The Magazine

About Foursquare Podcast: Episode 1

11

on October 18th, 2010

Each week Ching Yu will be putting together a weekly audio recap of foursquare stories from this blog and others around the web. This week he was joined by Eric Leist, founder of #LBSChat on twitter. They’re both experts on foursquare. In Episode 1 they cover:

  • Foursquare adding their 4 millionth user
  • New Badges: New York Comic Con, Conan Blimpspotter and Pee-wee Herman
  • New specials and their growing adoption among retailers
  • Official foursquare app for Symbian phones
  • Much more

It’s definitely worth a listen. Let us know what you think of this new feature in the comments.

Download

[podcast]http://aboutfoursquare.com/podcast/001.mp3[/podcast]
  • Sassy

    Love love love it!!
    I’d really like to hear some international news too, I’m sad the UK’s first Superswarm wasn’t mentioned!

    I now have something to look forward to on a Monday! Monday’s aren’t all that bad anymore ;)

  • http://zhephree.com Geoff

    Good podcast! Was a tiny tiny bit surprised no one mentioned how the webOS app has built-in photo (and video!) uploads for check-ins and shouts. (allows you to choose any of 4 hosts, including Plixi, Flickr, etc)

  • http://ericleist.com Eric Leist

    Hi Geoff,

    Thanks for your comment! That’s a good point about the webOS app. I’ve seen photos and video uploads linked in shouts. But I don’t think that really solves the lack-of-pictures problem for Foursquare. Other apps like Whrrl, SCVNGR and Gowalla have integrated photos closely into their location pages. If I open Foursquare on my mobile phone (how most users experience Foursquare), I’m not going to see pictures because that webOS app you’re talking about only broadcasts the shouts in real-time. As a visiting user who looks at the location page the next day, those pictures aren’t accessible.

    There are billions of awesome things developers are doing with the Foursquare API. As I said in the podcast, it will be interesting to see how many of those functions Foursquare starts to adopt in the near future. Maybe pictures are next!

    • http://zhephree.com Geoff

      Oh, it’s definitely not a permanent solution, but it works given the limitations of the foursquare API.

      However, those images are viewable at a later date. Flickr and Plixi and other photo hosts actually support tagging the images with the foursquare venue ID. In the webOS app, you can view a venue and it pulls all the photos for that venue taken on any of the 4 hosts and presents them all on one page. It even shows nearby Flickr photos.

      Unfortunately, outside of the app, finding these images aren’t as easy (however, browsing Flickr machine tags, you can actually find photos for a particular venue)

      But yeah, it’s not ideal. but it does work pretty well considering the limitations of foursquare and having to rely on third parties.

      • http://ericleist.com Eric Leist

        That makes perfect sense, but it seems like a lot of trouble for users to go through to see pictures. At the same time, I can understand why Foursquare isn’t making pics a top priority. There’s a lot of competition in the LBS space right now, and some of these vendors are taking a leapfrog strategy. In other words, they want to focus on what the other apps are not yet doing, as opposed to what they already have.

  • Ching Yu

    Thank you for the feedback, we will definitely update and mention anything we messed up or missed in our next episode.

  • http://rynoweb.com Chuck Reynolds

    You guys not patched through iTunes yet? I’ll give it a listen either way… :)

    • Chris Thompson

      Chuck, we’re still waiting on Apple to approve the podcast feed. It should be available via iTunes shortly.

  • http://www.queenslandholidays.com.au Chris Chambers

    Will you post a note here, or tweet something out when the podcast is in iTunes?

    Chris

  • http://robert.aitchison.org Robert Aitchison

    I admit I did an Indonesian style checkin to get the Blimp spotter badge after “seeing” the west coast blimp on video. Since I’m on the West Coast I think that counts ;)

  • Beckey

    Your Podcast was awesome!! Its so nice to hear from someone who’s addicted to foursquare as I am. I can’t wait for more!! :D

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