It was almost exactly two years ago that Google launched Latitude, their location-based service. Two years may not seem like a long time, but it’s “the equivalent of a decade in location services,” Latitude PM Ken Norton jokes. Most importantly, it was just before Foursquare launched to the world at SXSW in 2009. That changed the entire game, literally, as Google CEO Eric Schmidt likes to say. You see, it brought the idea of the “check-in” into play. And that ended up being the idea that launched a thousand location-based services. Today, finally, Google is getting on board with that idea.
Yes, the check-in is coming to Latitude — finally.
Latitude at its core has always been about sharing your best available location with people on a continuous basis. In other words, it was a service that relied on location updates running constantly in the background. “It has been good for seeing where you are, but not seeing where you ARE,” is now Norton puts it. In other words, you could see that a friend was at a place on a map, but not that they were at a Starbucks. To find that out for sure, you’d still have to send them a text. → Read More
The mobile check-in is not just a way to tell your friends where you are via FourSquare or Facebook Places, it is a marketing opportunity. Southwest Airlines is combining Facebook Places and charitable giving to the Make-A-Wish Foundation to encourage travelers to check into Southwest when they get to the airport.
From now through Christmas, Southwest Airlines will make a $1 donation in the form of free travel credit to the Make-A-Wish Foundation, which grants wishes to children with life-threatening medical conditions. Often these wishes involve travel, an Southwest will donate up to $300,000 in travel credit through this promotion. → Read More
We’re currently on a bus on the 101 South heading down to yet another Facebook event. We don’t know too much about this event other than it is centered around mobile. And while we don’t know anything for certain, one thing we have heard that is very likely coming is the Places Write API.
I know, it’s not as sexy as a Facebook iPad app or the mythical Facebook Phone. But still, this new API will be very useful to a range of location-based startups hoping to further leverage Facebook’s massive social graph. This means that you’ll be able to check-in on your favorite location app and it can also automatically check you in to a Facebook Place. → Read More
When Facebook launched Places in August, it encouraged advertisers to list their businesses in the Places directory. But now an advertiser is taking it one step further and asking passersby to check into a billboard using Facebook Places.
In a new outdoor campaign across the UK for British singer Cheryl Cole, who has a new album coming out and a concert tour, fans who check into the billboard will be taken to her Facebook page and get a chance to win two free tickets (plus travel and hotel) to one of her X Factor shows. The campaign was designed by Mediacom and Polydor Records. → Read More
When Facebook launched Places, their entry into the location space, the headlines made it seem as if every startup player in the field was about to go extinct. Obviously, that didn’t happen. Instead, the playing field has largely stayed the same — though slowly, but surely, those startups are now integrating with Facebook Places in order to get access to Facebook’s massive social graph. The latest is Loopt, and they’re going deep.
With a lot of these location startups, you check-in and you can push that check-in to Facebook. This technically checks you in to Facebook Places as well, but what it really does is create a new object for the place you’re at on the other service within Facebook’s graph. With Loopt’s new integration, you’ll check-in to a place and it will find that place on Facebook Places, and check you in there. → Read More
We’ve seen quite a few ingenious ways to use the Web for recruitment or to land a job. The Daily Mail newspaper’s job advert in its search engine-targeted robot.txt immediately springs to mind as does the ad man who bought up Google Adwords spots next to the names of six ad executives he wanted to work with.
But the following effort from German digital marketing agency Jung von Matt/Neckar involving Facebook Places before it had launched locally is the stealthiest of them all. Here’s how it worked: → Read More
Facebook’s geo-locational service Facebook Places is now working in the United Kingdom. Want up to the minute proof? Check Twitter and TechCrunch Europe.
The Next Web reports that a conference for the formal announcement of Facebook Places United Kingdom happened at 8am BST, where Facebook Places product manager Michael Sharon walked British press through the service. If you are in the UK and you’d like to find out more about Facebook Places or how to claim your Places venue, you can read more here. → Read More
Remember Please Rob Me, the site that tried to raise awareness about the dangers of broadcasting publicly on Foursquare and other geo services when you are not home? I don’t know that any burglaries ever actually occurred as a result of the information on the site, which in any case is not operational any more (it made its point).
But when you take the same idea of location broadcasting and put it on a service with more than 500 million users, it is no longer just academic. People’s houses will get robbed, at least in New Hampshire. A burglary ring in Nashua, New Hampshire targeted people who checked into places on Facebook, alerting them when they were not home. The police caught them after they broke into 50 homes and stole $100,000 worth of goods. → Read More
As Facebook Places becomes a destination for brands and local businesses to connect with Facebook’s 500 million-plus members, there is a need for technologies that help businesses run promotions and track interactions with their Places pages. Context Optional, a SaaS offering that allows users to build, monitor and manage brand presence on Facebook, is debuting a customizable Facebook Places Check-In Leaderboard, a way for brands to recognize users who ‘check in’ to Facebook Places such as retail stores and restaurants.
Places Check-In Leaderboard allows guests who check in to various locations to claim ownership of said locations via specially-designated categories which are tied to frequency of check-ins. Brands who implement a Places Check-In Leaderboard will be able to create Leaderboard categories such as ‘High Roller’ and ‘Shop-a-holic’ and attach special deals and offers to Top Fans on the Leaderboard. → Read More
Facebook has come along way from being Mark Zuckerberg’s afterschool project. In fact “The Facebook Effect” author David Kirkpatrick implied at TechCrunch Disrupt that Facebook was so influential it should be governed by the United Nations, “They are too important to our culture to be left to a private corporation” he said.
But, despite the fact that at 500 million users Facebook has just under twice the population of the United States, it is a business not a country. And while Google is currently the most visited site on the Internet with about 170 million or so uniques in July, the levels of interaction that we have with Facebook are more often and more intimate, which makes it the most important site on the Internet today.
The amount of time we spend on Facebook underscores the fact that we no longer live in geopolitical countries but digital ones. And we often as citizens of digital domains forget that the end game of these platforms is “make money” which means that companies like Facebook must take steps to preserve business models based on lead generation and the monetization of user data, and that those steps are often against users’ best interests, literally. → Read More
Booyah’s InCrowd, famously announced by founder Keith Lee at the Facebook Places launch event earlier this month, just hit the App store. InCrowd is the first of the inevitably many apps that will be built off the Facebook Places API and the only location-based app that has exclusive access to Facebook search.
Touted as part game and part social utility, InCrowd is unique in the LBS space as it goes beyond collecting check-ins and allows users to experience a virtual world corresponding the real world visited in Places. Like a location based Second Life, InCrowd app users can create their own customizable avatars, “interact” with old and new friends nearby as well as accumulate status and virtual goods. → Read More
This is a guest post by Hunter Walk (@hunterwalk) who conducted a survey of 500 Foursquare users to better understand their check in behaviors and motivations. His obsession with Foursquare is unrelated to his day job leading the consumer product team at YouTube, although he did at one point hold the Mayorship of their San Bruno headquarters.
Have you noticed “Off the Grid” [OTG] appearing in your Foursquare feed recently? No, it’s not the latest trendy West Hollywood club or SF food cart. OTG is Foursquare’s “privacy” feature where you check in to a location but don’t disclose it to your friends (while gaining any applicable points, badges, etc). What purpose does it serve to notify your friends that you’re out on the town but to hide the location? And what does it tell us about the future of location-based services & privacy? This was the question I set out to answer by surveying nearly 500 Foursquare users. → Read More
George Orwell’s novel 1984 begins with Winston Smith, the main character, seeing posters saying BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU. In 2010, that could be replaced with FACEBOOK IS WATCHING YOU. Or rather, YOUR FRIENDS ON FACEBOOK ARE WATCHING YOU. You and your friends can now post where you are and share this information, if you so chose.
Facebook showed off the power of this new location feature at a launch event this week with a giant projections of a U.S. map showing where people were checking just moments after Places launched. TechCrunch writer MG Siegler called it “Facebook’s Awesome Dark Knight-Esque Live Check-In Display.” But it was one of the scariest things I’ve seen. → Read More
As we noted a couple days ago, the video Facebook made to explain their new Places feature was a bit Apple-esque. But something else they pulled off recently was even more Apple-esque: the secrecy surrounding their location launch.
Sure, we spotted the code for it months ago when an overzealous engineer likely pushed the code (but not the actual feature) to the touch.facebook.com version of the site a bit early. And everyone generally knew that something in the space was coming from them. But what’s odd is that we hadn’t heard from anyone who was actually using it out in the wild in the past several months. The best we got was all the way back in March when someone saw a very early beta of it. As we noted at the time: → Read More
You’d be hard-pressed to find a hotter term in technology right now than “check-in.” Following Facebook’s entry into the location space with Places, it will soon be a term that hundreds of million of web users know well. But millions already do know it well thanks to Foursquare. While it seems likely that they weren’t the first to use it, they are the ones that made it ubiquitous among the location-based services. As such, they’ve been trying to apply for a trademark on the term.
Foursquare (technically Foursquare Labs, Inc.) filed the trademark application on March 11 of this year. But in June, the USPTO turned down the trademark request stating that “the applied-for mark, as used on the specimen of record, is merely informational matter; it does not function as a service mark to identify and distinguish applicant’s services from those of others and to indicate the source of applicant’s services.” → Read More
The countdown is officially on for the big Facebook location backlash. How long will it be? One week? Two weeks? We all know it’s coming, it’s just a matter of when. And that’s too bad because I think Places is actually pretty great — potentially.
The ACLU wasted little time yesterday trying to start such a backlash (their post on the matter came what, a whole 30 seconds after the press conference ended?). Evelyn already did a nice job deconstructing many of their arguments and showing why a few were ridiculous. All I can add is to say that thank god the ACLU doesn’t design consumer apps — it would be like Facebook’s current nightmare of settings multiplied by a billion. We’d have settings for individual minutes in individual days for when individual users could see individual profiles. It would be the least social social network ever. → Read More
Leading up to Facebook’s location announcement, there were two schools of thought. Either you thought Facebook Places was going to destroy Foursquare. Or you thought that this new service would help the startup by bringing more awareness to the location field. It appears that the latter is happening.
“Just heard from The @HarryH that today was @foursquare’s biggest day ever in terms of new user signups,” Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley just tweeted out a few minutes ago (@HarryH is the Twitter name of Harry Heymann, Foursquare’s engineering lead). → Read More
Yesterday during their Places event, Facebook showed a video highlighting the thoughts of the team of developers who actually built the functionality. It’s slick as hell — very nicely done. In fact, we weren’t the only ones who initially thought that it looked like an Apple video.
No it’s not quite the FaceTime Don Draper-esque commercial, but it’s much better than a lot of the very bland videos that most other companies put out there to talk about their products. → Read More
If you hate the idea of Facebook gaining a location element, you’re really going to hate this. It’s awesome.
Tonight, immediately after their Places launch event, the company flipped the switch (an actual switch, by the way) to make the location product live. While it was a few hours before the new location-enabled iPhone app went live, touch.facebook.com went live for millions of users around the U.S. right away. And Facebook had some giant projections to showcase that. → Read More
