Internet Things

Foursquare Thursday – Are its competitors withering?

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A screenshot of items on Gowalla

A couple of weeks ago I focussed on the huge number of new features that Foursquare had rolled out in a four week period. Things have quietened down a bit since then – although there has been an updated Android client to include events and better photo support to match the iPhone, as well as the ability for staff to reverse venue merges, SU2s can edit venue descriptions and a new URL format for venues on the web site. But the service is still very much alive and innovating.

Alas the same cannot be said for its competitors – Gowalla, Facebook Places and Google Latitude.

A couple of weeks ago Gowalla announced the removal of some features from the platform in the next version. Items, like those shown above, will be removed completely; Notes will be removed pending a new implementation to come later, and Pins (like Foursquare’s badges) will see the ‘fat trimmed’ from them. There will be other new features introduced but the announcement doesn’t expand on what these are.

Now while I prefer Foursquare, I do use Gowalla and have cr.osspo.st configured to push my check-ins there as well, and it’s a particular shame to see Items removed. Gowalla stated that fewer than 0.5% of its users actually used items, and there seemed to be a lot of confusion about their purpose. If Gowalla made more effort to explain the role of items, how to get them and why you should drop them at spots then maybe more people would use it – it’s one of the features that makes Gowalla unique.

Foursquare had a similar problem with check-in points before Foursquare 3.0 was released – they didn’t seem to serve much of a purpose and were open to abuse. But rather than remove the feature completely, Foursquare overhauled and improved the points system and re-introduced the leaderboard to encourage competition between friends, and now it works well.

Without Items, the differences between Gowalla and Foursquare are almost minimal. Foursquare’s new Lists feature is very similar to Gowalla’s Trips, and Foursquare’s design improvements mean it’s not far behind Gowalla in terms of appearance. There’s now very little that’s unique about Gowalla and it’s a shame.

I also mentioned that Facebook Places. A recent Business Insider article suggests that Facebook is scaling back its Places feature, and so rather than you checking in you would simply add a location to your status updates and have a choice of venues to do so. Facebook updated its iOS app this week and whilst the standalone checkin feature is there, you can also attach a location to a status update. Facebook also recently discontinued its Deals feature in the UK (not sure about the US) which competed against Foursquare’s Specials, where businesses could offer special deals to those who checked in.

And finally Google Latitude. Earlier in the year an update allowed users to check into anywhere that existed on Google Places, rather than just updating their location co-ordinates, but there hasn’t been any changes since. With the advent of Google+, it may be that Google decides to focus on the location-based elements of that instead, similar to what Facebook is doing.

Foursquare Thursday – August madness

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It’s been a while since I last posted about Foursquare, and a lot has happened. Foursquare has been busy rolling out new features, so I’m going to summarise what’s new. Most of these have cropped up in the past month.

Lists

You can now make lists of venues, such as your favourite museums, pub crawl routes, best places to go for a good burger, that kind of thing. Foursquare starts you off with three lists – venues you’ve added to your to-do list, tips you’ve ‘done’ and tips you’ve added yourself – but you can add more. It’ll even suggest some based on your checkin habits – it’s suggested food places in Leeds and Bradford for me.

Lists are public and show on your profile. You can also check out lists from Foursquare’s various partner brands like MTV (music video locations) and Time Out (the best burgers in New York).

Check-in to events

Foursquare now pulls data from external sources so that you can not only check into a venue, but check into an event at that venue. In the screenshot on the right is my local cinema, and Foursquare knows which two films are being shown there today. When you select ‘Check In Here’, it’ll ask you which film you want to check into – or whether you just want to check in to venue itself. Events listings appear in the iPhone app and on the web site, but haven’t yet been rolled out to the other mobile clients on Android, Blackberry and so on.

New mobile clients

Speaking of which… the iPhone client got a bit of an update recently. It’s now more blue with several screens re-designed, and it now looks a lot more professional than it did before. Another major change is that photos attached to checkins now show in the timeline on the friends page.

Android also received some attention to make it feel more like a native Android app and not a quickly-ported iPhone app, but it lags behind the iPhone app in terms of features. Similarly the Blackberry app now integrates with Blackberry Messenger and has been finally updated to version 3.0, with the Explore feature.

More brand pages

Foursquare has launched new brand pages, so it’s now much easier to create a brand presence on Foursquare. Pages are free to set up, but I gather there are still costs involved if you want a custom badge for your brand.

More badges

Speaking of badges… as usual, Foursquare has added more badges including a new ‘core’ badge – Baker’s Dozen, for 13 checkins at bakeries. You may want to head to Gregg’s for a sausage roll or 12! New partner badges have been introduced from ESPN, MTV and Pepsi, plus the badge for the upcoming film 30 Minutes or Less is now available globally and not just in the US.

Notifications

Back in July Foursquare introduced a notification ‘tray’ on its Android client and web site, which came to the iPhone a few weeks later (rare example of Foursquare offering something to Android users first!). There’s now an icon to the right of the Foursquare logo, which when clicked will inform you of new friend requests, when you’ve been ousted as a mayor, when a friend does one of your tips or comments on your checkins or when a venue you’ve previously checked into starts offering a special deal. It’s a bit like Facebook notifications. You can also control whether these do a push notification in the mobile apps.

Presidential Foursquaring

Barack Obama is touring the country, so you can now follow The White House on Foursquare. Of course, this probably has nothing to do with him running for re-election next year…

New categories

Foursquare has added a handful of new categories – Tennis stadiums, Military Bases, Car Rental counters for airports, apartments and neighbourhoods. A few existing categories, mainly related to food, now have new icons as well.

US Merge-a-thon

Foursquare used their computers to identify a whole host of potential duplicate venues, which were queued up for SU2s and SU3s to process – over 100,000 of them. As it happens, quite a few were not duplicates but hopefully it will result in a net improvement in the quality of Foursquare’s listings. All of the venues were in the US this time.

So, as you can see, a lot has happened on Foursquare over the past few weeks. Foursquare is still owned and run by its founders and hasn’t been absorbed as a subsidiary of a larger company, so it’s agile enough to be able to make major changes like this very quickly. And hopefully there will be more to come!

A rant about BT

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Communication

Earlier this week I said that our flat move had gone well and in particular that our phone line would be activated on Thursday, i.e. yesterday. It hasn’t.

Christine got a voicemail message from BT (with whom we have our phone and broadband) asking her to ring them. After being on hold for quite a while, someone finally answered, but initially didn’t know why we ringing. Eventually, we were told that there was a problem with the phone line and that the activation would have to be put back. We could have a working phone by Friday (today), but with a different telephone number, and that the broadband wouldn’t be working until Thursday next week – a week later than we’d been told originally.

To make it worse, we’re not receiving a discount on the monthly bill for the time (nearly 2 weeks) when we’ve been unable to use our phone line or broadband, so we’re effectively paying for a service that we aren’t getting.

Initially I had praise for the way BT handled our move – our first call to them assured us that it would be a quick, simple process which would allow us to keep our number. A few days without phone and internet access would be inconvenient but understandable. But having no internet for the best part of two weeks seems excessive, especially as there’s no financial compensation. And really, does it take a whole week for someone to drive over to our local exchange and press a few buttons?

The problem isn’t necessarily with BT Retail, with whom we pay the contract with, but seemingly with BT Openreach, the subsidiary of BT which owns and operates the telephone lines and exchanges in the UK. To me, they seem to be a very expensive and inefficient outfit which only serves its own shareholders, i.e. the BT Group. Although it’s regulated by Ofcom, other parties have very little say in how it’s run.

In Britain, we don’t have that many alternatives to broadband via phone lines. Virgin Media’s cable network is good, but generally limited to large towns and cities – no good for my small town. Wireless broadband over 3G mobile networks is an option: prices are coming down to be comparable with fixed-line internet, there’s no need to install anything apart from plugging in a Mifi router and they can even be bought on pay-as-you-go contracts. But wireless suffers from latency issues, making it poor for use in online gaming, and again, it’s not always available. We’re also some years away from better and faster 4G networks.

Maybe it’s high time for the ownership of Openreach to change; its shares could be split amongst the other large ISPs in the UK (Sky, Talktalk, Orange, Virgin Media etc.) so that all have a say in how its run; it could be made a not-for-dividend company answerable to Ofcom like Network Rail for the railways; or completely re-nationalised. The last one is a long-shot, but any of those should improve accountability to its direct customers (the ISPs) and regular home users.

In the meantime, I’ve paid for an extra 2 GB of data to be added on to my mobile contract with 3 for this month. Thankfully it only costs £5, and 3 don’t charge extra for internet tethering or using your phone as a personal hotspot, so I’m only partially out of pocket. I’ll still be pointing this out to BT in a letter.

In an age when I can order a book at half 4 in the afternoon, and have it on my desk at work at half 9 the following morning, how does it take so long for phone lines to be connected? Is BT’s equipment really that old and archaic, or is their lack of accountability and need to shore up profit margins the driving force here?

Enabling hardware acceleration on Firefox 4

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Red Panda

A release candidate of Firefox 4 has finally been released after a very protracted beta phase (over six months), and the final release should be coming very soon. One of the major new features is hardware acceleration – using your graphics card to help to make the browser faster and more responsive – and it’s available to varying degrees for Windows XP, 7, Vista, Mac OS X and Linux users. XP users get basic DirectX 9 acceleration, Vista and 7 users get DirectX 10, and if you have Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6.3 or above you get to use OpenGL.

Hardware acceleration will be enabled automatically if your computer and drivers supports it, so to check whether it’s working, open a new tab and type ‘about:support’ in the address bar. Scroll right down to the bottom, and there’ll be a section called ‘Graphics’. On the very last line, you’re looking for ‘GPU Acclerated Windows’ – if it says 1/1, then you’re all set. 0/1 means that you’re not using the hardware acceleration. Thanks to Joedrew for this information.

If it is disabled, the next thing to do is to try to enable it. On a Mac, you’ll need to be running Snow Leopard and ideally version 10.6.3, so upgrade to that if you can. On Windows, you’ll probably need to update your graphics drivers. Right now, only Intel, AMD (ATI) and nVidia graphics are supported, so if your graphics card is by someone else, you’re out of luck. But for those three, once you know what type of graphics card you have, head to the manufacturer’s web site and download the latest drivers. In most cases, your drivers will need to be quite new – ATI and nVidia issued updates in June 2010 which are required for hardware acceleration to be enabled.

How good is hardware acceleration? On my test machine, which runs Windows XP and has Intel integrated graphics, I tried Microsoft’s flying images demo in Firefox 4 beta 12 and Internet Explorer 8. Firefox managed a steady 60 frames per second with no problems, whilst IE8 struggled to make 6 frames per second. IE8 also needed 50% CPU usage for just 1 tab, whilst Firefox needed 45% with 9 other tabs open.

There’s some more information on the Mozilla Wiki, including the specific driver versions supported. If you haven’t updated your graphics drivers in a while, now may be a good time to do so, so that you can make full use of Firefox 4’s extra oomph when it’s finally released later this year.

2-Factor authentication on Google

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Water wheel

Google has recently enabled two-factor authentication for all users with a Google Account. This means that, when you log in, you provide two pieces of secret information, rather than just a password (which would be ‘one-factor’ authentication). This second piece is a 6-digit code that is generated randomly every 30 seconds from another device.

This improves security by ensuring that, even when a third party knows your password, they still cannot log into your account without the 6-digit code (although see below). Think of it like a PIN number – a thief could steal your credit card but wouldn’t be able to get money out of an ATM without knowing the PIN number.

Some banks have started using two-factor authentication for their online banking services – as well as your username and password, you are asked to enter a code generated by a small electronic device on your keyring. Blizzard Entertainment offers a similar device for World of Warcraft and Starcraft II players, as well as a free iPhone app that does the same thing.

So Google isn’t the first to offer this – it’s actually reasonably well tried and tested. To activate it, log into your account and click the ‘Using 2-step verification’ link. Google will then walk you through setting up your account for two-factor authentication.

There are a variety of options for the second factor. There are apps for the iPhone and Android phones, but you can also receive a code by text message to a mobile phone number that you provide during the initial setup. You’ll also be asked to provide a backup system in case you lose your phone; in my case, Google will phone my work number and a computer will read a number to me.

I mentioned there’s a caveat. Two-factor authentication works great on Google’s various web sites, but falls down if you access Google services through other apps, such as IMAP for Gmail, or CalDAV for Google Calendar, which aren’t really designed with two-factor authentication in mind. As soon as you enable two-factor authentication, any attempts to access data over these protocols will see your login fail.

Thankfully, there’s a way around it, in the form of application-specific passwords. Essentially, for each method of connecting to your Google Account, you can create a separate password. Each password can then be revoked if you find someone using it without your permission, and once generated, passwords cannot be viewed again. Furthermore, the passwords can’t be used to get into your account on the Google web site (they would need your main password and verification code), so it wouldn’t be possible for a hacker to change your main password, or deactivate the two-factor system. It’s not a perfect solution, though.

I’ve turned on two-factor authentication because I have a lot of important personal data in my Google Account – all my contacts, my calendars and hosting details for this site – and wouldn’t want anyone obtaining unauthorised access. The workarounds for CalDAV and IMAP are a bit of a pain, but I feel it’s worth it for the piece of mind.

Whilst we’re on the subject of Google Account security, if you use Firefox I’d recommend installing the HTTPS Everywhere addon, which forces the use of SSL/TLS on most parts of Google. I would, however, suggest disabling the ‘Google APIs’ option in its preferences as this may break some other web sites. Still, it will help to prevent your Google Account data being caught be man-in-the-middle attacks.

Foursquare Thursday

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Barton Square

Seeing how I haven’t posted for a while, I’m going to try to post something about Foursquare each week on a Thursday as a way of encouraging me to actually write something. This week’s post is going to be an introductory one, about why I participate in Foursquare and what I feel sets it apart from its rivals.

I started using Foursquare almost as soon as I bought my iPhone, and, predictably, my first check-in was where I work. In fact, most of my check-ins are either work, or one of the two stations I pass through on my commute, due to the fact that I work full-time five days a week. But some more interesting ones appear at weekends or special events.

Obviously I wouldn’t bother participating in Foursquare if there was no reward for it. I’ve managed to get 17 mayorships (it was 18 earlier this week but I’ve been ousted from a local pub), and 15 badges, which isn’t bad but could be better. It’s certainly fun to get badges and compare with friends.

As yet, I haven’t unlocked any special deals (apart from the Super Bowl one at the weekend, which I didn’t take up as I don’t really have any interest in American Football); unfortunately there aren’t many UK companies taking advantage of Foursquare in that way as yet. Locally, there’s only Wetherspoons and Dominos Pizza. Hopefully that will improve; right now I’m the mayor of a couple of sandwich shops and some tangible rewards would be nice.

My participation in Foursquare goes beyond being a simple player, however: I’ve also been helping to find duplicate or incorrect venues and get them fixed or merged. I’ll mention more about this next week.
Foursquare for me is fun, although a bit limited as only a few of my friends also play it. Plus, the US-orientated nature of most of the brands mean that some of the rewards are out of my reach, which is a shame. Still, I enjoy it.

Not dead yet

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Pagoda

I mentioned a few weeks back about several services that had been popular in the past but were now shutting down: Vox, BlogRolling, Xmarks and Bloglines.

Unfortunately, Vox and BlogRolling both bit the dust at the end of September and October respectively. But the future is much brighter for the other two.

Xmarks has a new owner and will be launching a premium service in addition to the current free service, so it’ll be around for some time. I don’t currently use it, but seeing as I can only run Safari on my iPhone (and the Firefox Home app is a little clunky) having my Firefox bookmarks available in all browsers could be beneficial, so I may sign up.

And Bloglines has had a stay of execution. Presently it’s run by Ask.com, part of the IAC group; IAC will still own it but it will be moved to another part of the business. Either way, it’s probably a big relief to those still using the service and who may have been apprehensive about moving to an alternative like Google Reader.

Finally, yes I know the picture at the top has nothing to do with this article but it’s a nice recent picture of Bradford, in the new and underutilised Urban Garden.

Demise of Web 1.5

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Broken Glass

This month is turning out to be what Anil Dash calls the end of ‘Web 1.5′ – services which started before the ‘Web 2.0′ bandwagon started rolling, have not been popular for some time and are now closing.

I’ve already mentioned Bloglines, and to add to that there’s BlogRolling, which is “probably shutting […] down soon”. BlogRolling is another service that I used to use but haven’t for many years; it let you keep a list of blogs that you read (a ‘blogroll’) and allowed you to sort and categorise them easily. It made sense in the early days when people were using services like Blogger, but packages such as WordPress make this dead easy now. Its one stand-out feature was being able to show which blogs had recently updated, but this was before RSS/Atom feeds really took off and once I had switched to a feed reader I didn’t see the point of staying with the service.

Xmarks, which allows you to synchronise your bookmarks/favourites between multiple browsers on different machines, is also due to stop operating in around 9 months time. The blog post explains why in full, but essentially they were unable to build a viable business around a free service, and there’s increased competition now that Google Chrome has sync built-in, as will Firefox in its next major update (it’s already available as an add-on).

I’ve also already mentioned Vox, Six Apart’s community blogging service which also closes at the end of this month.

It’s perhaps a shame that these services are going under. Bloglines, BlogRolling and Vox have all stagnated for some time and it’s therefore no surprise that they’ll soon no longer be around. As for Xmarks, it’s a pity that they didn’t offer a ‘freemium’ service, or switch to a paid-for model; while the new sync services in Firefox and Chrome are good, Xmarks was one of the few ways of syncing bookmarks between different browsers.

I’m wondering who will close next.

Update: MSN/Windows Live Spaces is closing and its users are being moved to wordpress.com.

Bloglines closing down

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Bloglines is down!

Bloglines, a web site which allows you to subscribe to and read RSS/Atom feeds online, is closing on October 1st.

It’s a bit of a shame – I started using Bloglines almost exactly 6 years ago, and it was great to be able to read all of my feeds on one central web site. That being said, a couple of year later I moved to Google Reader and have stuck with it ever since, due to its better user experience. Bloglines never seemed to catch up and I only know a few people still using it now.

Even so, the number of people using feed readers is apparently falling, and according to paidContent Google Reader is also experiencing a fall in traffic. Whether this is because of feed features in desktop browsers like Firefox and later versions of Internet Explorer have become people’s preferred way of using feeds, or that people prefer Facebook or Twitter, I’m not sure, but it would seem that their popularity is waning.

Up and running again!

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At last, the move to the new host is complete!

I’m now hosting with Bytemark, a well-known hosting company based in York with data centres in Manchester and London. The domain is managed by 123-Reg – I’ve decided to keep the domain and hosting separate to make any future host changes easier.

The hosting package is quite different to the package I had previously. Whereas before I had a simple virtual host setup with FTP, email and databases, this package offers SSH access to a complete virtual machine running Debian. In other words, I can configure everything on the server essentially as I wish – even changing to a different Linux distro if I wanted to.

I’ll be sticking with Debian for now. It brings with it Apache 2.2 and MySQL 5, and I have the ability to add things like FastCGI should I wish to at a later date. I’ve also been able to install every optional Perl module that Movable Type can use, including ones like Image::Magick and XML::Parser which require compiled code.
I’m still using Movable Type 4.3x for now – it’s still supported, with version 4.34 having come out a few days ago, and having tried MT5 for a bit I think it’s a bit overkill for what I need it for.

The move to the new host wasn’t quite as smooth as I’d hoped – some issues with having the domain released from the old host, for example, and the new machine that the site runs on had a disk failure last night, literally about 30 minutes after I updated the DNS to point to the new server. It’s also taken some time to get used to configuring the server myself, rather than having a fancy-pants admin interface to do it for me. Suffice to say I’ve learnt a lot about the Unix command line over the past couple of weeks.

Hopefully now everything will work, but give me a heads-up if it doesn’t!

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