It's been discussed here on Slashdot previously, and many of the stories involving twitter, geotagging, facebook, and location-aware applications have had discussions mentioning it (and similar services, like Gowalla).
You post here on Slashdot, and yet you don't even read the headlines?
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Sorry for not diligently reading every single story ./ publishes.
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Maybe you should spend time scanning headlines, instead of attempting to make yourself look so very post-modern by posting snarky little regex comments that add nothing to the discussion other than to tell us, "Here's a guy who thinks he's so very much better than all of us, because he's never heard of the thing we're talking about."
To borrow a line from Chris Rock, you are clearly "keepin' it real - real dumb." If not knowing about something makes you feel better, great. Otherwise, you might try understa
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Either you have a life, or you're feigning ignorance trying to one up us all... damn hipsters.
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Hipsters? What, not knowing or caring what people on Facebook are doing makes me a hipster? Friggin' awesome!!
Now, get off my cool, hip lawn as I go back to ignoring your social networking craze altogether. It's largely just recycling usenet and IRC/ICQ -- all of which got boring in the 90s for some of us.
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IRC never had cool people. I know, I was one of them.
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Foursquare, and its sister location-based social networking application Gowalla, were the darlings of this year's SXSW Interactive conference - the same conference where Twitter launched. I take it your not a web applications developer*, because if you were you would have followed SXSW and then you would have heard of Foursquare.
* Unlike most of Slashdot, which seem to be except when posting in this story. =p
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I use Facebook all the time. [...] Is this another one of those "I use it, therefore I assume everybody uses it" kind of things?
Face...what?
foursquare? Twitter? (Score:2)
No use for user feedback? (Score:2)
I cannot, however, see any point whatsoever in foursquare.
Do you also avoid consumer reviews of products when you go to buy something?
That seems like a bad idea. It seems equally silly to refuse to look at ratings of something like a restaurant you might want to try for the first time.
Even just the fact a lot of people have checked into a place means it must be decent.
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I cannot, however, see any point whatsoever in foursquare.
Do you also avoid consumer reviews of products when you go to buy something?
That seems like a bad idea. It seems equally silly to refuse to look at ratings of something like a restaurant you might want to try for the first time.
Even just the fact a lot of people have checked into a place means it must be decent.
But it's not the first or only venue to post reviews of restaurants.
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>>Do you also avoid consumer reviews of products when you go to buy something? That seems like a bad idea. It seems equally silly to refuse to look at ratings of something like a restaurant you might want to try for the first time.
There's Zagat, Metro Times, and hundres of other resources for that.
>>Even just the fact a lot of people have checked into a place means it must be decent.
Oh, no no no no. That's completely wrong. I assume that people check into McDonald's and Starbucks all the time. A
Foursquare and offers (Score:4, Informative)
The guy who founded Foursquare's predecessor, Dodgeball, actually sold the business to Google, where it became Latitude. He was dissatisfied at that product's narrow scope, and set up Foursquare to revisit that niche the way he preferred. I imagine that Facebook put in a bid for Dodgeball and began work on Facebook Places after they were rejected.
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Actually now that I do some background reading, the Google sale took place back in 2005, so it's much too old for Facebook to have had a look in.
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Watch, now that I said that... the next hot new product == facebook.com/b/
Business as usual (Score:2)
"Its influence ever further?" Isn't this just good competition in the social networking space? Google is a far more monolithic company than Facebook, its goal being to have its hooks in all the world's information, and they've been trying to muscle in on social media as well (Buzz, Wave, Me, etc.). I haven't heard complaints about that.
When company B resists buyout by company A and company A then starts competing directly with company B, it's usually because company A had decided to move into company B's ma
Opinionated summary. (Score:2)
I started out wanting to point out the internal contradiction in the perspective presented by the summary (who seems to support Foursquare, yet describes the very-similar service provided by Facebook in negative-sounding terms). Then I considered a general rant on what I think of Foursquare as a service in the first place; but I decided this might be an opportunity to address a broader question:
The majority around here seem to believe software should be outside the scope of patents. Even if we allow for s
Antitrust? (Score:2)
Facebook is starting to do things very similar to what Microsoft did when they bundled IE with windows. There are apps running on their platform and when they want control over those apps they simply bundle their app and integrate with the user interface in ways that aren't available.
And Facebook's marketshare is probably similar to what MS's was at the time. It is the most popular thing on the internet.
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It is the most popular thing on the internet.
Did I miss Something [google.com]?
Who turned the offer down...? (Score:3, Insightful)
Probably the same person that had decided that no one uses text messages anymore and supporting non-smartphones is not worth their time and non-smartphones supposedly no longer exist.
As it is I migrated to BrightKite a long time ago because their interface just worked better and I was never really interested in the gaming aspect of Foursquare. To me it's just a social proprioception tool.
My use case in case anyone wants to know. I have a tight knit group of friends and for 90% of my checkins only they get the updates. Conversly, I only get their alerts sent to me. Where this is useful, for me, is if I say go to the mall on Saturday.
*I check-in at the mall cause I need new socks.
*Fifteen minutes later friend A checks in at the mall
*This check-in generates an alert which gets SMS'd to my phone "A has checked in where you are!"
*I sms Friend A : "Hey I'm at the mall too. Why don't we grab lunch at Restaurant X?"
There, with little effort I now have a coincidental meet-up with a friend over lunch; this has significantly made my trip to the mall more enjoyable than just hunting for a good deal on socks. Silly, perhaps, but for all you know it maybe a friend I don't get to see that much offline.
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You know, I was kind of wondering where this move left Brightkite. Potential acquisition target? #3 to be and out?
Innovation (Score:2)
GetGlue (Score:2)
On the other hand though, i've logged into Facebook maybe three or
Re:All of us? (Score:4, Informative)
I never used Foursquare, because it reminds of the game the retarded kids have to play at recess.
Yes, because any activity involving even the slightest bit of exercise is only for the "retarded".
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I never used Foursquare, because it reminds of the game the retarded kids have to play at recess.
You obviously never played foursquare with weightlifters using a bouncy medicine ball...shit is intense.
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I use foursquare and it can be quite helpful when in a new town for a night of partying.
And now we know why regular slashdotters don't use it...
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Ah, but the Facebook one is better! Now not only can you see if someone isn't at home, you can stalk their friends as well to see if they really aren't at home, or if they're just pretending to be not at home. Plus, you can see if the house is going to be empty by seeing if any family members are also on the friend list and seeing where they are. Plus, a peruse through the photos can tell you whether or not the family pet is harmless, a potential conc
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We should start a pool on how long it'll be before we see a national-media news story about someone putting this "business model" into practice and being caught. Maybe a second pool could try to guess the media nickname of that perpetrator, e.g., "The Facebook Bandit".
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I don't have to worry. I unfriended everyone who "Likes" the IBA page on Facebook!