The Social

Here's to FourSquare! Former Dodgeball loyalists gather poolside at SXSWi to celebrate the new app.

(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET)

AUSTIN, Texas--"I couldn't be any more psyched for how it's taken off," FourSquare founder Dennis Crowley said of his brand-new mobile social-networking application, which made its public debut here at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival. "It's been, like, 5,000 times better than I expected."

We were wearing bathing suits. A fellow hardcore FourSquare user, media consultant Rex Sorgatz, had used the service to announce a "bikini flash mob" at the rooftop pool of the Omni Hotel on Monday afternoon. When about 20 people had showed up, Sorgatz--in a cowboy hat, Texas-flag swim trunks, and his trademark hipster glasses--raised a drink and said, "Here's to FourSquare!"

I'm biased. We all were. The iPhone-centric FourSquare has been a project near and dear to our hearts in the New York tech scene, as many of us were loyal users of Dodgeball, the service that Crowley built as a graduate-school thesis and sold to Google in 2005. In January, Google announced that it would be shutting the service down amid budget cuts, and Crowley (along with co-developer Naveen Selvadurai) got cranking on its successor so that they could debut it in time for SXSWi. I was an alpha tester, as were most of those at the impromptu pool party.

If the number of FourSquare friend requests in my in-box are any indication, it's been a hit this week. While it hasn't been as buzzworthy as the then-new Twitter was at SXSWi '07, it's undoubtedly one of the things that people will be talking about when they return home from Austin later this week. And if it goes as Crowley and Selvadurai hope, they'll keep using it, too.

Like Dodgeball (and other location-based mobile applications like Whrrl, Brightkite, and Loopt), FourSquare lets you broadcast your location to your friends. Unlike Dodgeball, FourSquare uses GPS on the iPhone (an SMS code and a mobile Web site is available for other devices, but apps for Android, BlackBerry and the like are down the pipeline) and lets users rack up points and badges for awarding nightlife habits and accomplishments.

"Naveen and I had been kicking around these ideas for a while, since last summer, and then nothing was seriously built until, I guess, that night that we were all at Lock's (that'd be Curbed founder and prolific Dodgeball user Lockhart Steele) birthday party and the rumor started spreading that Dodgeball was getting shut down," Crowley said. "We started to talk (about how) we've really got to build this thing because it's going to be turned off."

FourSquare was built in a matter of weeks, because Crowley and Selvadurai wanted to be able to roll it out in time for SXSWi. "It is, admittedly a little bit sloppy, and it's buggy, and people call us out and say we launched too soon," Crowley said of the occasional slip-ups and outages for FourSquare, which went live in the iTunes App Store less than 24 hours before SXSWi kicked off.. "The goal was to launch here and have people take it back to wherever they live."

Now, they're literally building the application in the SXSWi petri dish, a massive gathering of digital-media's early adopters and innovators who are all eager to socialize and navigate the labyrinthine Austin party scene. Special "badges" have been created for SXSWi. On Monday morning, I earned my "Panel Nerd" badge for spending what FourSquare deems to be too much time at the Austin Convention Center. (Message to my editors: Take note of this!)

He said that while user interest has been through the roof, investors--FourSquare is currently self-funded and run out of Crowley's apartment as well as a number of East Village coffee shops--have been quieter. "I haven't really seen any investors here, to be honest," he said. I've been getting e-mails from a few people, but I haven't run into anyone in the halls or anything." He'll probably need that if FourSquare gets much bigger just to keep its servers afloat. But with penny-pinching the inevitable VC habit du jour, it could take some work.

Crowley also laughed off a Gawker report that Google's lawyers were about to start breathing down his neck over the similarities between Dodgeball and FourSquare--even though Google has launched its own location-aware platform, Latitude.

When Crowley and Selvadurai return to New York later this week, they'll have a lot to do. FourSquare users at SXSWi have been blunt, sending out Twitter messages pointing out bugs and asking when there will be better features to find their friends, like an address-book import function. They'll have to figure out some way to control users attempting to game the system, something that Crowley says has already popped up, and work on building a FourSquare presence in other cities. Right now there are 12, including Boston, Denver, and Minneapolis.

Plus, location-based mobile networking is a hot space. Competitors like Brightkite and Whrrl are better-established, bolstered by investor money, and have already worked in features like Facebook Connect integration. Crowley and Selvadurai have some catching up to do.

They'll also have to deal with what happens when they use FourSquare to "check in" to downtown pizzerias and I show up to steal their food. Just sayin'.

Loopt a la Android. (Click for larger image.)

(Credit: PRNewsFoto/Loopt)

Location-based networking service Loopt has now gone live in Google's Android marketplace, and is compatible with "select phones" that run the open-source operating system.

As with other handsets' versions of Loopt, the app lets you track your Loopt-using friends on a map and find other members in the area. They can also share their location with social-networking and messaging services like Facebook and Twitter.

Prior to launching its iPhone and then Android apps, Loopt was restricted to carriers with which it had signed contracts, like Verizon and Boost Mobile. Typically, it was a subscription service that cost a few extra dollars per month.

"From the start, our goal has been to build a ubiquitous interoperable network in which customers don't have to worry about who has what provider or mobile device," Loopt CEO Sam Altman said in a release. Well, with the iPhone and now Android, it looks like they're getting there.

For the most part, the only person you can socialize with on a handheld GPS navigator is the chick who tells you to turn left after 100 yards.

Garmin wants to change that. The device manufacturer has partnered with location-based app company ULocate to bring its Where.com software, previously available only on compatible cell phones and carriers, to some of its devices. (It hasn't said which ones specifically.) This will give Garmin owners access to Where's own Buddy Beacon software, which shares users' current locations with friends. It can be hooked up to Where's Facebook application, too, so you can tell your friends where you are.

Personally, sharing my location isn't exactly what first comes to mind when I use an in-car GPS navigator, but some of Where's other services sound helpful: Yelp reviews, gas price comparisons from GasBuddy, and a handful of others. Unfortunately, a Where representative told me on Tuesday, those aren't encompassed in the Garmin deal.

Location-sharing has been met with some skepticism. Many people thought that location-based social-networking and friend-finding applications would explode after the launch of the iPhone 3G, but we still haven't seen an epidemic of location-sharing take off. Many cell phone owners seem to be perfectly OK not having everyone on their Facebook friends list know where they are.

I might be sold if Where makes its gas price widget available to Garmin. That's something that Ms. "After 1.1 miles, take the exit right" hasn't yet been able to offer me.

This post was updated at 6:22 a.m. PT on Tuesday to clarify that only the Buddy Beacon widget will be available on select Garmin devices.

Buzzd, a mobile service focused on "real-time" reviews of bars and restaurants, says it's making some inroads in the tough, crowded location-based networking market.

The New York-based start-up is set to release numbers on Thursday announcing that 1.2 million venues are now listed in its directory, 10 percent of which were added by users. As for demographics, about 80 percent of Buzzd's users (it doesn't provide specifics on active users) are in the U.S., concentrated around cities like New York and Los Angeles, with another 10 percent in Europe and 10 percent in India.

Like many "geo" services, Buzzd lets members tell their friends where they are; rival Brightkite also lets members post "notes" on those venues, but doesn't turn them into a real-time lookup service. Buzzd has partnered with event and venue listing services like Time Out, Flavorpill, MyOpenBar, and Zagat. You can also use Facebook's newly extended API to hook it up with your profile credentials.

While it's a mobile Web site that doesn't require a download or subscription service, Buzzd has nevertheless worked on forming carrier deals--and says that more are on the way--to improve visibility in exchange for ad revenue sharing.

So what's next? Founder Nihal Mehta told CNET News.com that the all-important iPhone application is on the way, as well as a "strategic investment" on behalf of a major player in the mobile market. He's not saying who that is, but one can guess it's likely a handset manufacturer (though probably not Nokia, because it just bought competitor Plazes) or a carrier.

With more GPS-enabled handsets on the way--iPhone 3G, I'm looking at you--there are few Web 2.0 niches that are more hyped-up than location-based services.

The latest evidence: Nokia announced Monday that it plans to acquire Plazes, a start-up still in private beta.

Financial terms of the deal, which is expected to close in the third quarter of 2008, were not disclosed. Plazes, which is based in Zurich, Switzerland, but works primarily out of Berlin, will become part of Nokia's Software and Services division. Plazes' technology will likely be worked into future mobile apps.

It's good news for Plazes, which has 13 employees. The track-your-friends-on-a-map application was in a tight market that kept growing tighter, with no clear winner emerging.

"When we started in 2005 the potential of that space might have been obvious, but it was an uphill battle nevertheless, with so many concepts gone sour before," a posting Monday on the Plazes blog explained.

Indeed, the first breakout start-up in the space, Dodgeball, was quickly acquired by Google. And instead of gaining mass-market success, it faded away.

Since then, start-ups like Loopt (which had some prominent stage time at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference this month), Whrrl, and Brightkite--many of which do more or less exactly the same thing--have popped up and gained minor to moderate buzz. By getting acquired, Plazes has pulled itself out of the fray and, in effect, has ensured that it won't go under like some of its location-aware start-up brethren surely will.

"If all goes well, in the near future Plazes will be made available to millions of Nokia customers both online and on millions of mobile devices," the Plazes blog post read. It will still be available as a standalone service, and its iPhone application is still on track.

What if your nightlife agenda was dictated not by text messages, phone calls, or your city edition of Time Out, but by a shifting pattern of dots on a Google Map?

As absurd as it may sound, a New York company called Sense Networks thinks that's the solution. On Monday, the company emerged from stealth mode and simultaneously released an "experimental" product called CitySense, an urban navigation product that puts a new spin on the hot market of location-based mobile networking.

A Citysense map of San Francisco.

(Credit: Sense Networks)

Backed by hedge funds rather than the venture firms that typically fuel tech start-ups, Sense Networks wants to do a whole lot more than just tell you where your friends are. Rather, the company plans to use its database of location-based information--sourced not only from people who download its mobile client but also from previously untapped resources like taxicab GPS logs--to create both consumer- and enterprise-oriented products. It's calling that mapping technology "Macrosense."

CEO and co-founder Greg Skibiski described Macrosense to me as a platform for crunching and analyzing location-based data in real time. That has major implications for the retail and financial services industries, he told me. If it's accurate, it could be a huge asset for predictive markets--as well as possibilities for some cool consumer applications.

The first of those, Citysense, has been unveiled along with its more corporate sibling. Currently available as a free download for BlackBerry and iPhone handsets, Citysense displays what look like heat maps to show where the most human activity is going on at that moment, down to the street intersection; future releases of the product may make those locations even more detailed, but Skibiski said that's not yet decided due to the important issue of privacy concerns.

In its initial alpha phase, it's limited to San Francisco. Other cities, including New York, are in development.

Citysense can also show you where, based on historic data, the most "unusual" levels of activity are going on. You then have the option of looking up nearby businesses on Yelp and Google Maps, or bookmarking locations on Socialight, thanks to external APIs built in.

Then, using the location-aware technology built into the handset, Citysense eventually begins to "learn" where you spend most of your time, and as the product grows beyond San Francisco, eventually it'll be able to suggest nightlife options to you in cities around the country--all this without taking any kind of user registration information.

That's a crucial talking point, considering some people are inevitably going to find Citysense and its brethren more than a little bit Big Brother-ish. Skibiski stressed to me that it's not for meeting people, it's for "meeting" places: No personal information is mined, users have the option to completely erase their past navigation histories if they wish, and there's no way to track other users in the system, he said.

Citysense, with its focus on "unusual activity" and machine learning, might be a bit too wacky for the average BlackBerry user, but that's not a big deal for Sense Networks. The company plans to profit primarily from business clients purchasing deeper data from the Macrosense platform; Citysense and all future consumer applications are intended to be strictly icing on the cake.

Business reviews site Yelp will be focusing quite a bit on mobile features in the near future, including an upcoming location-aware iPhone app on the way, company representatives told CNET News.com Wednesday.

This will mean that iPhone users will be able to log onto the Yelp application and search for businesses and reviews of establishments close to their geographic coordinates. In other words, you will be able to look and find which sushi restaurants are within five blocks of your location--and see Yelp members' warnings on which ones might make you puke.

The application is still in development and does not have a timeline for release yet, so few concrete details are available. It'll likely rely on cell phone tower triangulation for location awareness rather than GPS; while the impending "iPhone 2.0" is widely believed to have GPS capability, but if the application uses triangulation, "Yelpers" with first-generation iPhones will be able to use the product as well.

This will be Yelp's first foray into location-aware services, which are a hot and developing niche of the social Web. Some services, like Loopt and Brightkite, focus on charting your friends on a map; others, like Buzzd and Socialight (in the U.K.) run services designed to pinpoint nearby restaurants and bars.

Yelp's entry into the location-aware market could potentially shake things up since the service already has a huge cult following in several major U.S. cities (it's approaching 3 million business reviews) and most other players are start-ups trying to build up loyal user bases. A location-aware mobile Yelp could deal a blow to newish companies like Whrrl, which offers pretty much the same kind of service.

The company has not said whether it will expand location-aware mobile services to devices beyond the iPhone, but Apple's handset is a logical starting point. Yelp, which is geared toward urban 20- and 30-somethings, pulls in a full percent of its traffic from iPhones, representatives said, and the company doesn't even operate an iPhone-specific mobile application yet. That could be due to the company's popularity in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, which happen to be (at least anecdotally) hubs of iPhone use.

Also on the agenda: international expansion, slated to come later this year. Currently, you can write a Yelp review for any business in the U.S., but not internationally. First in line is likely Canada, followed by other English-speaking countries before the site moves into translation efforts.

For something so focused on navigation and geography, it's a bit ironic that location-based social networks have to work their way through such a jungle: carrier partnerships, handset compatibility, creepy privacy concerns, and what-have-you. But one small New York start-up, Socialight, says it's found a route: developers, developers, developers.

Socialight, which focuses on user-created city maps and whose founders insist that location-based mobile services can have functions other than stalking your friends, announced Wednesday that it has opened its application program interface (API). This will let developers mesh Socialight into applications for mobile platforms like Apple's iPhone, Google's Android software, and other devices and operating systems equipped with location-aware technology like GPS and cell tower triangulation. The start-up is also open-sourcing its mobile Java application along with the API.

"There are other APIs out there for tracking where your friends and family are," co-founder Dan Melinger said in a statement Wednesday. "But no one we know of has released an API that lets you publish, manage, and distribute local content, media, and information. This is far more useful and we are excited to see what develops."

For Socialight, this means convenience: an API can lead to more reach with fewer formal partnerships. At launch, Socialight has announced that Dash Navigation is using its API to send Socialight maps to its in-car GPS devices.

"We're making it much simpler to create your own apps for location-aware devices like the iPhone," Melinger told CNET News.com. "We expect a lot of developers to design apps that show content about the places around you--whether its a vintage-eyewear-shop-finder for the iPhone or something for your in-car GPS that helps track down the Shochu bars of L.A."

For the industry, still dealing with how to figure out location-based networking and mobile social networks, and the potential snafus involved with those, Socialight is something to watch: APIs and developer platforms were what made PC-based social networks really skyrocket. This could be an indicator of whether the same will hold true for the mobile space.