Perhaps [initial users] thought they were being helpful, but I suspect most of the reasoning behind “Seat 23A” or “This Tollbooth” had to do with boredom or a surreptitious motive to become mayor of something (anything) and therefore accumulate points. The problem was, the lowest level of engagement in Foursquare is supposed to be the check-in, not the creation of locations. By creating instead of interacting they were diluting the major concept. And worse yet, they were creating a mess for anyone else looking in, trying to check in.

Landing in any major airport in 2010 and trying to check into Foursquare meant scrolling past all of this Foursqualor in order to find the actual airport. Check-ins to dozens of seats, gates, regular commuter flights at even the smallest airport crowded the screen. With airport names sometimes invoking some local politician or patron saint of flying, mere searches would not always help. Later, Foursquare would appropriately weight these major hubs so they appeared towards the top of the list when you were nearby. But for a while a casual Foursquare user could be forgiven for just getting fed up with the chaff, the atmosphere of waste, the annoying litter of the fake-or-worse locations.

In London, however, this issue seems to be worse as the general population interested in potentially using Foursquare is far more diverse. In the U.S., you were dealing with a savvy first-mover who didn’t mind (and potentially relished) the clean-up and pruning while the general public gave Foursquare a chance after many of the corrections had been made. In the U.K., a cross-demographic shift to social with these tools in place would mean newcomers could be turned off immediately by the digital litter and abandon Foursquare altogether. For Foursquare to take hold in the U.K. will require a base of superusers who can make changes to locations easily, reporting, policing and editing venues as needed. More at the link.

Google Acquires Zagat

Google has purchased Zagat, popular restaurant review site, for an undisclosed sum that is estimated at less than $66 million.  Google made the purchase to improve its local products. As stated in the Google blog, “Moving forward, Zagat will be a cornerstone of our local offering—delighting people with their impressive array of reviews, ratings and insights, while enabling people everywhere to find extraordinary (and ordinary) experiences around the corner and around the world.”

Facebook Testing Page Recommendations
Facebook is testing a Page recommendation widget, which prompts users to write a recommendation for a Page. Facebook is hoping this widget will make it easier for friends of reviewers to find and connect with Pages.  When questioned about the widget, Facebook responded by saying “We’re always testing new features with small percentages of users to provide us feedback to help improve the service. The tests inform many of the improvements we make to the site and help shape new products.”  Facebook is also testing friend’s filters in the news feed: http://mashable.com/2011/09/08/facebook-news-feed-changes.

Twitter’s Active Users

We finally have a pulse on how many active Twitter users there are. Typically, Twitter likes to share number of users, which is currently around 200 million, rather than active users. This week, Twitter finally broke the news that there are over 100 million active twitter users logging in at least once a month and 50 million active users logging in everyday. Adding to these stats, Mashable explained that “Twitter now hosts roughly a billion tweets every five days, 230 million tweets every day, and has hit a new record for tweets per second: 8,900.”

Smartphone Satisfaction
Apple should be grinning over the recent study completed by J.D. Power and Associates on Smartphone satisfaction. The study, which surveyed 6,898 Smartphone owners, found that Apple Smartphone’s had the highest customer satisfaction. Criteria included overall satisfaction, performance (35%), ease of operation (24%), Smartphone features (21%), and physical design (20%). Apple scored 830 points based on a 1,000-point scale. The industry average, for comparison, was 788 points. HTC was the closest to Apple with 801 points. See the full study here.

Smartphone Usage

Speaking of Smartphone’s, how is the average consumer using them? According to a recent study by Pew Research, Checking in on apps like Foursquare are at the bottom of the list. The survey, which was conducted on 2,277 adults, found that 92% of Smartphone users send and receive texts whereas only 12% checkin on geolocation services. View the charts below to see how Smartphone activities rank:

-Anna (@alucas9)

New #4sq Features
Foursquare has made two notable updates to their app this week:

Tips List
They have added a tips list feature, which allows people to categorize a group of places. So now, for example, you can create a tip list for your favorite local bars or coffee shops.

Event Check-Ins
Foursquare has also announced official event check-ins. Foursquare has partnered with ESPN, movietickets.com, and Songkick to populate it’s database with sporting, movie and concert events for you to check-into.

Higher Ed and Foursquare
In an article this week, InsideHigherEd discussed “A recent survey by the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth found that 98 percent of higher ed institutions are on Facebook, and 84 percent are on Twitter.” This is a contrast to the 20% of campuses that have adopted an institutional presence on Foursquare. Foursquare use among colleges is expected to rise as officials realize the opportunity to interact with students while they’re on campus. Just think of the engagement opportunities – such as turning a college tour into a virtual check-in game or making students aware of campus events as they’re happening.

Skype Wi-Fi
Skype has a new app for iPhone and iPad users called Skype Wi-Fi. Skype Wi-Fi allows users to connect to more than 1 million Wi-Fi Hotspots around the world. Normally you will be charged by the minute (starting at $.06 per minute), but this weekend only you can try the app for free for 60 minutes. Find out more.

Social Media Marketing Infographic

Mashable Infographic

-Anna (@alucas9)

From there, to meet the requirements for inclusion on Foursquare’s Page Gallery, I added a banner, wrote a few tips and it was set up in no time.

As of this posting, we’ve yet to show up on the gallery page. However, a lot of brands are there and more are certainly being added by the minute. But, why? Will Foursquare pages become a new go-to for major brands?

The answer, I think, is maybe. There’s certainly value here, as demonstrated by some of the brands that have piloted this program over the past year or so, such as The New York Times, Tiffany & Co., Starbucks and Bravo. MTV has used theirs as a brand tie-in for the Jersey Shore, complete with its own badge.

But there’s also tremendous opportunity for spam. If you use Foursquare, you’ve already seen brands signing up as people, even brick-and-mortars, which I don’t understand. From a “checking-in” standpoint, it is absolutely ridiculous to think that the sandwich shop around the corner or the major research university nearby is “following” you or stopping in at the local watering hole.

What makes a lot of sense, however, is for organizations that travel from event to event, like our local SPCA, or businesses that frequently operate in multiple locations (hello, food trucks) to use this new offering to share with their peregrinations with interested parties, without violating the terms of service or common sense.

What is likely even more important about this change is that Foursquare is looking for more content providers. They want more people to make notes and give tips for the locations that they index, so they can pitch their value to potential advertisers and partners. Requiring brands to make five recommendations in order to be listed in their gallery will lead to an explosion of content.

All in all, I think this is a welcome change and opportunity. But like everything else, it has to be done right. Rush out and sign up your brand today, but make sure you have a plan on how you want to use it. As always, that’s the only way to truly and effectively get the most out of your social media tools.

-Thomas (@thomasmcdonald)

Apparently – if the Color app’s recent announcement is any indication – it gets you quite a bit of hype. The concept behind Color is important. But its execution is nothing to write home about.

Some photos from around the Feedback office, as well as one that we uploaded that was not taken here - a loophole in Color's reason for being.

Color offers what it claims is a breakthrough new social networking application for geo-tagged pictures. With the free app for iPhone, you take photos as a group, and anyone within 150 feet of one another can see the photos that others have taken on their device. Photos are posted without any sort of authentication. The makers of Color recommend that users not use the app alone.

And by alone, what they really meant to say is “don’t use Color unless you are hanging out with your anti-social friends in a public place” or perhaps, “don’t use Color unless you would otherwise tweet what is happening, while it’s happening, with people besides those within 150 feet of where it’s happening.”

Not only is every photo you upload to the service sent free and clear to whatever cloud Color is using to store the photos on, but there are no restrictions on who can see or join groups while you’re at locations. There’s even a well-published workaround to being able to eavesdrop on groups formed at any location, no matter where you are.

Pretty logo, though.

What’s more, photos can even be selected from the iPhone’s camera roll, enabling users to break from the spirit of the app, which is taking pictures based on the place you’re currently located.

My initial thoughts on being able to take pictures with a handful of people at once is that Color is more of a toy than a realistic tool for most users’ social media arsenal, but there are some advantages a product like this could have after it has been more refined.

However, Color falls short of being able to claim any sort of victory in the location space, despite the claims by the tech press. In the end, combining a sub-par and confusing application, numerous privacy concerns and a poorly executed though unique idea seems to do nothing but feed the tech bubble trolls of the media.

-Brad (@bcarr)

The other day I downloaded some mobile app I was referred to called Ditto. If you haven’t heard of it, all you really need to know is that it’s for groups of people to schedule get-togethers or something like that. For the purposes of understanding where I’m going with this, its specific purpose doesn’t really matter.

Aside from crashing every time I tried to use it (an issue that has since been fixed), my main thought was, “I can sort of do this already on Facebook or Twitter, or even over email or text.”

Keywords: Sort of.

The Ditto app, currently sitting in my iPhone's "Meh" folder.

Just as actors go to Hollywood in hopes of being discovered or writers go to New York hoping to grace the pages of GQ or Vogue, it seems more and more developers are creating mobile apps with the sole intention of being bought by an already-established social network. These apps aren’t too spectacular by their lonesome selves, but the technologies could add a certain oomph to existing, more well-known and frequently used services.

You can tell sometimes by just picking one of these apps up. The concept behind Ditto (“making plans with a group”), for example, has some potential. But perhaps not on its own. Why would I open a separate app to make plans when I can already use a more mainstream technology that most people use? My groups are already in place, and they aren’t on Ditto.

The Beluga app, good for groups but does not actually look like a whale.

Lots of these niche apps have similar looks and feels to the more mainstream social services we’ve all come to know and love, and sometimes hate. These aren’t bad applications, but the developers must – have – to understand that these services will never reach a critical mass of users. Instead, these apps are their tickets to the bigtime.

Consider the case of Beluga, the answer to BlackBerry Messenger for phones that aren’t BlackBerrys. The technology is slick, but I doubt Beluga on its own was never going to have mass appeal. Plus, most people hate caviar. Facebook bought the company a few weeks ago, and it would appear that, somewhere down the line, Facebook Groups are going to become better because of an app named after a type of whale.

Ditto looks an awful lot like Foursquare, and would be a great add-on (Foursquare shifts from “check-in service” to “make plans and check-in service”). An app called Where, which delivers information about popular places to users based on their location, resembles that of Yelp and could be a great component to that already popular places-ratings service.

These niche apps fill a similar hole that some of the now-official mainstream social media mobile apps did years ago. The official Twitter app was originally called Tweetie, created by a developer who made millions (probably) off the sale. Similar with Tumblr’s mobile app, which was built here in Richmond and was so good that it eventually became the blogging service’s official iPhone, BlackBerry and Android app. (Thanks in part to that little app, Tumblr now has an official office – and employees with good-paying jobs – here in the Virginia capital.)

Gowalla 3.Whoa!

Check-in at one of the biggest location based services, check-in at them all? The newest version of Gowalla’s iPhone app was released on Thursday, and had some pretty big updates. Gowalla has unified check-ins, allowing users to check-in to Facebook Places, Tumblr, Twitter, and competitor Foursquare when they check-in to Gowalla. Download Gowalla 3.0 here.

Rumor Alert: Google to Buy Groupon?

Rumor has it that Google may buy Groupon for a whopping $6 billion dollars. Groupon is rapidly growing in popularity, and is set to exceed $500 million dollars in revenue this year. Sources say that Google wants to make this purchase to extend their online dominance through local advertising dollars, and to fend off competition like Facebook, who recently announced their own deal service.

One Hangover (Badge), Coming Right Up:

Badges! Foursquare announced new badges this week, including Dog’s Best Friend (“for frequenting dog parks”), Great Outdoors (“for getting out to parks to breathe in some fresh air”), Swimmies (“for the aquatic minded”), 9 to 5 (“for those of us in the weekly grind”), Hangover (“we’re not encouraging hangovers, but are happy to salute people who keep on trucking!”), and Ski Bum (“to commemorate your trips up the mountain”).

Social Networking for Social Good:

This week, Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes officially launched Jumo, a social activism social network. You can connect with Jumo via Facebook connect, and then select to follow any of the 3,500 charity organizations (in 200 issue areas) you support.

Netflix To Offer More Streaming Options:

Recently, Netflix began offering a streaming-only subscription, and beginning in 2011, we may have more instant options. This week, Netflix announced a deal with FilmDistrict that will allow first run movies to be streamed. The New York Post also reported that Netflix is in talks with production studios, possibly paying upwards of $100,000 per episode for first-run TV content.

Facebook has done for “deals” what they did for buying ads… They made it super-simple, very logical and with a prowess that makes Foursquare’s process seem silly. Sort of like Apple does to Windows on a regular basis (sorry, baiting a flame war there :).

Go claim your location and start dealing!

-Dean (@dbrowell)

Excerpt below from a feature on geolocation apps, popularity and more from Feedback, Inc’s Dean Browell (@dbrowell).

So who’s in your pocket these days – Foursquare, Gowalla, Yelp, Facebook Places, or other?  Why one over the other?

I’m partial to Foursquare, interested in ShopKick, find Yelp helpful and will try anything.  Just watching the landscape.

So what’s the deal with Facebook Places?  Plan to use it, screw it, or could you care less about those knuckleheads in Palo Alto.

It’s important to not get distracted by just the check-in aspect.  Geo-location and even Facebook Places‘ role in it will be just as important for what it does for any of the 500 million + average users who never check in but nevertheless ends up impacted by the check-in data of others, such as choosing a restaurant or hospital based on who has been there or seeking the testimonial of a friend who they’ve seen has been there.

Who do you hope prevails in the geo wars?

For Foursquare and all the more geo-dedicated apps, there’s a long and storied history of innovating specialists having a place in the discerning consumer’s mind.  Just ask Apple or the entire craft brewing industry.

If you were sitting in the captain’s chair over at Foursquare or Gowalla, what would you say to Zuck?

“You were supposed to just take Microsoft’s money.”

Read the full article here…

Find more Feedback thoughts on Geolocation here…

You should first know that this thing kind of blew my mind at first.

The canned description is that this is Foursquare for the Internets. In other words, a way to “check in” at just any ol’ website as you surf, thereby communicating where you go and tagging you as a “fan” of frequently visited sites and therefore the, “one true fan” of sites you’ve visited more than anyone else (like Foursquare’s, “mayor”). It also has patches/badges for browsing accomplishments and a point system that builds by visiting and sharing pages through Twitter, Facebook and more. It’s easy to lazily make this the web’s analog to Foursquare. It can be a lot more than that.

Step back from the mechanics, which require a downloaded plug-in for your browser, and you can see that in some ways this turns web analytics a bit on its head – in fact it reverses the magnifying glass, showing you the interesting detail beyond your simple history. It really forces you to take a different look at your browsing culture and personal identification.

As Co-Founder Eric Marcoullier (@bpm140) reflected openly in a Twitter conversation with me:

I pretty much always look at who visited the page before I read the article now. The context is fascinating.

During my first week I really stayed open with my browsing. I installed the One True Fan plug-in on my main browser and allowed auto-check-ins on basically every site I visited (in full disclosure I did hide check-ins on exactly three sites, for client sensitivity reasons). Doing this while on the AGLA Hiring Heroes tour was particularly interesting since my check-ins ricocheted between scheduling which tiny town we’d be in from Dallas to Los Angeles and keeping up with news and work from the world outside the bus.

There’s a stat dashboard I don’t visit very often, but does contain some sample activity:

And here’s the bar that subtly appears at the bottom of websites – it’s small at first but when moused-over shows:

I too found myself checking who else had been there, both from a crowd-sense and a breadcrumb sense. It doesn’t just include anyone with a OneTrueFan.com plug-in, but also anyone sharing these sites on Twitter, Facebook and more (lots more, coming soon, they promise). Yes, there are privacy concerns (that can be easily assuaged with just NOT sharing site visits or un-checking “auto check-in”) but it still makes for an interesting personal if not public experiment.

Consider how this lens, of our internet life, combines with other lenses. How our patterns and likes, our real-world favorites and virtual world favorites begin to make up our personal identity. Consider the generational differences and how OneTrueFan.com data could illuminate our perceptions of demographics… The mind blows.

Business, healthcare & higher education institutions… what if you could actually identify who your biggest fans were?

For more on One True Fan, here’s video of Eric from their Disrupt 2010 presentation:

OneTrueFan.com is in private alpha right now…

-Dean (@dbrowell)