Foursquare, about to celebrate its third birthday, is big but not huge. It has signed up 15 million users, hired over 100 employees and now boasts several million check-ins per day. That is impressive work for three years, but it must keep growing.
To do so, Foursquare co-founder and CEO Dennis Crowley says the company is in the process of redesigning its mobile app for a broader audience, disassembling it and trying to put its features back together in a way that's more useful and interesting. It has also launched new features on its Web site, such as the neat and powerful "Explore" tool, which can help you find cool places to visit in your neighborhood or in an entirely new city.
As Twitter realized a few years ago, Crowley says Foursquare is seeing a big chunk of its growth from people who want to use parts of Foursquare, but not necessarily broadcast to the world. That means building a service that's useful to more casual users, and not just early Foursquare diehards.
I recently sat down with Crowley at the company's brand new, roomy headquarters in New York City, for an idea of what's next. Here's a lightly edited transcript of our chat.
Trover launches Lists today, a new way to highlight the rich, guided tours its pioneer users create for the places they live. At its core, Trover is a location-based photo browser, putting its users' photos on a map you can explore. It uses social networks to help with discoveries, but its emphasis is on the things found by its users.
In addition to lists, which will help highlight individual users more, today's update also adds @-mentions and redesigns the news feed to be more about the people. Trover has positioned itself as a "browser" for places, but when you talk to CEO Jason Karas, you hear Trover is learning that people are part of those places. The new version of Trover is still about discovering places, but it provides the authentic flavor that only the local folks can offer.
As mobile becomes normal for the Web, location becomes key. The next phase of location apps are live, right there with the user as she goes about her business. When it comes to mapping the outside world, the space is pretty crowded. It's hard to argue with Google Maps, whose free consumer service powers the maps on both dominant smartphone platforms. For businesses, it's crucial to be on the map, and Google Places can't be overlooked.
But there's another frontier of mobile mapping that matters, and the exploration has just begun. Indoor mapping of big buildings - like airports, convention centers, museums and stores - is the El Dorado of mobile location. Google has begun its expedition inside buildings, and businesses can sign up and offer their floor plans. But there's another option: Use a platform like Meridian and build your own inside map. Which is better for business?
National Geographic Maps has partnered with AllTrails, an online network for outdoor enthusiasts, to launch a co-branded service at alltrails.com. The site aims to be a comprehensive destination for people planning hikes or other backcountry outings. Its 200,000 users can browse nearby or search for trails, post reviews and photos and share trails with friends. Users who have completed a trail are listed on its page.
Trail profiles give time and distance measurements, weather forecasts and routes overlaid on topographic maps. AllTrails initially used Google Maps data but found it to be too inaccurate for safe planning of wilderness trips. After Google began to charge for access to the Google Maps SDK, AllTrails began to explore other partnerships. Today's announcement with National Geographic is the beginning of an integration that will move AllTrails away from Google.
The official blog of Open Street Map reports tonight that someone at a range of Google IP addresses in India has been editing the collaboratively made map of the world in some very unhelpful ways, like moving and deleting information and reversing the direction of one-way streets on the map.
Update: Google sent the following statement to ReadWriteWeb on Tuesday morning. "The two people who made these changes were contractors acting on their own behalf while on the Google network. They are no longer working on Google projects."
The IP addresses match the same ones that were caught last week running a long-term scam wherein telephone directory listings were scraped from a crowd-sourced phone directory in Kenya called Mocality. A Google contractor then systematically called those phone numbers claiming to have a paid placement deal jointly offered by the Kenyan company and Google! A Google spokesperson told BoingBoing on Friday that the company was "mortified" by the discovery - but now it appears the same Google contractor may be behind mayhem rippling throughout one of the world's biggest maps. Google says it's investigating these latest allegations.
Google has resorted to gamification to drive interest in its location services. It posted a YouTube video last week promoting a Google Maps-powered game coming to Google+ Games in February. It involves rolling a ball around a cube covered with 3D Google maps. Players apparently get extra points for hitting Zagat-rated businesses, promoting Google's acquisition of the review publisher last year.
"Play your world, like never before," is the promotion's slogan. It ends with a link to Google's new Start Here page for Google Maps, which offers a detailed walkthrough of the service. This gives Google a chance to show off all the new features of Maps, such as interior mapping and crowd-sourced map-making. If Facebook's history is any indication, one surefire way to drive social network eyeballs to something is to turn it into a game.
Foursquare has released a new Web version of its Explore tab at foursquare.com/explore. The mobile version of Explore, which launched last March, is for finding stuff to see and do nearby. Today's release of Explore for the Web helps with planning interesting things to do from the desktop or iPad.
In its announcement of Explore for the Web, Foursquare says its mission is "adding an 'interesting' layer to the whole world, tailored just for you." Foursquare Explore draws on the check-ins, tips, lists and interests of your friends to put a layer of "interesting" - which is apparently a noun at Foursquare - on a map. This is a challenge to Google Places and Maps, which is racing to add "interesting", but Foursquare's 1.5 billion check-ins give it a strong position.
One of the biggest detriments to Amazon's Kindle Fire tablet is that it does not support location-based services. This was likely a choice from Amazon to leave GPS hardware out of the device to cut down on costs. The lack of location services on the Fire greatly hinders what kind of apps can run on the device. One company has figured out a way around the Fire's restrictions and is bringing its navigation app to the Fire.
HopStop is a metropolitan navigation app that gives door-to-door directions for pedestrians, cyclists, taxis and mass transit in over 200 cities in the United States and Canada. Without location services on a device, HopStop's app is basically useless. Enter location provider Skyhook with a simple fix to a complex problem.
The urge for control is powerful, made exponentially more so whenever two or more representatives of a government get together. Among the more prominent, and ridiculous, examples of this trend are Iran's attempt to create a "halal" Internet (ostensibly to safeguard Muslim sensibilities, in reality to control the political thought of Iranian citizens) and the American former intelligence chief's proposal for a ".secure" Internet in which users would voluntarily give up their Fourth Amendment rights.
Add to this China's "national" global positioning system. This Chinese satellite navigation network will obviate the need to use the Pentagon-created and U.S.-run GPS system, which dominates location technology worldwide.
The smartphone explosion has invited a bum-rush of new apps - and extensions of old ones - vying to be the way we discover places. Companies big and small are fighting to be the best location data platform. Google and Yelp struggle for dominance of business listings, and valuable geo data providers like SimpleGeo are selling for big bucks.
ReadWriteWeb gets tips about new consumer-facing location apps every day. We like the futuristic whiz-bang idea of augmented reality, so we tend to write these up every once in a while. But geolocation apps have not yet caught on in consumers' minds. That's because most offerings focus on monetizing location, leaving the user interface as an afterthought. Today, I think that changed. I found Localscope, the first location app I've ever used that I think I'll use every day.
