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Posts Tagged ‘fourwhere’

The End or the Beginning for Foursquare?

Foursquare has been one of those social media “baubles” that are shiny and glittery but, for whatever reason, has never been wildly embraced despite a lot of attention and more than $15-million of venture capital.

Once thought to be the next Twitter, Foursquare was supposed to catch fire a couple of years ago the popular SXSW conference but it flamed out instead.

Sure, it has two million registered users but who knows how many of those are active. Heck, I have a Foursquare account but it’s been collecting dust for months.

There has been a lot of conjecture about Foursquare’s future in recent months over whether it is anything more than a novelty that lets people broadcast their location. The biggest weakness has been that Foursquare has no other features. It’s a one-trick pony.

Heck, if you want to use a service that makes Foursquare interesting and useful, check out our Fourwhere service that shows comments from users on a map in cities around the world. For what it’s worth, Fourwhere also displays comments from Gowalla and Yelp.

If there were clouds on the horizon about Foursquare before, then it’s fair to suggest dark clouds are now rolling in as Facebook has launched a new service that lets people broadcast their location to friends using a mobile phone.

Facebook’s service looks and smells a lot like Foursquare. Facebook is even using the term “check-in”, which has been Foursquare’s catch-phrase.

The question now is whether Facebook’s move into the location-based services market is the beginning of the end for Foursquare. Given Facebook’s dominance and Foursquare’s precious foothold, it could see many of Foursquare’s users flee to Facebook. After all, why use a service with a single feature when there’s another option with multiple features.

The other school of thought is Facebook has now validated the location-based services market, which means that Foursquare and other start-ups such as Gowalla could thrive based on the rising tide lifts all ships theory.

My take is Foursquare’s prospects have become a lot more dim.

If Foursquare had been enjoying Twitter-like success, Facebook’s entry into the market would be significant but not earth-shattering. The fact that Foursquare is still a small player likely means it is about to take a major hit as people migrate to Facebook in significant numbers.

By Mark Evans - August 19th, 2010 - 9 Comments »
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Posted in Social Media

FourWhere Now Combines Gowalla, Yelp and Foursquare

We are excited to announce that FourWhere now includes places and content from Gowalla and Yelp – a move that makes it the only service to integrate information from the three leading location-based services: Gowalla, Yelp and Foursquare.

Since its launch in March, FourWhere has received an enthusiastic reception by providing users with an easy way to discover places and comments for thousands of restaurants, bars, cafes, stores, tourist attractions and other venues. The service uses data from Foursquare, Gowalla and Yelp, and displays it using Google Maps API.

Not only does FourWhere now combine information from Foursquare, Gowalla and Yelp, it also uses intelligent matching to amalgamate similar venues. For example, Moonbean Coffee can appear as Moonbean Coffee Company or The Moonbean Coffee by different sources. Fourwhere merges all three descriptions, along with comments to the venue.

FourWhere is a free service developed by Sysomos Inc., a leading social media monitoring and analytics provider. Nick Koudas, Sysomos’ chief executive and co-founder, said Fourwhere reflects Sysomos’ ability to quickly introduce innovative services.

“FourWhere is an example of how Sysomos can leverage its leading-edge data and text analytics technology to seize upon new opportunities,” Koudas said. “We recognized the growing interest in location-based services, and we continue to look for new ways to expand FourWhere to take advantage of the market’s growth.”

The addition of Gowalla and Yelp means FourWhere users now have even more information at their fingertips when looking for places to eat, shop, socialize or visit in thousand of cities around the world.

Using FourWhere is easy. There is no need to register, and you don’t have to be a member of Foursquare, Gowalla or Yelp to discover new places and comments. To use FourWhere, search for a location (city or address), and then click on the map to see the places in which Foursquare, Gowalla or Yelp users have been, and any comments they have left about particular places.

If, for example, you are looking for a place to eat near the Charlestown Bridge in Boston, you would search for “Boston” or “Charlestown Bridge, Boston”, and then move the map to the area around the bridge. FourWhere then displays information about each place on the map, as well as offering details about the service it came from, and the users who provided the information.

In this case, we are looking at comments for a Polcari’s Coffee Shop. Each comment includes information about whether it came from a Foursquare, Gowalla and Yelp user. More information about a user can be seen by clicking on their photo or avatar.

If you have any comments or suggestions about FourWhere, please let us know.

By Mark Evans - June 21st, 2010 - 29 Comments »
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Posted in Technology

What’s the Buzz at SXSW?

For anyone in the technology world, the South by Southwest conference (aka SXSW) in Austin, Tex. is the place to be. It’s a combination of conference, exhibition, networking and a break from winter – sort of like March Break for geeks.

The buzz going into SXSW was all about location-based services such as Foursquare and Gowalla. Given their growing popularity, these services were expected to take centre stage as the digitally-savvy attendees happily climbed on the bandwagon – much like they pushed Twitter into the mainstream in 2008 after enthusiastically embracing it at the SXSW conference.

With the first three days of SXSW conference completed, what’s the buzz so far? To get a snapshot of what’s happening, we used Sysomos MAP to put the spotlight on the biggest conversations.

Not surprisingly, “Austin” is the most active keyword with a strong association to “sxswi” (the interactive part of SXSW, which also showcases music and film).

As expected, Foursquare and Gowalla are also attracting some good buzz. But perhaps the most interesting “buzz” from SXSW is “gmail”.

Todd Jackson, a product manager from Google, said during a panel that Google made a mistake by launching its new social network, Google Buzz, too aggressively. Another Google employee, Jonathan Perlow, also said Google is fixing some issues that have slowed GMail’s performance.

More: If you’re at SXSW and looking for a tool to jump-start your visit to Austin, check out FourWhere.com, a new service that combines Foursquare’s content and data with the Google Maps API. FourWhere, which was build by Sysomos, is a user-friendly way to discover content from Foursquare such as restaurants and cafes.

By Mark Evans - March 15th, 2010 - No Comments »
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Posted in Events

FourWhere Fans Fuel New Features

Since the launch of FourWhere earlier this week, the reception has been amazingly enthusiastic with tremendous traffic, a wave of tweets, some great blog and media coverage (e.g. Now Magazine, TechCrunch and Mashable) and, as important, some excellent feedback from users.

As the suggestions for new features and improvements rolled in, our team of developers jumped into action to introduce an improved version of FourWhere, which is a service that combines data and content from Foursquare with the Google Maps API. This makes it easy to find all the places visited by Foursquare users and any comments they may have left about them.

FourWhere’s improvements and new features include:

1. Support for different languages in tips and comments. Content in French or Japanese now render well.

2. There’s no more need for right mouse clicks. The menu of venues and tips now appears with a single left-click.

3. There’s no more Java required. This was mostly a problem for Mac users. FourWhere is now 100% HTML and Javascript.

4. We’ve added Opera support so FourWhere now supports all the major Web browsers.

5. FourWhere can now be used on an iPhone or a Google Android phone, although the small screen size limits the experience.

Below is a graphic showing the venues around the Austin Convention Center in Austin, Tex. where the South by Southwest (SXSW) conference is now happening. For anyone at SXSW, check out FourWhere as a way to discover places to eat, dance, drink and, of course, do business.

FourWhere was created by Sysomos, which offers social media and monitoring and analytics services.

By Mark Evans - March 13th, 2010 - No Comments »
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Posted in Social Media, Technology

Tapping into FourWhere at SXSW

As the SXSW conference kicks off today in Austin, Tex., thousands of people are going to be looking for cool and interesting places to eat, party, drink, dance, relax and do business.

One of the tools that you might want to add to your SXSW social arsenal is FourWhere, the newly-launched service created by Sysomos which combines content and data from Foursquare with the Google Maps API.

FourSquare provides a user-friendly way to see all the places that have been visited by Foursquare users, as well as any comments they made.

To use FourWhere at SXSW, type “Austin Convention Center, United States” into the search box. Then, right-click on the map. This will show all the places around the convention center visited by Foursquare users.

To get information about a venue on the map, click on one of the orange dots. This will display its name, and any comments about it. For example, here’s several comments for the Iron Works BBQ, which is the orange dot with “5+” beside it on the lower right-hand side of the graph below.

More: FourWhere was listed among by Lifehacker as one of “best tools for hacking your next big conference (like SXSW).

By Mark Evans - March 12th, 2010 - 1 Comment »
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Posted in Events, Social Media

Introducing FourWhere: Start Discovering the World Around You

A growing number of people are using location-based services such as Foursquare and Gowalla to tell the world where they’re visiting, and offering “tips” about these places.

But how do you easily find the information being provided?

The answer is FourWhere, a new and free location-based social search service from Sysomos that mashes-up locations and comments from Foursquare with the Google Maps API.

FourWhere is simple to use; you start by providing your location (city or address), and then right-click on the map to see the places where Foursquare users have been and any tips and comments they’ve left about particular places. (There’s a screenshot of FourWhere at the bottom of this post.)

“Creating FourWhere was a natural move for us given that Sysomos is a leading player in the social media analytics market, while Foursquare is emerging as one of the fastest-growing social media services,” said Nick Koudas, chief executive and co-founder with Sysomos.

“More people are using location-based services such as Foursquare, Yelp, Twitter and Gowalla. Today’s launch of FourWhere is the first step in bringing the local buzz together.”

After the initial release, we’ll continue to enhance the service by adding content analytics. We plan to add more real-time information from other social media sources using Sysomos’ extensive content database.

FourWhere is a public service so there is no need to register or sign in. Just visit http://fourwhere.com, and start discovering all the fun places you never knew existed and see the buzz about them.

By Mark Evans - March 9th, 2010 - 31 Comments »
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Posted in Social Media, Technology

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