Happy holidays to you: photos and comments are here!
We’ve been promising this all year and really hustled to get it out for the holidays. So, without further ado, our holiday gift to you: foursquare just became more useful and social with the addition of photos and comments. (It’s in the app store now! You can also see these new features on foursquare.com)
You’ve been requesting these features for months, and there are some cool aspects that you’ll notice right away:
- Comments make meeting up and exploring so much easier. Improve your day by telling a friend that you’re around the corner and they should swing by. And getting a last-minute comment reminding you to order the best dish saves your meal. (You can even comment on the website and from check-in links posted to Facebook and Twitter!)
- Tips with photos changes everything. See dishes before ordering them, figure out if a venue looks fun, or easily identify a hard-to-find spot. More info = better exploration.
- The past comes to life. You can visit your history page on foursquare.com to see all the places you’ve been, with photos and comments preserved. Remembering is more fun than ever.
We’ve had a ton of fun testing this. A couple notes:
- Be sure your iPhone has foursquare push notifications turned on so you’ll know when your friends leave you a comment.
- Photos on check-ins are only visible to your friends (and the networks you share to, like Facebook and Twitter). Tip and venue photos are open to the community. And, as you’d expect, comments are only visible to your friends.
A few of our partners have done an amazing job getting the new photos feature integrated for today. Photos from Instagram pushed to foursquare will now be check-ins with photos (rather than just check-ins). Sightings on Foodspotting will be check-ins with your food photos. And picplz is the first service to allow check-in photos on both iPhone and Android. Soon to follow: we’ve got the new foursquare for Android coming later this week, WebOS (thanks to @zhephree) and BlackBerry in January, and the rest of the major platforms in early 2011. And the API will be ready for all developers later this week!
There are a couple features we weren’t able to fit in for this release but we’re working to launch soon. These include sharing photos (to Facebook and Flickr), an easier way to keep track of all the comments you’re getting, and a more useful place to store all your old photos (right now, it’s all on that history page). Stay tuned for those!
In the meantime, enjoy photos and comments, and have fun out there!
APIv2. You’re going to like the way it looks. I guarantee it.
Good news, developers: version 2 of the foursquare API is now ready for you to play with. We’ve been working on this for almost a year, and, while it’s still in beta, it’s looking awesome. Trusted testers have been using it for a while and it passed a significant milestone with this week’s hot new Android client, the first app built entirely on the new API.
You’ll find APIv2 better in lots of subtle ways:
- OAuth2 is much easier to use, more secure for users, and can even be used entirely from client-side Javascript.
- By dropping XML support, we’ve been able to make the server more responsive (but not 1000x faster; sorry).
- There’s extensive documentation that includes sample applications and an API explorer.
- A lot of work was put into consistency and clarity.
- And last but not least, we’ve added oft-requested new endpoints for fetching user’s badges, user’s venue histories, and venue popularity.
We’re well aware that there are many other things you want from our API (push notifications, venue management, and better venue search and trending information, among others), and we’re working on adding those features. But we believe this is a step in the right direction, making it even easier to build cool applications for our five million enthusiastic users and giving you incomparable access to our repository of millions of curated venues and user-created tips and hundreds of millions of check-ins.
You can learn more at our new developer homepage, developer.foursquare.com. Be sure to send any feedback or questions along to our developer mailing list.
P.S. We don’t have a concrete timeline for deprecating APIv1 (it will be a few months), but we’re encouraging all developers to use APIv2 going forward.
Badges badges badges!
We’ve been rolling out a bunch of new things lately and, thus, haven’t spent much time talking about our core foursquare badges. Time for some badge love: we roll out a ton of these, and they’re broken up into two groups. First, we have the surprise ones, which users unlock when they do certain things. While we don’t really talk about these, but you’ll probably see stories or tweets about them.
The other type are badges we use to encourage and reward certain behaviors. Think the Gym Rat badge, which helps motivate and reward people for going to the gym. Here are a few of the many we’ve introduced recently:
- 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!
- Ski Bum – to commemorate your trips up the mountain
For those of you who love earning new badges, you can also see many of these ‘encouragement’ badges in your trophy case; if you hover over any locked badge (the ones that are grayed out), you’ll get hints to help you earn it.
These are only a few of the many badges we’ve rolled out as we continue to match badges to activities that you love. Going forward, we’ll introduce many of these new badges on Twitter, so make sure you’re following @foursquare. Happy exploring!
Shout #turnRED to help create an AIDS Free Generation
Today is World AIDS Day. By any measure, AIDS is one of the most dramatic and pressing health issues facing the world today. At foursquare, we like to think that people’s actions can help raise awareness and change behavior, so we teamed up with (RED) to help turn the world red with awareness.
This campaign is even more important because we’re so close: with current treatments, we can virtually eliminate mother-to-child transmission of HIV within five years, creating the world’s first AIDS free generation. When you shout #turnRED with your check-in and broadcast it to Twitter, it’ll turn your section of the (RED) map a bit more red (and you’ll earn a (RED) badge to help spread awareness further). Hopefully, all together, we can raise awareness for a healthier future.
Learn more and view the map at www.joinred.com
UPDATE: Some users are reporting an issue unlocking the badge. We’re busy investigating now, but rest assured that everyone who checks in and shouts #turnRED will be awarded the badge.
UPDATE 2: It’s all fixed. Anyone can unlock the badge now, and we’ll be retroactively giving it to everyone who shouted #turnRED this morning.
We’re heading west!
In the past year, we had a major growth spurt: from about 100,000 to over 4.5 million users; from a single phone platform to six; from 50-person foursquare flashmobs to 1,000 person epic swarms; and we now have thousands of developers building on the the foursquare API. The biggest challenge: hiring fast enough to support that surge. Despite growing from 5 employees to 35, we can’t expand as quickly as we want.
So, to help attract the best talent in the world, we decided it’s time to open an outpost in San Francisco. We’ve been working out of the Square office for some time now (they’re awesome!), and they’ve been nice enough to free up more room for us to hire a full team of West Coast engineers. So, if you love Mission-style burritos, temperate climates, and want to work on some of the most exciting data and engineering problems in the world, contact us.
Everything in its right place: unveiling the new Trophy Case
Foursquare was created with a core set of 16 badges, designed to reward and motivate all of you. As we’ve grown, we’ve tried to expand those offerings to make foursquare fun for everyone, from the Dog’s Best Friend to the Great Outdoors, to partnerships with applications like RunKeeper and organizations like the Wall Street Journal. Starting today, there’s a new Trophy Case to house all these badges, and a Partner Badge program to create even more.
When you visit the Trophy Case (just click ‘Badges’ in the navigation bar), you’ll see all your unlocked badges on a shiny new page. It’s got two sections to navigate:
- foursquare badges – the core set that everyone can unlock, like Gym Rat and I Voted, dreamed up by our small team.
- partner badges – these come from organizations that we work with, like the New York Times and CNN. These badges have a distinct shape and unlocking them requires that you follow a brand or attend an event (like the Rally for Sanity or Spotting Conan’s blimp).
In the Trophy Case, you’ll also get a clearer picture of how many badges you’ve unlocked, and which of your friends have unlocked each of them.
To help fill out your Trophy Case, we’ve worked with a bunch of partners to pilot the new Partner Badge program. To start unlocking badges, follow these guys:
- the American Red Cross – go donate blood; each donation center has unlock instructions, so head out and earn your cookie!
- Ellen! – we love her show, and a ton of you do, too. Over the coming months, we have a series of Ellen badges that you can unlock by following her and doing Ellen-esque things. Follow Ellen on foursquare.
- RadioShack – be a RadioShack Holiday Hero; follow them, unlock the badge, and earn big discounts on your holiday shopping.
- People Magazine – People’s Sexiest Man Alive badge rewards you for following in the footsteps of the world’s sexiest men. Follow People.
- MoMA – Follow the New York Museum of Modern Art, take in some culture, and unlock their badge for discounts on MoMA memberships.
The Partner Badge program is still in its early stage, and we’re slowly expanding it. If you are an organization that would like to create a badge, fill out this form.
We’re excited to see the unlocks roll in every time we announce a new badge. We hope they make your days brighter, and that the Trophy Case helps you keep track of them!
A little nip and tuck
Lately, we’ve been making a lot of updates to the foursquare app, so we figured it was time to show some love to the website. A couple new things that you’ll notice as you’re surfing around foursquare.com today:
- We cleaned up the homepage for logged-in users, with more of an emphasis on what your friends have been doing lately. It should make it easier to keep up on things from your desktop.
- We also fixed up the tools for finding friends, making it simpler to add and manage them.
There are a few other random tweaks and clean-ups, but those are the two more noticeable ones. Hope it makes it easier to keep up with your friends, even when your phone is not handy.
Help kids while running your 26.2
This year, the New York City Marathon organizers are attempting something unprecedented – encouraging all participants to raise money for charity, with the goal of one million dollars for each mile of the course. With over 45,000 runners participating, there are a wide range of worthwhile charities being supported, so we wanted to do our part to urge these runners on. This weekend, when runners using RunKeeper unlock the special New York Marathon badge, a donation will be made to support Camp Interactive – a not-for-profit organization that empowers inner-city youth through the inspiration of the outdoors and the creative power of technology.
Any RunKeeper user who completes the course will unlock the new badge and help a great cause. Here’s how you do it: just add the NYC Marathon to your RunKeeper races, link your RunKeeper account to foursquare, and track your marathon on your iPhone or Android. Here at foursquare HQ, we’re cheering for our founders Dennis and Naveen to make it (they’re each fundraising individually for Camp Interactive). And if you want to watch, track RunKeeper users live on their site, or grab a spot along the route and cheer on the charitable runners.
Watch America vote today on elections.foursquare.com
Today, to help you remember to vote, we’ve loaded over 100,000 voting locations into the foursquare venue database. When you check in at one (they’re all called ‘voting location’), you’ll unlock an ‘I Voted’ badge. (And for absentee or mailed votes, you can unlock the badge by checking in somewhere and shouting “I Voted.”)
When you’ve done that, swing by elections.foursquare.com to watch America vote in real-time throughout the day, with all the check-in data from polling stations across the country. Navigate the map to see where foursquare voter turnout is happening, and all the details about how and where our country performs its civic duty.
The gifts keep on coming: photos and comments are here for Android!
As promised, the Android update is here for the holidays! It’s got all the same features as the new photos and comments version for the iPhone, and a couple of extra goodies: two foursquare widgets for your home screen.
The new hotness is the addition of photos and comments:
In addition, there are two exclusive Android home screen widgets: one to enable quick check-ins, and one to see your friends’ latest activity.
We’ve received a ton of great feedback from iPhone users, and have been working around the clock on this update (literally – we have one Android developer in NYC and one in Australia). We’re both extremely excited and pretty tired; hope you enjoy this!
Visit the Android marketplace now to download it (or scan this barcode).
Happy holidays from team foursquare!
P.S. Once again, we’ll have BlackBerry and WebOS in early January, and all other platforms in early 2011.
Posted in Android, Foursquare
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