Facebook Places functionality updated for smartphones

Andre — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 08:01:23 +0000

An announcement this week from social networking giants Facebook sees the launch of a new smartphone function called ‘Places’. Places enables people to update their status to show people where they are, when they are on the move. It constitutes Facebook’s first location-based service, enabling people to share information about where they are eating, playing or shopping.

The Places feature follows on the back of other existing services such as Gowalla and Foursquare. It is currently only available as a US iPhone application, or by entering Facebook’s smartphone site. However, there are plans to roll out the new feature to the 500 million members of the networking site in the very near future. Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook has commented: “This is meaningful because you can stay connected with your friends around you.”

The new feature employs smartphone GPS technology to enable users to locate their current location and access a list of places nearby. The action then enables them to publish their location details to their news feed facility on their own page. They also have the ability to tag friends whom they are with, to distribute location information among a group of people travelling together, providing friends have already updated their location on the site.

Product vice president Chris Cox commented: “While home and work are two of the most important places in people’s lives, Places tries to tap into the third most important. This third place is the one we end up talking about a lot. I went to a movie, I saw a band, I went to a bar. So much of the interesting stuff in our lives happens in this small amount of time and we want to make that come alive. The worst portrait of Facebook is people at home just looking at pictures of other people having fun. This is exactly the opposite. This is a very participatory, real-world kind of thing.”

1 million users and counting for social network start-up Foursquare

Jenny Sanderson — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 11:14:32 +0000

Social network start-up Foursqaure are relative new comers to the scene but in an online world dominated by Facebook and Twitter they are doing surprisingly well.

The site is fairly well known in the US and has only recently raised eyebrows in the UK but they are already set to hit the milestone of 1 million users according to a Tweet posted by the company last week, not bad for a company that is just over a year old.

The service has proved extremely popular for those living in big cities around the US . It will track a users whereabouts via their mobile phone and is able to recognise when a user arrives or ‘checks in’ to a specific store, restaurant or attraction located in their city.

The user must be signed into Foursquare in order for it to track their movements via the GPS built into their phones. If the user visits a specific establishment enough they are awarded the ‘mayor’ status, which means that they are the individual with the most visits. Many businesses offer prizes and rewards for anyone that becomes a mayor, it works sort of like a high tech loyalty card that you are pretty much guaranteed to have on you at all times.

The service has only recently been introduced in the UK with London inevitably the first city to become part of the network. Debenhams and Dominos Pizza were among the first major companies to target users of the service in the UK and with the growing popularity of Foursquare there are likely to be many more over the coming months.

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Facebook Places functionality updated for smartphones

1 million users and counting for social network start-up Foursquare