Tag: LOCATION-BASED

If you're as obsessed with Foursquare as I am, here's some good news for you: there's finally a site that lets you see how many more checkins you need to become mayor of your favorite venue. It's called When Will I Be Mayor?, and it offers features like venue monitoring so that you always know how close you are to achieving a mayorship. I've been waiting for something like this for a while ...

Loopt was the first location-based social app out of the gate for iPhone -- remember that absurd demo with the guy in the double-popped collars? -- but it was soon passed up by competitors like Foursquare. Now Loopt is playing catchup by introducing LooptStar, a "loyalty card" system that allows businesses to reward repeat customers. Anyone who's used Foursquare will notice that this LooptStar ...

Although they've been overshadowed by nightmarish privacy concerns lately, Facebook's upcoming location features are starting to get some buzz again. This time, it's been more-or-less confirmed that Facebook will be introducing Foursquare-style checkins, at least on mobile versions of the site. Some code for a "location" tab in the touch.facebook.com version of the site seems to indicate ...

Foursquare is awesome for figuring out where your friends are, but it can also be useful for knowing where your enemies aren't. Avoidr, a service built on Foursquare, promises to help you "keep your friends close and your enemies at that bar down the street." With Avoidr, you can select any Foursquare contact and discreetly declare him or her "dead to you." You also get to assign an insult to ...

Cheating at Foursquare has always been insanely easy. Check in somewhere you're not, get the points, take unearned mayorships ... no problem. In fact, there are even some loathsome new third-party services that let you pay for mayorships. Well, Foursquare has had enough of that, especially since businesses now offer real-world perks based on checkins. They've implemented a new anti-cheating ...

Do you like the idea of Foursquare, but aren't in love with the Foursquare iPhone app? Maybe Kickball is more your speed. This new iPhone app is a Foursquare client with awesome mapping of nearby venues and friends' locations, and it makes Foursquare both more interesting and easier to use. It's available for free ("for a limited time") in the App Store. Kickball uses Twitter's GeoAPI to ...

We've been writing an awful lot about the location wars on Download Squad lately. Gowalla, Foursquare, and the rest are exploding in popularity, and that means trendy, early-adopter types might have several different sites to check in with every time they go somewhere. Reporting your location to multiple sites is a usability nightmare, but it has a solution: unified check-in! A service called ...

In this corner, with a big head start, a huge userbase, and tons of features, it's ... Foursquare! In this corner, with millions of dollars in funding and a great-looking new design ... Gowalla! digg_url = 'http://digg.com/apple/DING_Round_2_Foursquare_Gowalla_both_update_iPhone_Apps'; By now, most people know that Gowalla and Foursquare have been going blow-for-blow in the location-based ...

Maybe you've heard of Foursquare -- that trendy mobile app that lets you and your friends check in when you go somewhere -- but chances are you haven't heard of FourWhere. It's a search engine for location-based social networks, starting with Foursquare, but planning to expand to Gowalla and others. Just like third-party apps started popping up for Twitter as it got more popular, you can expect ...

We recently covered the beta version of Gowalla's location-based social app for Android, and now it's hit version 1.0. You can download Gowalla from the Android Market starting today. Gowalla's main competitor, Foursquare, has already been on Android for some time. If you're familiar with the Gowalla iPhone app, the Android version won't disappoint. It has practically all of the features of the ...

Google continues to get better at narrowing search results based on your location. First, they implemented the "near me now" search option for Google Mobile and Android, and now they're bringing location-based results to the desktop. If you pop open the search options panel on Google.com, you can choose "nearby," and Google will return only results from your general geographic area. At worst, ...

A big part of getting a location-based app right is -- shocker! -- providing an accurate location. Gowalla is using that principle to get a leg up in its battle with Foursquare for location-based check-in supremacy. Gowalla now uses Skyhook in its Android app, which means it's providing some of the best location data around. The Android app is currently in beta, although it's not highly ...

If you're on Twitter, you've probably seen people who automatically post their Foursquare checkins. The constant stream of auto-posted "I'm at someplace you don't care about!" messages can be annoying, definitely, but some people also think it's dangerous. That's why Please Rob Me was started. It's a cute little website that shows a feed of people's Foursquare checkins, implying that their homes ...

By now, everyone knows that Foursquare and Gowalla are locked in a battle to become the number one location-based check-in game, with Yelp and (maybe) Facebook threatening to upset the balance. Well, Gowalla just leveled the playing field with Foursquare a little bit by introducing the first public version of the Gowalla API. That means developers can now build cool apps on top of Gowalla's data, ...

Sometimes, Apple's decisions about content in the App Store can be petty and anti-competitive -- like asking developers to remove any mention of Android. But sometimes, they make a call that seems to put users first. This time, it's a request that developers use your location to provide useful information, rather than just serving you location-based ads. Here's the text of the warning to ...