Image of Foursquare's board via Fortune
While some folks might attribute the rumbling feeling that hit New York this afternoon to a 5.9 earthquake in Virginia, Betabeat now knows better. It was the tectonic reverberations of defeat, as Facebook quietly phased out the Places feature of its mobile app which everyone was screaming for months would kill Foursquare.
Social distribution could help Groupon move beyond email lists to a more precise and targeted audience. And Foursquare wouldn’t mind the revenue it would get from these leads.
via: Techcrunch
WordSpy entry for SoLoMo
SoLoMo n. Mobile phone apps that combine social networking and location data. [Social + location (or local) + mobile.]
When asked why they don’t use location services, 58 per cent of respondents said they “didn’t see the point”. Despite teens being seen as careless with their online privacy, 45 per cent are avoiding location services because they consider them unsafe. 28 per cent said they didn’t believe their phones could run the software, while 16 per cent said they don’t use them as their friends don’t either.
Young people’s indifference to location services was highlighted when they were asked to score the services they are aware of out of five (‘One’ being pointless and ‘Five’ attributed to them loving it). Across all four services ,a score of three was the most frequent, indicating that they neither loved nor hated the products.
Let's look at Foursquare and Facebook. First, there's no doubt Foursquare is throwing off some impressive numbers (e.g. the company's recent announcement of 6 million users). It typically announces total, rather than active, users and that number is roughly growing linearly at present. Total users, by definition, of course, only goes up - yet according to compete.com, Web traffic has declined for five consecutive months, amounting to a 50% reduction in traffic over that period. And while traffic isn't the best indicator of usage, Web visits should be just as likely now as five months ago, and it's certainly not a positive sign of rapid growth in usage.
More details at the source..
New startup SNAP launches Wednesday to help businesses automatically connect the dots between their existing in-store loyalty programs and their customers’ social media behaviors. The SNAP service is now commercially available after having been piloted by Tasti D-Lite for more than a year.
Once deployed, SNAP’s patent-pending technology implicitly “checks in” the customer to his or her configured social networks each time a transaction occurs. The platform enables businesses to automatically reward customers with points, badges, discounts and the like for socially sharing that in-store activity back to Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare.
SNAP exists as a business layer that sits on top social channels. The system plugs into the APIs of Foursquare, Twitter and Facebook, but it has APIs of its own that not only allow for rapid store integration at the server level, but also enable SNAP to receive and track transaction data in real time.
