facebook-places

Facebook Buys Gowalla To Compete Against Foursquare

by Paul Joseph December 6, 2011 Featured

Since the past year and a half, two buzzwords have been on everyone’s lips: Social and Locatio n. With the advent of smartphones, people are now connected to the internet wherever they go. With the inclusion of GPS chips on almost all smartphones, their phones are now capable of telling where the owner is. Different brands advertise to different people at different places. With the advent of Facebook, Foursquare and Gowalla, this is now becoming a reality.   Gowalla was founded sometime in 2009, and targeted mobile web users. They have over 6 Lac users who use it to share locations with their friends. They have smartphone applications for Android and iOS devices. Facebook launched its Places service in the past year, where people could check in to places and share it on Facebook. To further strengthen their places platform, they have now acquired Gowalla for an undisclosed sum of money. Facebook will effectively shut down Gowalla as a company and hire all their staff. This is informally called as an ‘ acqu-hire ‘ sort of takeover. Facebook’s main reason for doing so can be to compete with their main rival: Foursquare . Gowalla’s smartphone applications were known to be well polished and comprehensive and Facebook Places could really benefit from that. Foursquare , as we just reported, now has over 15 million users. It has apps available for a large variety of smartphones and they offer deals to users who frequently check in to places, also called mayors. So far, Facebook Places hasn’t garnered as much momentum as Foursquare and they hope that the acquisition will turn the tide around. We feel that increased competition in the Location Sharing market may tend to confuse the average user, as he will go where his friend goes. This makes ones platform being the choice of trendsetters very important. Both Facebook and Foursquare will now be fighting it out, with some competition from Google Latitude. What do you think? Are you a Foursquare user? Will this development convince you to switch over?

Tagged as: advertising, facebook, facebook-places, gowalla, lbs, location, mobile, news, smartphne, web

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Foursquare Soars With 15Million Users: Peaking Too Soon?

by Paul Joseph December 6, 2011 Featured

Foursquare has grown its userbase almost thrice of what it was last year. It includes users from U.S as well as other parts of the globe. Foursquare announced these numbers blatantly and has proved the high rate acceleration of geo-social companies especially startups despite several stumbling blocks. 2011 has seen a humongous growth in this scene. However, while Foursquare is in the win-win situation, it is a bad time for Gowalla. Grapevine has it that Gowalla will put its shutters down ever since Facebook’s talent-based acquisition recently. With the growing trends of geo-social phenonmenon on the web, Facebook places and Foursquare has seen more check-ins and smartphones have added to this triumph. Other players in the same domain will also raise its flags such as Loopt, Scvngr and MyTown (in U.S). This shows that the web is slowly removing the physical boundaries and people are definitely loving these geo-social based applications. The game becomes interesting with the fact that almost 350 million Facebook users are on board with Facebook Places and almost 20 million users use the smartphone pallication to check in. Foursquare and its other competitors however with a smaller user base is still yet to rule this mobile sphere. The comScore data says that there is a huge smartphone market base of 90 million users in U.S which is yet to exp-lore Foursquare and other similar geo-social applications on their mobiles. This time too, Facebook Places reigns and Foursquare will have to put up yet another fight to outshine these numbers. If not they might be defunct just like the way Gowalla is. Facebook on the other hand goes on increasing its strength with the Gowalla acquisition and now have their engineers on board in Palo Alto, CA. Facebook’s PR exclaimed, “ We’re excited to confirm that Gowalla co-founders Josh Williams and Scott Raymond…we realized that we share many of the same goals: building great products that reach millions of people, making a big impact quickly “. A hindsight of early reports also revealed that in India Foursquare is the 1771st most sought after social networking platform.  The interesting part is that almost 3.4% of Foursquare users in India drive a revenue of 3.8% of the page views.

Tagged as: acquisitions, facebook-places, facebook-users, features, international, mobile, news, technology

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Facebook Revamps Various Features To Counter Threat From Google+

by Paul Joseph August 24, 2011 Featured

The social networking behemoth Facebook has announced a slew of improvements to its various features in an official blog post . The revamped features give users more control over their profile and make it easier to control their privacy. The new features will start rolling out in the coming week. Here is a list of improvements that Facebook has made to its features. Sharing Facebook has now made it easier to share posts and other stuff with the people only you want to share with. Now, whenever you share something, there will be an icon next to the item and a drop-down menu having three labels i.e. Public, Friends and Custom. You can choose the label you want to share with. Facebook promises that this drop-down menu will be expanding over time to include smaller groups of people like co-workers, Friends-lists that user may have created and groups the user is member of. This feature is clearly inspired by Google+, though Facebook claims it had started working on it six months ago. When Google+ was launched, its Circles feature, which allows users to share things with only a certain group of people, was lauded by many. With this Facebook is simplifying its privacy settings too. In the past Facebook has received immense flak for its complicated privacy controls. But the new changes will bring most the controls from a settings page to being inline, right next to various bits of information that a user shares. As a result  a bunch of settings that were there previously there have been moved directly inline, and a handful have been replaced or removed. Tagging Another major revamp is the ‘tagging’ feature. Previously, your friends could tag you in any of their photos or posts and these photos and posts would appear immediately on your profile. This was a bit of an annoyance to many users and most of them had asked Facebook to get rid of this. Facebook has now found a solution. Going forward, the user will have the power to approve of the photos or posts people tag them in before they appear on their profile. Also, the user will have the option to remove the photo or post only from her profile or remove the tag completely. She can even report the tag to the user or report to Facebook for abusive content. Another important change that Facebook has done is, now anyone can tag you in their posts or photos or vice versa. You don’t need to be friends to tag other people in your photos and posts or other people to tag you in theirs. But, of course you have the choice to approve or reject those tags. Places Facebook has revamped its places feature as well. Now, people can tag locations they have been to in the past or planning to go in future. Also they can add location to anything. Facebook is also phasing out the mobile-only Places feature. Another minor change is to the feature which shows us how our profile looks to someone else. Previously, the tool for doing this was behind. But now Facebook has brought it on the top of the profile where it’s easier to access. These number of improvements in Facebook features improve the functionality and give us more control over the stuff we share. The major reason for this is the lurking competition from Google+. This is how competition in the market helps the end user.

Tagged as: author, browsing, facebook, facebook-places, features, india, news, profile, sharing, web

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Foursquare Hits 10 Million Users With Geo-Loaction Networking

by Paul Joseph July 20, 2011 Featured

The most sought after social networking platform Foursquare has appeared in the numero uno position. Just the way Foursquare helps people and places connect through interfaces like mobiles, there are many other players in the same arena. Facebook Places , Loopt and Gowalla are trying to beat but Foursquare appears to be victorious with a whopping 10 million users giving a whole new dimension to the geo-location based networking ear. This milestone has been elucidated by Foursquare in a  beautiful infographic . The Foursquare growth traction is 10 million in two years as compared to Twitter that took two years to reach a user base of 1 million. The interesting part is the dynamism of Foursquare in engaging its customers with enthroned mayor-ships and check-ins . Apart from individuals, Foursquare has added a lot of value to the local business-patron relationship. There are some very popular Foursquare chains such as : What was the main metric for Foursquare? It was indeed happiness. The Foursquare team threw light on this by targeting three cities such as London , New York a nd Hong Kong . Each check-in would open a window into sentiment. The blue pixels meant myriad states of awesome, happy and okay whereas red meant shifting emotional landscape which talks about disagreement, the ratio observed was 6:1. This is a whole new game ushering in the age when technology has touched our lives deeply. Those days are gone when Yellow Pages was the only local encyclopedia. Today Foursquare has broken those walls and make similar services available to people. Foursquare has a loyalty factor where people share their check-ins, experiences or endorsements and businesses can learn a lot from these data. So Foursquare is benevolent on businesses as well. People can now connect with local brands just by searching for its name. In past to attract more users and secure its market location based service Foursquare had taken necessary steps to update their privacy settings and also added more languages in their kitty.   Businesses are guided by behavioral analysis and with Foursquare having 10 million users, it is time that brands are set to check-in to success! Looking For A Social Media Agency?? – Contact WATConsult – India’s Leading Social Media Agency Related Posts LinkedIn Reaches 100 Mn Users, Launches Job Portal Facebook Drawing Marketing Money Away From Google And Foursquare? Twitter And Foursquare Add More Languages To Attract New Users Italy and Saudi Arabia Move To Regulate User Generated Content? What About The Free Internet? Will Women Drive The Future Of The Internet?

Tagged as: 10 million users, facebook-places, foursquare business, generated, infographic, internet, money, social, technology, women, yellow

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Indiabook: The Facebook Killer Of India?

by Paul Joseph April 1, 2011 Featured

What’s the first thing you tend to do the moment you turn on the PC. Log on to Facebook. Fb have become almost like alpha and omega for everybody because it gives us the accessibility to connect with most of the people around, even though you haven’t met them in person. Millions of people are users of Facebook to catch up with old buddies, promote business, share links and videos. We just received hot piping news of the new launch in the Indian Internet net-working Site. It is as huge as Facebook and better… It is called IndiaBook. Shocked!!! Do not be. It is true. Yes Facebook allow you to connect numerous people but it has earlier received range of issues. It is not the case going to be with the Indiabook. It guarantees online privacy, child safely, and they have some extra-ordinary features in compare to Facebook. The Indiabook allows its users to decorate their profile using HTML and CSS while Fb allows plain text. Some of the best Features of the Indiabook are: You can chat with 10 of your friends without separate chat interfaces. Instead of a ‘wall’ Indiabook features ‘graffiti’- allowing you to be colorful with numerous new fonts. In the chat itself you can upload your image. The profile page is fantastic changing the color according to your mood. If you have changed your profile into business page and want to change back to the older version, Indianbook gives you liberty to do so without any sort of confusion They have an excellent description of every feature which is easy to follow. Indiabook not only gives you freedom of chat and uploading but it also gives you updates of the surrounding from education to the world of media. Almost everything. Indiabook have a feature of recording your voice chat and listening to it later. There are many new app and features to this giant Indiabook , to unlock more click here. Showcase Your Digital Work Here! Win An Award! Log onto WATAwards Related Posts Facebook Places Begins India Roll Out Google Tweaks Social Search And Bing Bar Gets Facebook Integration SlideShare Launches Social Web Conferencing Service – Zipcast And Now We Have Facebook-Ready SIM Cards Too! Google Announces Larry Page As New CEO And News On Groupon Clone

Tagged as: april fools joke, digital, facebook, facebook-places, friends, google-tweaks, image, indiabook, people, reports, social-search

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