Slashdot Mirror
Facebook Takes On FourSquare
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 has just ousted @Foursquare as the mayor of useless crap.
If Facebook takes over an app I never heard of or ever will use, and some blogger tries to tenuously relate it to the totalitarian state taking over our lives, and a tree falls on a mime in the woods, and I go on using email and ignoring Facebook like I know so many other people do, do I care?
rate them, comment on them, and generally spew your opinions all over the internet as fast as your fingers can hit the keys.
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.
I know what people do with it, but why do they do it?
Living With a Nerd
I use foursquare and it can be quite helpful when in a new town for a night of partying. However, it is missing something. Badges are sorta cool but it is super easy for people to cheat. It's very open ended which is also good but it should give me more incentive to use it. I may hate facebook but I do have it on my phone. Maybe foursquared patented certain things? I really don't know. Oh, and does anyone know a stalker by the name of Topguest?
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?
"the mother of all social networking sites is taking another huge step for bored teenagers everywhere" bored??? nooooo........ just nothin to do with their lifes.... :D
//LIFE WOULD BE EASIER IF I HAD THE SOURCE CODE!
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".
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?
My work here is dung.
http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/04/08/149245/Foursquare-Turns-Down-100M
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 (its predecessor which was bought out by Google and then killed) back in the day.
1. The usual "please rob me since I am not at home" rant.
2. I actually follow an RSS twitter search of my (current) hometown. It was very useful when the snowpcalypse came because the state highway admin was actually posting useful updates. It went from 2-3 a day to about 10-15, and it is all "I'm here and you don't give a crap!" tweets.
I should put something clever here. Maybe someday.
I hate it when people double bounce the ball while playing four square
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.
Living With a Nerd
While I've always thought, and still think Twitter is generally useless, I can see some marginally useful applications of it. I cannot, however, see any point whatsoever in foursquare.
Either you have a life, or you're feigning ignorance trying to one up us all... damn hipsters.
avoiding me?
but thank you for posting
now i have a fix on your ip from the backdoor i installed on slashdot just on the offchance you might post here again. it was a perilous operation getting that backdoor installed but it just makes the payoff today that much sweeter. note to slashdot: you didn't really need an exterminator, i planted that ant colony
now its just a quick geolocation, then i'll pack my plastic ties and knives, and i'll be on my way
i'm coming for you baby, it won't be long now, soon we will be together forever in the sweet hereafter, the way it should have been all those years ago. why oh why did you try to run?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
"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 market to begin with and thought that the easiest way to get into the space would be to grab up and integrate an established player. Witness for instance Apple's strategic purchases of all sorts of companies associated with its mobile technologies. Recently they've gotten multitouch technology from FingerWorks and power-efficient mobile CPU tech from P.A. Semi, both of which ended up in their iOS devices.
Likewise, when Google decided to get into social networking for serious (as in not Orkut) they made an offer to buy Facebook, and when that fell through they started fiddling with things like Buzz, Wave, and now Me. Clearly social is a big part of Google's strategy going forward, and they tried to make that easier by grabbing up an established player.
So, Facebook clearly wanted in on the geolocation game, and their first move was to -- guess what -- buy up someone who already had some success in the business, FourSquare. When that fell through they decided to build their own product, which may or may not become a serious competitor to FourSquare. This is absolutely bog-standard business practice in Silicon Valley.
I guess next we'll hear that Facebook bought land for an office space in Nevada, and the headline on Slashdot will be "FACEBOOK PLANNING NEW AREA 51, GEOLOCATING DEMON BOTS TO SCOUR THE EARTH OF MYSPACE USERS."
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
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
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.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
What's Facebook?
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 software patents, I'm not sure what about Foursquare you would patent - but there might be something. If you exclude patents, there is nothing of value you could protect as intellectual property - i.e. nothing stoppnig a big player in the "social networking" space, such as Facebook, from doing exactly this to any new company that provides a unique service somehow related to social networking. You can copyright the code (though as I've posted before I think that's a bad retrofit of copyright law), but I don't need your code to implement a service. You can trademark various things, but I don't need them either.
So the submitter seems to think the innovation at Foursquare should be worth something, and that FB shouldn't get to swoop in and eat their lunch. Is it? If so, how should that be enforced?
Foursquare and Facebook Places both grew out of the very early Socialight (with Dodgeball mixed in to Foursquare).
Look where Mike and Naveen, two of the lead Socialight guys wound up... Mike (Facebook Mobile) and Naveen (Foursquare)
They both have similar outlooks on the location aspects of social networks but I'd bet that Facebook Places will be a platform that allows other services to work with it. (much like 3rd party Facebook Apps)
Foursquare will be fine.
IRC never had cool people. I know, I was one of them.
Now the question is, who at Four Square turned down the offer, and how badly are they crapping their pants?
Doing PR for Zuckerberg in your spare time, eh CmdrTaco? How utterly pathetic.
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.
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.
Code softly but carry a big magnet.
s/If you read the news/If you watch advertisements and infotainment/
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
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?
It amazes me that Facebook has thrived despite its inability to do something remotely original. They had one thing going for them back in the day that created their entire company - they took an idea like MySpace and its predecessors and focused it on a niche of social networking(college students). At this point, who's going to stop them, Four Square is far too small to compete, and its entire user base likely already has Facebook accounts.
Its a popular chain of shops in australia and new zealand. Its being going for decades.
Dear Facebook,
We would like to thank you for this great check-in feature which will enable us to always know where our... friends are eating or staying. Keep up the good work!
Signed,
International Burglar's Association
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?
Someone who thinks Facebook could take over Google (from TFA). So yeah, move on.
I'd say that what Facebook ought to copy isn't FourSquare but GetGlue, which is kind of like FourSquare but instead of checking into places you check into video games, books, movies, tv shows, etc. As a geek i'm a lot more interested in seeing what my friends are reading or playing than i am in seeing what restaurant they just went to. Plus since it's about things rather than places the privacy and stalker concerns are a lot less prevalent.
On the other hand though, i've logged into Facebook maybe three or four times in the past six months, and i'd rather it stayed away from buying or out-competing sites/companies that i actually like.
And on the other other hand, Facebook seems interested in convincing users that privacy doesn't matter anyways, so perhaps a system that encourages you to tell everyone where you actually are at the moment is actually the "best" thing for them =P
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
What's Facebook?
It's malware designed to make life easy for identity thieves and other criminals.
Sorry for not diligently reading every single story ./ publishes.
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
i have been using foursquare for a long time and i absolutely love it. playing the meta-game of acquiring badges has motivated me to travel to all new places and discover things I may never have come across on my own. it's fun, and my buddies and i have gone on some road trips to see places we've found through foursquare to great success. if you have an actual social life, it can be great fun to find which bar or club your friends are at on any given night without having to contact everybody directly. it's nice the way it is. i wouldn't want facebook getting their grubby hands on it.
frog blast the vent core
I hate those. What's this Facebook thing, btw?
Your obviously not hip anyway as you are still spelling your as you're. Get with it man. To be down with the FB generation, you must accept and revel in the new era of illiterate literacy, where people who cannot write do so constantly, to those who cannot read or speak and yet do so constantly.
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 understanding the topic, and contributing a useful opinion.
"It's an obvious attempt by the company to muscle in on FourSquare's block, casting its influence ever further over us all."
No,over YOU not all of us. lol
Is it just because I'm old? I just don't understand the need to constantly tell the world what we're doing every second of the day. Is it the instant feedback people crave? The constant pats on the back and attaboys from friends? The need for approval among our peers for everything we do? What?
I just don't get it.
I stumbled on this site that sort of mocks the whole FourSquare thing - http://www.faquesquare.com/
Yes. You are.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Let me guess ... you were the first kid out when playing dodgeball?
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
"Who cares?" Studies have already shown that many engineers view Twitter/Facebook as a waste of time. So you have a "popular" medium which is more or less ignored by the people building the future. If one ascribes to a theory that most future perspectives are written by individuals within a high Asperger's framework (no references but simply IMO) then one would view better social networking capabilities with a big yawn.
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?
As opposed to one of those "I don't use it, so I assume nobody does" kind of things? ;)
really no different than sniffing the fire hydrant.
Are you sure you didn't (accidentally?) hide FourSquare posts? A variety of people I have on Facebook have been spamming me with their FourSquare autoposts for a while now.
"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".
You missed the point. Before the PCification of elementary schools, it was possible to play keep away, smear the queer, some other violent games whose name escapes me. Catholic grade school was like a war zone during recess but only fun. Every game was phsyically demanding. So when everything got banned the girls were like, "Well, can we still play 4 square?". "Uhm, yeah, 4 square is OK."
Same here. This is some American-only thing, right?
I first encountered a writeup about it on the Onion. Thought it was a parody, but apparently no.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
Kia ora! Give that man a jar of Marmite!
Four Square was my neighbourhood corner shop growng up.
Mr Four Square is now so iconic of NZ that Dick Frizzell parodies him.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
I see all these websites open-up just like bars, and everyone just gets their new ID card that obviously links to their Government(tm) credentials just for the sake of saying they are a member or some such. Nobody has a controlling interest or lordship on which any of these "bars" are built, and all they do is get their ID card just to seem more fassionable. I seen a similar article like that about a man that collected credit cards, over 13 years ago in a National (Porno)Georgraphic book; it never stresses the Identity-theft threats of having ID cards as it seems he just wanted to get as many unmanageable credit dispensory memberships as though he was collecting baseball cards. It was proof-positive of a gimich in the making, like people that collect "DO NOT DISTURB" doorhangers from every hotel they pretend to have occupied once for memory-sake.
As for me, I actually do the opposite statistically of what I see in trends. I have no government-issued ID because my cause at life is to not do anything with the assistance of a government agency. I have no membership to any corporation or club because I see that as just another bias in my favor of which someone would target to steal my Identity in a world that assumes the worst against someone onto their record to make life a living "expensive" Hell to expunge those fabrications from a Record. I've seen ladies and ladds have over 50 memberships to various social websites, and they pick a day they have nothing to do and login to each of them for not more than 5 minutes just so the bean-counters reset to say "On within the hour" or "Active Recently."
That's why I think that much of the Social websites, unmistakedly associated to Google-Analytics, are working together to profile as many people as possible because someone somewhere is going to prove that all the private information forbidden to governments can be collected through EULA's and shared to various private companies in a grab to re-create governing bodies more effectively outside of de-jure government.
The shit is floating to the surface.
IRS: It says on your Facebook page that you earn over $110,000 income per year,
yet according to our filings you say that you earned $0 income per year, and
we find in our approximations of this itemized list of financial transactions
that your Facebook page is complimentary to the evidence as proof that we
think you are lying to us.
Me: but that...that's just to attract women to think I'm important. I fill
jars of mustard for a living on Slashdot!
Judge: GUILTY!!!! MONIEZ AWARDED TO teh JIDF REVENUE SOIVICES OF ISRAEL!
Me: FFFFFFOOOOOOOIIIIIIIIIII!
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 search for nearby restaurants or coffee.
So, if you're using Ovi Maps find places features on your phone just now and finding all these cool places, enjoy it while you can. Give it a year or two and there will be a hundred million other punters insisting that the starbucks on the corner make the best coffee in town.
What makes some of us jaded is not the technology. It's people.
Deleted
Hmm... and you see no potential for it to match people with similar interests at all? "People who like X, Y, and Z have also liked A and B in this town - you should check it out!" Amazon, Netflix, and others already do this sort of taste-oriented marketing, I see no reason why other companies couldn't do the same.
And, if you're the sort who's interested in "trying something new," it doesn't take much deductive reasoning to say "Hmm... I know what Starbucks is, I know what Friday's is, but this little taco place I've never heard of looks local, and looks popular..."
Of course there will always be systems that can be gamed, and people who will be susceptible to it. Friday's will always spend more money on advertising than the local taco stand. Why not offer an option to filter out "non-local" and "franchise" results? Or instead of selling advertising, charge a reasonable monthly service fee, or offer a "premium" paid membership that will allow you to say "don't give advertisers priority"?
I'd pay a couple bucks a month for a service like this, and I think you might find other people would too, if the filters were reasonably well put together to allow you to find things easily.
Again, there's a lot of potential. There are ways to address all of these problems, and simply throwing your hands up and saying "people suck," isn't going to cut it.
When are we going to talk about the real issues with Facebook? It's not this or privacy, it is their ability to 'ban' users effectively making them less as virtual people when users support pages on Facebook that are aligned with views that are opposed by 'controllers' at Facebook. I've burned my 3+ year old Facebook account by standing up for Palestinians and Arabs after the flotilla mascara. The reason given for 2 months was 'I wasn't me' now 2 months later after repeatedly asking why that reason has been converted to 'abusive behaviour'. Whatever this claimed behaviour was I'm not informed about the incident and appeal is outright denied. I'm no more a Mr Prefect than most of us here. However I don't visit pages on Facebook that I don't support to cause trouble so I can only imagine that the abusive behaviour was me on the attack of some jerk on a page that was there to cause trouble. This loss of account took with it 3 years of contributions and all existing posts in threads across the whole of Facebook.
It's a virtual death sentence, without being informed why, without appeal and without any justification. Evil mind control. You can set up a new account but just how many accounts can you create which you can verify is another issue.
Not only are Facebook selling our information, they are imposing media and virtual policing over a network of 500M users. Doesn't anyone find this a major concern? It not just me either if you support any Palestinian freedom issue you will eventually loose your account. Many people are on their 20th account. One Christian woman from the US is on her 3rd account in 3 months and she certainly isn't abusing, Muslim, Arab only interested in human rights.
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On that basis these page shouldn't exist
http://www.facebook.com/pages/twin-cities-mn/vote-for-medical-marajuana-for-the-state-of-minneosta-november-2010/180189298268?ref=search
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Draw-Mohammad-Everyday/124493387570371?ref=search
To single out people who support a peaceful outcome that delivers quality of life to Palestinians... even I don't think I'm going to 'change the world' from Facebook. Why care about me?
In 3 month between Facebook and the Jewish Internet Defence Force (JIDF) they have converted me from a support of Israel to a fire breathing virtual Arab! These cockroaches that swarm the internet in defence of Israel rather than create friends for Israel are turning people towards anit-Semitic positions. They couldn't be doing more harm to the Jewish people. They are the screaming nutters of Israel online.
Given Mark Z Jewish heritage it only a short mind jump to a conspiracy theory. Is this the future for the internet?
Gowalla fit in the midst of all these recent goings on? Haven't heard much about them lately. Maybe either Foursquare or Facebook or both should go after them, considering how seemingly unimportant they are these days.
Basically no. In order for collaborative filtering to work you need a large population, and a large sample of information from the individual, more is better. i.e. hundreds of pieces of information discriminating X from Y. With email, web sites etc it works because the individual visits or receives many emails.
e.g. Restaurants on the other hand? How many do you visit? The result is that the system only has a small sample size and therefore gives crap generic recommendations (Hey there's a great McDonalds/Starbucks round the corner) from the masses. You would have to visit and rate tens of restaurants to even start giving good results in places you don't know. The same is true for other categories.
However. I admire your fresh faced innocence and energy. Go ahead and build it.
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