foursquare

SoundPrint – an app for finding quiet spaces

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Screenshot of the SoundPrint app

Today I want to share with you an app called SoundPrint, which is an app for finding quiet spaces to eat and socialise.

You can install the app on your phone (iPhone and Android), and it’ll pop up a list of places nearby where other SoundPrint users have done a brief sound test. The venue database is from Foursquare, a site where I’m a superuser and still an active user of its Swarm app.

Incidentally, Swarm came in very useful when writing my review of 2023 and 2023, quantified, as I could see exactly where I had been all year.

Using the SoundPrint app

You don’t have to register an account if you’re just browsing to find a venue. However, if you want to contribute your own sound checks, then you can register an account. A sound check is as simple as holding your phone up for 15 seconds to measure the noise levels, and then telling SoundPrint where you are. You can also specifically recommend places for SoundPrint’s ‘Quiet List’ if they are particularly quiet, and submit noise complaints for very loud venues. SoundPrint will try to reach out to such venues with suggestions for how they can become quieter.

Venues are categorised as ‘quiet’, ‘medium’, ‘loud’ and ‘very loud’ with the number representing the decibels (dB) recorded by user’s sound checks. It’s worth noting that the repeated or prolonged exposure to noise above 85 dB can lead to hearing loss.

I found out about SoundPrint from Samantha Baines’ excellent book ‘Living With Hearing Loss and Deafness’ (sponsored link). I saw it whilst out Christmas shopping and subsequently borrowed from our local library. I’m partially deaf and wear hearing aids, and this book has lots of helpful tips, both for deaf people and their friends and family.

That being said, SoundPrint isn’t just for people who have hearing loss. If you are autistic, then you may benefit if you find noisy places overwhelming. I can see my wife using this app as well, as though she has good hearing, she struggles in noisy environments.

The Demise of Gowalla

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On Monday, Gowalla announced that the two co-founders of Gowalla and several of its staff were moving to Facebook shortly and that the service would be closing sometime in January. Having formally launched at SxSW 2009, the site will therefore be gone before its third birthday.

This hasn’t come as much of a surprise for those following Gowalla over recent months. Foursquare has been the big elephant in the room, attracting more attention and having a much larger user base. For a while, Gowalla had a niche – the design of the web site and app was much better, and there were features like Trips (where you could create a list of venues, or ‘spots’ to visit) and virtual items that you could collect. But earlier this year version 4.0 of the app was announced, which removed several features, including items, and tried to focus on travel guides.

This was not well-received. For a while I’d been trying to use both Foursquare and Gowalla, as they both offered something different, but the 4.0 update put me off. Gowalla wanted to focus more on ‘stories’ – not just individual checkins taken in isolation, but say catching a plane, staying in a hotel, visiting attractions and then coming home as one story – or at least this appeared to be the intention. Sadly this wasn’t the reality – ‘stories’ were just individual checkins.

There have also been problems with the API, as mentioned in this blog post by Ben Dodson, which saw several third-party services turn away from Gowalla recently – especially since the 4.0 update. All the while, Foursquare was adding new features to their site, without removing anything or alienating its core user base.

So what now? Gowalla is presently still around and you can still download the app from the iOS App Store, but presumably new user signups will end soon. An export feature has been promised to allow you to retrieve your data but it isn’t live at the time of writing. Even though several of the developers are going to Facebook (the others have been sacked, apparently), it’s a ‘talent acquisition’ which means that Facebook is essentially buying out the staff and not the product, so any data you have on Gowalla will not be transferred to Facebook. This isn’t the first time Facebook has done this – box.io was one of the most recent services to be ‘aqhired’ by Facebook where the developers moved to FB and the service shut down. Still, if you think Facebook is an evil privacy-stealing flying purple people eater, then once you’ve exported your data you can delete your account.

While it’s sad to see Gowalla go, this is potentially good for Facebook, and its new profiles that are aiming to document your life as a story (as far as I can tell). Gowalla’s talent could well be very important in making this a good feature.

As for Foursquare? On the one hand, with Gowalla out of the picture, it has less competition, and could gain favour with ex-Gowalla users if it allows them to import their data and gain badges retrospectively. However, this new deal with Facebook could see Facebook Places resurgent, and while Foursquare has over 10 million users, Facebook has hundreds of millions. Quite what Facebook plans with respect to its location based features remains to be seen but this acquisition shows that it’s more serious about it than some of us thought.

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!

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.