our social web: news and opinion from John Johnston on the state of the social media.
Do these tweets just now from Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley mean Foursquare is about to offer image uploads as part of an app update, at last?
I certainly hope so. I think it really needs it to keep people’s interest up over the longer term. I know he’s said before they have been planning to add the feature. Perhaps now is the time.
I thought I’d share a couple of nearby Foursquare offers as a snapshot of what’s going on in the geolocation space, just in my local area. Regular readers will know I’ve written a few other posts about Australian businesses experimenting in the geolocation space.
I see we have the University of Technology, Sydney offering a free movie ticket for the Foursquare Mayor of the UTS Library on a certain day. Interesting new way to encourage students to study? If you come an study at the library regularly, we’ll reward you with some entertainment.
Of course we also have fast food chains starting to offer the “supersize me” types of deals we’re all familiar with.
Never to be outdone, I see that Facebook is now introducing Facebook Deals, which is layered on top of Facebook Places, to provide a similar service to local businesses and users of Facebook.
What kind of offers have you seen in your local area? Anything that’s tempted you yet?
Here’s a little iPhone app I’m now using that I think is pretty cool.
Instagr.am is a new image sharing service (currently just for iPhone) that enables you to take a photo, or use an existing photo from your iPhone photo library, and share it. There is also a decent choice of interesting filters you can quickly apply to each photo and preview before uploading.
I think the really handy things about this service are that it’s really easy to use, and that you can crosspost the images to Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and Tumblr if you so desire – greatly increasing the sharing aspect. You can also locate a photo using Foursquare before you share it. As Foursquare doesn’t yet have image uploads the way Gowalla does, it’s a welcome addition.
It’ll be interesting to see how this service develops, if it develops. Surely they’ll be adding platforms other than iPhone, if they have the funds to do so.
If you’ve used Instagram, what do you think of it? Good enough to keep using? If you haven’t, do check it out.
All the social media news right now seems to be about the New Twitter features. I just want to take a moment away from that to say that I’ve now started using the new Seesmic Desktop 2 app on my Mac, for my desktop social networking needs. So far, I’m impressed with it, enough to keep using it on a daily basis.
It has to be said that I do still visit the individual social network web interfaces on a regular basis, but I’m finding that there are some really useful aspects to the new Seesmic Desktop version.
I’ll spare you the full rundown of features as that’s been well covered elsewhere, but here are the main reasons why I’m liking using it a lot. I have been a user of Seesmic Desktop since the beginning; well, from even before Seesmic bought the Twhirl desktop Twitter client and developed the app into what it is today.
Okay that’s it. As I said, there are many more features but those are the ones that make it worth using for me. Have you tried it yet? What are your thoughts on it?
Further to my recent posts, Local businesses: to use Foursquare (yet) or not, that is the question’ and 10 examples of businesses in Australia already using Foursquare for marketing, it seems that Coca–Cola has now jumped in with its own contribution to Foursquare markeing. Enter, The Coke Machine Fairy.
I just noticed this a few minutes ago when I visited my local shopping centre, Broadway Shopping Mall. There was a “Nearby Special” banner on display as I checked-in.
It appears that Coke will be leaving “goodies” in Coke machines around Sydney on a daily basis. Instructions on how to play the game can be found here.
