Daily Bits

Social Networks

Foursquare Ties Up with Starbucks, Free Barista Badges for Every Check-in

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Foursquare continues its quest for media hype dominance with yet another interesting feature. It just launched a new promotional gig that ties it up with Starbucks. So, on Thursday, the next time you visit a Starbucks outlet and check-in to your Foursquare account, you will be rewarded with a barista badge.

The Starbucks barista badge can be earned if you’ve checked-in to five Startbucks outlet. Although, there’s no physical reward yet is given if you earn the barista badge, I’m pretty sure Starbucks and Foursquare will come with something to give out some form of physical rewards in the future. A free tall Cappuccino perhaps for every barista badge earned? This may sound appealing for frequent Startbucks customers, but Starbucks’ Chris Bruzzo, vice president for brand, content and online said that the company is eyeing different rewards set, not just free Starbucks drinks.

This is a rather unique gig and both companies stand a chance of getting positive gains from this deal. Starbucks can use Foursquare to gather feedbacks from clients and perhaps gain new clients as well since Foursquare members can easily share their feedback to their network of friends on Foursquare.

For Foursquare, it already gained from the deal since Starbucks is planning to use the Foursquare business analytics tools that it recently launched.

So, the next time you visit a Starbucks outlet, don’t forget to check it in to your Foursquare account. You might be the first person to earn that “prestigious” barista badge.

AOL Gets Serious with its Social Aggregator – Lifestream

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AOL wants to spoil the Google Buzz party with social lifestreaming service of its own, dubbed Lifestream.  This was previously launched as part of AOL’s platform but due to the success it gained in terms of users AOL decided to launch it as an independent platform.

Basically, Lifestream is just like Friendfeed, aggregating your updates from social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Delicious, Digg, Flickr, MySpace, YouTube and online real-time updating services. It lets you follow other Lifestream members and see all of the content they published on those online sites.

Lifestream also lets you filter out content from specific networks to reduce noise and cluttering in your own Lifestream “stream.” Reversely, you can auto-publish your updates from various social networks to your Lifestream account. Lifestream also has a location feature similar to Foursquare.

For checking out your account, Lifestream offers several methods. You can sign in to your Lifestream account via Adobe AIR interface, on the web, on your iPhone or Android phones. When you access Lifestream on your mobile phones, it automatically notes your location.

In other words, AOL’s Lifestream service is a pretty much full-featured lifestreaming service and it’s a good decision from AOL to launch it as a separate product. With the popularity enjoyed by real-time, lifestreaming services Lifestream can carve its niche into this market.

While it is a pretty solid service, it will also nice if Lifestream would open up to currently popular lifestreaming services such as Google Buzz and Twitter and would not thread the path towards becoming their rival.

You may check out AOL Lifestream at lifestream.aol.com. If you do, please share with us your opinion about it.

MySpace Gets Serious with Its Social Gaming Platform

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Trying to revitalize itself as once a major force in the social networking arena, MySpace is beefing up its social gaming service in an effort perhaps to catch up with the popularity of social games on Facebook. At the Games Developers Conference, MySpace has launched a new MySpace Games experience – creating a more social gaming environment with new set of tools and functionality for both users and developers.

MySpace launched its new game site at myspace.com/games. For MySpace users, the new MySpace Games Gallery offers more features including game notifications, personalized game recommendations, discover new games from their friends’ Stream, and popular game charts. MySpace users can also rate the games to enhance search results and recommendations.

For game developers, MySpace is providing a simple and user-friendly platform for independent game developers as well as robust support for premium games for its partner major development game developers.

MySpace games engagement will also be improve as games are to be merchandized in more areas and shared easily among users.

MySpace also announced the new Neon for  iPhone application. This application will provide users access to their MySpace games while on the go as well as make it easy for them to interact with games on their iPhones. All the other things that users can do on MySpace Games on the web are carried over to the iPhone app plus the ability to install games remotely.

So, what do you think? Can MySpace bring back its glory days through social games? Or is Facebook already deep into the game that it will be difficult for MySpace to rock Facebook’s dominance? Will you be using MySpace games?

Foursquare is on a Roll! To Launch Free Analytics Tool

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Foursquare is really gearing up to go big time in the next couple of months perhaps. The location-based social network is all over the news the past few days.  Well, what can you expect? It’s closest rival, Gowalla is also up on its feet with new features and new platforms lately.

So, for Foursquare’s latest arsenal NYT’s Bits Blog is reporting that Foursquare is about to roll out a free analytics tool and dashboard in the coming weeks. This tool will allows business establishment owners to get a grasp of information about people who are visiting their business establishments. It will also help store owners in knowing certain demographics about their reglar customers as well as learn how they could make new customers become regular ones.

In addition, the new Foursquare tool will also allow business owners gather a range of real-time data about usage, the number of Foursquare users who have  “checked in”, when these people arrived, male-to-female customer ratio as well as data about the times of day where there were more visitors in their establishments.  If you’re running a business establishment, this information will be very useful for decision making.

Finally, the new feature will also include a staff page for each establishments wherein employees would be able to “socialize” with customers.

Of course, to protect user privacy, such feature will be in an opt-in, opt-out feature.

It’s Gowalla Vs. FourSquare, Which Side are You On?

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Undoubtedly, location-based or location aware services, be it on the web or mobile is the next big thing to watch out for. And if you haven’t jumped into the bandwagon, you might want to check out Gowalla or FourSquare, two of the hottest location-based social networking tool which are fighting it over the right to become the market’s number 1 service.

And these two services just might officially spark up their unavoidable rivalry at the upcoming SXSWi 2010 gig next week. Both FourSquare and Gowalla are said to be bringing more innovative features in the said event.

So, which side are you on? Are you using Gowalla or FourSquare? Have you checked what new features each of them are preparing to unveil?

I actually have both, and several of them. I have FourSquare on my iPhone and BlackBerry Bold while Gowalla both sits on my iPhone and Google Nexus One phone. But I don’t get to use them that much since there are very few people in my area who uses these applications.

In terms of features, Gowalla recently revamped its Passport pages by using Big icons to show places you’ve visited. It is also now easier to spot if you’ve got new friend requests. Design-wise, Gowalla has also made some improvements, specifically eliminating the prevalent dark green hues of its interface and replacing it with a light green look. Overall, Gowalla is ahead of its competitor, FourSquare in the looks department.

If FourSquare is lacking on the looks department, it is however prepping up some functionality enhancement. One of these is the “categories” element to plaes. This new feature simply lets you put places you’ve visited into various categories to make browsing easier.

Of course, these two location-aware services would only thrive if you are using them. So, which side are you taking? Have you used either of the two on your mobile devices?

Facebook to Stop Sending Apps Notifications, Thankfully!

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Although you can always add a friend’s updates on Facebook it’s still annoying whenever that friend used another application which you have not hidden on your profile before. So, you go out and hide it again to remove the noise that has been cluttering app your profile. Starting Monday, you will not have to go through each every one of those applications notifications and hide them. Facebook will stop sending those notifications, finally!

So, how could you then communicate with your friends to tell them about this cool new Facebook apps that you’re currently spending your time on? The Facebook Developers Blog suggested that you use counters instead, set news within the dashboards to share lightweight messages and activate the extended permissions to email users and send richer and more engaging messages.

Facebook is also planning to change how app requests function and how Facebook profiles will be displayed, all to make Facebook a pleasant, less noisy social networking platform.

I would have to commend them for doing this, despite the fact that it might actually turn some users away, especially those who enjoy using all those apps and telling their friends about them.  Who knows, some Facebook users might actually miss those notifications about their friends needing this or that on Mafia Wars. Or notifications about the fact they have no watered their plants on FarmVille, and many other time-wasting activities that they are doing on Facebook.

So, will you be disappointed or happy about this announcement or what?