3 Feb 2010
Captain Picard is dramatically in love with his iPhone and the Internet. Also, he is the man.
Surfing With Seniors of the Day: Sir Patrick Stewart talks Twitter, googling Shakespeare, and getting his gaming addiction under control.
1 Feb 2010
Interesting: the IAB is going direct to consumers to educate them on behavioral targeting and privacy. This taken from the main Wall Street Journal homepage.
Makes sense, as WSJ’s audience is extremely desirable to advertisers, yet probably also more broadly sensitive about privacy.
31 Jan 2010
I love this — it’s a great fit for Bravo’s properties, particularly Top Chef, and will surely bring Foursquare lots of new users and big brand awareness.
(via soupsoup)
24 Jan 2010
Nice. Does Delmarva really count as Northeast though? I’d spring for a New England version too.
caro: I think I’m going to get this shirt.
17 Jan 2010
Putting Foursquare, Blippy and Square Together
Yelp’s new check-in capabilities a la Foursquare have gotten me thinking about what’s next for location-based/social/financial transaction communications.
I’ve recently been reading a bunch about Blippy, which lets you share your purchases Twitter-style. This is in and of itself is interesting but scattershot, at least for now. Pair it with Foursquare, however, and one could see what the average meal or bar tab at a given spot is — and, ideally, which entrees are most popular and how much they are.
As it stands, you can get this information in a general way from Yelp/Zagat/MenuPages by scanning the reviews and looking at the number of $ signs, but Blippy data combined with Foursquare would be a lot more specific. Eventually you might even see that fried artichokes are a trending topic at Celeste (seriously, they’re amazing).
With Square on the way and, with it, more and more credit transactions taking place, it makes even more sense for purchase information to be tied to a location-based service.
Yelp’s new app is well-positioned to move in this direction too, and has the advantage of a large user base. However, my (admittedly biased) view is that Foursquare has the advantage of more curated — and valuable — social networks, as I argued yesterday.
Finally, I’d think that people would be more comfortable sharing their purchases at restaurants/bars since dining out is a public act, as opposed to the details of, say, a drugstore purchase.
17 Jan 2010
Yelp’s Monocle feature on the iPhone is pretty cool — and reasonably accurate. Most of the good stuff within two blocks is on here (as seen from my apartment):
- Fred’s is on the corner right in front
- Sushi Hana is two doors down from Fred’s
- Peacefood (the major outlier placement) is one block down Amsterdam on the same side of the street as Fred’s
- Land is 1.5 blocks down Amsterdam on the same side of the street
- Haru is, appropriately, one or two blocks down and across Amsterdam
Look forward to using this in unfamiliar hoods.
16 Jan 2010
When you think of the idea of “checking-in” at a venture in a mobile app, you likely think of Foursquare or Gowalla right now. The two gained significant momentum, funding, and users in the location space in 2009. But even with the growth, both services are still relatively small, neither much bigger than 200,000 users. That’s why much larger social networks like Facebook are perceived to be a potential risk to them. And one of those bigger networks has just entered the fray: Yelp.
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Yelp Enables Check-Ins On Its iPhone App; Foursquare, Gowalla Ousted As Mayors
sawickipedia: As anyone who has worked in the casual gaming space already knows - game mechanics can’t be copyrighted and are quickly imitated. Just ask Popcap about the gazillion Bejeweled/Match-3 knock offs it’s faced.
And as casual game developers have learned, resting on the laurel of your mechanic will quickly lose you market share to competitors. It’s important to create a rich full-game experience around the mechanic. It will be interesting to see which of the LBS apps wins as they compete more and more like game developers instead of as “app” developers.
(via caterpillarcowboy)True on the game mechanics front, but we also have something else going on here: for better and/or worse, the game is what you’re doing in real life.
I think that the winner here will not be the company that comes up with the best game, but the one that adds the most enjoyment to players’ day-to-day lives. As suggested yesterday, I believe (and hope) that the game elements are one facet of what Foursquare is doing, but very much not the end goal.
(via whitneymcn)
You guys are 100% right on this. The game mechanics are the “special sauce” that keep the checkins coming in, but the goal is the product is not to produce amazing game play. The goal is to build a killer social utility - something that encourages you to live beyond the daily routine and rewards you for doing so. -dens
(via dpstyles)
The social utility part is mainly what will hold Yelp back in location-based, I think. My experience with the Yelp community is that random people will add me as a friend and that’s standard practice — so my “network” on Yelp is not personalized at all. Probably the same reason I’ve never felt incentivized to write a lot of reviews, since I didn’t think I could earn Elite status.
Because Foursquare was location-based from inception, I’m sure users managed their networks more carefully. I sure did, and now it’s one of my Top 5 most-checked apps.
TechCrunch hits on this:
But the social connections on Yelp aren’t like more traditional social networks, so it will be interesting to see if with this feature, users start transferring their more traditional social graphs over to Yelp.
4 Jan 2010
Finally Finished The Wire
To commemorate: 100 Greatest Quotes from The Wire.
As with all things Wire, contains graphic profanity and violence — and **spoilers**.
