The Social

AUSTIN, Texas--Just one year after it initially previewed its new Internet Explorer 9 browser, Microsoft formally launched the software today at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival (SXSW), bringing in representatives from launch partners from The Huffington Post, Foursquare, Groupon, and Pandora to demonstrate an experience that looks less like the Web as we know it and more like the app ecosystem of a smartphone or tablet.

"We're used to the Web getting better because of everything other than the PC," Internet Explorer's Dean Hachamovitch said of how the most innovative kinds of Web development have, … Read more

AUSTIN, Texas--It can't be easy for Josh Williams, the CEO of geolocation service Gowalla, to see once-close rival Foursquare plastered all over his hometown this week for the annual South by Southwest Interactive Festival (SXSW). On the massive outdoor "Pepsi Max Lot" where lucky Foursquare check-ins can earn users "golden tickets" to a Monday night concert by Big Boi, at local vendors participating in a blockbuster partnership between Foursquare and American Express, or just on the smartphones of the tens of thousands of geeks who flood the Texas capital for the conference each year.

"… Read more

AUSTIN, Texas--Hailing the 2010s as "the decade of games," Seth Priebatsch, founder of the Google-backed start-up SCVNGR, brought a bright dose of dreamy enthusiasm to the first official keynote of the South by Southwest Interactive Festival on Saturday afternoon.

Plowing through problems from education reform to global warming, and how they could be addressed by applying the principles of games, the skinny Priebatsch showed up for his talk, "The Game Layer on Top of the World," in a bright orange polo shirt with matching sunglasses perched atop his head and spoke with the jerky staccato of … Read more

On a Monday morning late last month, at the headquarters of the Finger Lakes Wine Country Tourism Marketing Association, the promotional vehicle for a vineyard-speckled region about four hours northwest of Manhattan, something was amiss with Foursquare.

Namely, the Corning, N.Y.-based tourism group's account on the location-sharing social-media site was doing something funny: It was triggering friend requests. That's not supposed to happen with a Foursquare account that's set up as a brand or business page--users should be able to automatically follow the brand or company, rather than having to wait to have their requests … Read more

A new version of geolocation service Foursquare's iPhone app hit the iTunes App Store this morning, bringing photos and comments to the product for the first time. Foursquare members can now post comments on their friends' "check-ins," as well as attach photographs to the directory listings for venues they visit and tips they leave behind.

These new features will be available on Foursquare's Android app later in the week and then on its BlackBerry application next month.

Photo services Instagram and Picplz, as well as food photo network Foodspotting, are already tapped into the new Foursquare … Read more

In a very 21st-century spin on the old World War II adage "loose lips might sink ships," an Associated Press report Wednesday claims that the U.S. Air Force is concerned about troops' use of geolocation services like Foursquare and Facebook Places and the possibility that it could reveal the location of U.S. forces in war zones.

Military authorities in the U.S. and other countries have already made warnings about social networking in general, claiming that it's all too easy for sensitive information to be exposed inadvertently. The Department of Defense had been considering banning the use of social media entirely (… Read more

It's obvious that Facebook sees serious potential in mobile check-in service Foursquare: it tried to buy it for $125 million.

That didn't work. So Facebook started to get into the location game, too. It launched Facebook Places, its own geolocation service. And today, Facebook went ahead and launched a big new suite of mobile features that includes, notably, enhancements to Facebook Places that let businesses easily automate "deals" for when users check in. On the surface, given Facebook's scale, this looks like it could spell difficult times ahead for Foursquare.

Like Foursquare, Facebook's new … Read more

The first live Twitter messages from space were less than a year ago, but already astronauts have moved on to geolocation: Douglas C. Wheelock, commander of the Expedition 25 mission, earned the "NASA Explorer" badge on Foursquare for checking into the International Space Station on Friday morning.

Foursquare business development rep Eric Friedman said on the company blog that Wheelock was "the first human to ever use a location-based service from space," leaving open the possibility that aliens somewhere else in the universe may have developed their own social-networking services and consequently, as far as we … Read more

Facebook has been awarded a patent that appears to give it sweeping intellectual property jurisdiction over location-enabled social networking, something that our colleagues at BNET first noticed on Wednesday. Considering the geolocation space still does not have a single dominant player, the possession of this kind of patent may be a powerful weapon for Facebook that has broad implications for the industry.

Patent no. 7,809,805, called "Systems and methods for automatically locating web-based social network members," is extremely detailed. Among the concepts it claims are the sending and receiving of location-based status messages (what are commonly … Read more