Perry

Hewitt

Tag: foursquare

Friday 5 — 10.10.2014
1. Google has enhanced its search results with an “In the News” box. These results include blogs and other content sites that are not traditionally indexed as news. This would explain the travesty above, where a Chelsea blog is listed related to a search for Arsenal F.C.
2. Here’s a thoughtful recap and lessons learned from the NYTNow and soon-to-be-shuttered NYT Opinion apps. Being smart about mobile can draw in new and younger audiences, but it’s still a challenge to figure out what users will pay for, and to avoid cannibalizing existing channels with lower priced offerings.
3. Did you ever wonder what the advertisers know about you based on your web habits? Data researcher Jer Thorp paid 10 users $5 each to profile him based on the ads he’d been shown, and shares the results. If you are curious about the data online advertisers are gathering about you, download this Chrome extension, Floodwatch.
4. Creative types proficient in Photoshop or InDesign can make anything look good. For the rest of us looking for ways to improve our graphics, here are 23 useful tools to create images for social media.
5. Diehard location check-in fans may like the new Swarm widget for iOS 8, which lets users check in with a single tap. Foursquare is taking another run at serendipitous in-person socializing with a “nearby friends” feature.
Weekend fun: Jimmy Fallon runs down the pros and cons of Ello, the new ad-free social network.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Try out the Friday 5 archive, or sign up for a weekly email.
October 10, 2014
Friday 5 — 8.8.2014
1. Snapchat and WhatsApp are emerging as dominant photo sharing platforms. Interesting that a main modality for this sharing is private messaging (quasi-ephemeral in the case of Snapchat) versus Facebook’s one-to-many concept of posting to your profile page.
2. Social networking skeptics often decry the use of “friend” as an organizing principle for everyone from your sister to your teammate on the college lacrosse team a decade ago. Fear not: Foursquare and LinkedIn are embracing the follow model.
3. If you’re still trying to get your head around bitcoin, add Stellar to the list of digital currency projects you’ve got to figure out. Backed in part by online payment innovator Stripe, Stellar is a not-for-profit that seeks to expand digital currencies to a wider audience, and provide an easier way to move money over the internet.
4. Public radio junkies may want to check out the new NPR One app. Native for mobile and web for desktop, the app provides the ability to listen to NPR content in an nonlinear, curated way — and enables serendipitous discovery in the process. Features include the ability to select your home station independent of current location, search from every screen, and an “interesting” button (avoiding the awkward “like” on sobering news pieces). Read an in-depth review.
5. Are your social media posts more popular than you think? This (vendor-written) post explores the varying ratio of creators : commenters : observers online, and offers suggestions for how you might calculate probable reach across the different social networks.
Weekend fun: “We live in a rapidly changing world … the way people get from place to place needs to change, too.” Beyond Uber, there is WYSK.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Try out the Friday 5 archive, or sign up to get a weekly email.
August 8, 2014
Friday 5 — 5.16.2014
1. Foursquare begets Swarm, a mobile app that enables users to keep up and meet up with their connected friends. The check-in experience is largely the same, but new passive tracking allows for Neighborhood Sharing — which you can enable or disable with a swipe. Techcrunch describes the larger trend represented by Swarm and other invisible apps, as they move from a battle for the real estate on your home screen to just-in-time surfacing of contextual offers. Fun detail: your friends are defined as “right here” (500 feet), “a short walk away” (1.0 miles), in the area (20 miles), or “far, far away.”
2. Do you have people you like to follow on Twitter, but whose streams become insufferable during Bruins playoffs, Game of Thrones finales, or SXSW? Or people you feel professionally obliged to follow? Now you can mute them, because Twitter really, really wants to retain its user base. Here’s how.
3. Digital thinkers opine on the internet of things. Most agree on the inevitability of a “global, immersive, invisible, ambient networked computing environment …in a world-spanning information fabric known as the Internet of Things.” Opinions vary more on the benefit of ubiquitous data collection versus the associated risk of surveillance and tracking.
4. In case you missed it, Jonathan Zittrain wrote a compelling editorial on this week’s ruling that Europeans have a limited “right to be forgotten” by search engines like Google. Bottom line: it’s a bad solution to a real problem.
5. Pinterest begins its “tasteful” and “transparent” rollout of Promoted Pins, aka ads. With over 750 million boards and 30 billion pins, even a slow rollout represents a huge revenue opportunity for Pinterest (as investors behind its brand-new $200M round would agree).
Weekend fun: Watch P.J. O’Rourke offer his hilarious, skeptical view on the “dark, Satanic mills” that exemplify our current state of technology.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.
May 16, 2014
Friday 5 — 5.2.14
1. For a few years now, Foursquare has felt like a location data layer in search of a business model. The company just announced a move toward a more explicit user value proposition by revising its core app and splitting off a new Swarm app — a social heat map that doesn’t require an explicit check-in.
2. How can we stop wasting users’ time? Here are some practical ways to design experiences that avoid common user experience pitfalls. My favorite? Stop the madness of persnickety fields that make for tiresome web forms.
3. User growth is flat and the stock precipitously down — and now Twitter gets its very own eulogy.
4. At Facebook f8, Mark Zuckerberg announced a set of new features, few of which you might associate with Facebook as we know it. They include anonymous login, linking between apps, and a mobile like button. Also, he said trust, stable, and mobile a heck of a lot.
5. Teen-friendly, ephemeral, and visual messaging app Snapchat counters the unbundling trend of Foursquare and Facebook by adding features. Now users can swipe to chat via text or video — and true to brand, the conversation disappears when users leave the app.
Weekend fun: In one minute and twenty-three seconds you could accomplish something productive, like answering an email or flossing your teeth. Or you could watch tiny hamsters eating tiny burritos. And it’s only episode one of the series, so submit your suggestions printed on tiny tortillas via #TinyHamsterIdeas.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.
May 2, 2014
Friday 5 — 12.6.2013
1. Google Trends is a handy, visual tool for comparing topics by their relative search volume — see graph of search trends for Hong Kong and Singapore above. This latest release uses its vast historical data to offer dotted-line predictions of future search interest. Another useful feature: the algorithms now aggregate different searches likely to be related.
2. Foursquare has released a new version of its check-in service, with a sleek new design and location-aware push recommendations. Just arrive at the Beat Hotel in Cambridge? Now Foursquare may suggest the tuna spring rolls based on your friends’ behavior. Since its 2009 launch, Foursquare has amassed a significant location data layer, and this release may be one way — apart from its rich API — to take advantage of it.
3. Monday Note pulls together a number of recent charts to recommend mobile trends to keep in mind if you produce digital news. Thoughtful validation of the power investment in content strategy, with “newsletters designed for mobile that are carefully — and wittily — edited by humans.” Mobile news consumers on smartphones need more than automated headlines and snippets to keep their attention.
4. In case you missed it, here’s a great post on Boston tech company / innovation economy performance. Fun fact: 51% of Boston’s “massive winner” companies had an immigrant founder.
5. Did Apple’s U.S. mobile hardware marketshare peak at 40%? Latest Comscore data spots a flattening trend, compared to a gradual rise of Samsung devices now at 25%. Google’s Android still dominates with 52% of the U.S. mobile software platform market.
Weekend fun: Sherlock fans and other Cumberbatch disciples, you are in for a real treat: Here’s a video of Benedict Cumberbatch reading R. Kelly’s Genius lyrics.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.
December 6, 2013
Try it: Make the movie of your personal data

We’re all posting, tweeting, and sharing more than ever. How might all this micro-content we publish on the social web be boiled up into a story? I came across two interesting services that make a movie from your shared content: Vizify for Twitter, and Foursquare time machine.

First, Vizify for Twitter lets you create what they’re calling an animated portrait of your Twitter activity — kind of a greatest hits reel for your account. Here’s mine and here’s where to make your own. You authenticate through Twitter, then Vizify finds the tweets that have resonated the most, and creates an animation with audio. There’s a degree of customization — within the categories of photo, text, and video you can switch up the selection or delete an item. There are different soundtracks you can choose from based on a semi-cryptic set of icons.

Next, Foursquare time machine (co-branded with Samsung Galaxy 4) offers a slick fast-motion visualization of all your checkins. Rather than a highlights reel approach, this app tells you the full story. I had some trouble getting the stats to render, which might be a good thing as the restaurant:gym ratio over the past four years seemed problematic. Some of the motion is fun — your travel across geographic distances is rendered via plane or occasionally flying saucer. This application is positioned as a set up for The Next Big Thing, which is improved predictions of where you would like to go next. Foursquare has amassed a significant urban data layer without a clear revenue growth model — useful predictions might be one path to monetize that data.

There are many important concerns about, as The New Yorker puts it, the way we are all pole dancing on the internet. And as the Guardian pointed out last week, even just your online metadata tell a revealing story. Nonetheless it’s fascinating to see the kinds of movie-scrapbooks we can create today with the content we’ve explicitly produced and have opted in to share.

June 18, 2013
Tying transaction to check-in

The friction inherent to the foursquare check-in becomes a harder sell in an attention economy full of competing distractions – the value had better be high. Today, foursquare announced a partnership with OpenTable. Marrying the “Explore” feature’s social reviews by friends with the transaction and history of OpenTable’s reservation system is a big win, especially for travelers. It’s desktop web for now, but here’s hoping the app version isn’t far behind.

May 2, 2012