Foursquare, Gowalla, etc.: Location-Based Checkin Networks

This post is the second in my series of Android app comparison posts.  Last time I compared two Twitter clients, this time I'm looking at location-based checkin services.

Social apps

There is one thing to be careful of in sharing your location, and that is privacy.  Particularly when I post pictures of my small children, I don't want to make it too obvious to creeps and stalkers exactly where I live.  I also personally don't want my full name publicly associated with my posts.  You'll notice I don't post it on my blog, or on Twitter.  Of course, once these things get imported into Facebook, they become associated with my name, but I have configured my privacy settings so that the association is only visible to friends (and sometimes not all of them), or in some cases, friends of friends.


I'm the kind of person who likes to post things from my phone to share with my friends and the world.  I particularly like to post pictures, but location is another very social aspect of sharing.  Checkin services allow you to post about places such as restaurants, shops, parks, landmarks, transportation, or just about anything else.  It's social because a places are concrete things that other people can experience too.  They might enjoy the same restaurant, or be looking for one.  They might see you check in at a series of airports (or ferries), and get a sense of your travel experience. 

Facebook Places

The most popular checkin service is actually Facebook Places.  I think this is because almost everyone already uses Facebook, so they don't need to sign up for anything new, or connect with a new list of friends to share: they can just share.

I haven't done much with Facebook Places.  It's also the least interesting, at least among my friends, in that most checkins have no comments or pictures.  When I post that I'm somewhere, I usually like to say what I'm doing there:  what I ordered, who's with me, what I'm looking for.  I also like to include a picture.  You can do all of these things with Facebook Places, it seems that no one does, though.

Foursquare

The most popular of the dedicated checkin networks is Foursquare.  Foursquare is where you will be able to connect with the most people who go out of their way to check in.  Foursquare also makes checking in interesting in a number of ways:

Foursquare deal

• Points: Each checkin is scored, and you can see how well you're doing in the last 7 days against each of your friends on the leaderboard.
• Badges:  Checking in earns you different badges based on the number and type of checkins you do.  You can see which badges you have and which your friends have, and which you don't.
• Mayorships:  If you're the one who checks in the most days at a particular venue in the last 60 days, you become the "mayor" of that place.  
• Deals: Some stores offer special discounts to the mayor, or to anyone who checks in frequently enough.
• Categories: Foursquare venues are categorized, and each category has a different icon in the interface and can earn you different bonuses.

Gowalla

Gowalla is in many ways very similar to Foursquare, however, they have their own unique twist to checking in at a spot.  (You'll notice they each call it something different: place, venue, spot, location).

• Stamps:Whereas Foursquare is more of a competition against others, Gowalla promotes itself as a "game" and tends to be more individual.  There is no score, but every place you check in gives you a unique Stamp to collect on your "passport".
• Pins: Similar to Badges, pins are awarded for checking in, sometimes for a number of times at a number of unique types of spots, sometimes for places (like states or countries), and sometimes for events or special days.
• Categories: Gowalla has its own category system, similar to Foursquare, but whereas Foursquare's icons (including Badges) are drab monochrome black and white, Gowalla's icons are colorful and bright, drawn in a cartoony style resembling stickers that is very aesthetically attractive.
• Items:  Sometimes when you check in, you will find a bonus Item.  There are over 100 different kinds of items, and each item has a unique ID number and a history of who has handled it and where.  You can add items to your collection, or you can swap them for items left by others at different spots.
• Trips: Gowalla has trips generated by users, which are a collection of spots to check in.  Once you have completed the tour by checking in at each of those spots, you earn the pin for that Trip.

Gowalla also has some nice features on their website:  if you check in at a series of airports within certain time parameters, it will combine them into a single trip, showing each airport along the way and the distance between them.

Google Latitude

Another checkin service that I have not used much is Google Latitude.  Latitude is based on Google Maps, and will track your location (and give you stats for your own reference), and share it with your friends who also use Latitude.  You can check in to locations, either manually, or automatically for locations you choose, or you can have Latitude give you a notification when it thinks you might want to check in.

The great thing about all of these checkin services is that you don't need to choose anymore.  Foursquare will update Twitter and/or Facebook, and Gowalla will not only post your checkins to Twitter, Foursquare, and Facebook, but it will also retrieve your friends' checkin information from Facebook and Foursquare and display it alongside your Gowalla friends' checkins.  (All of these are optional.) 

The one thing that doesn't get transferred between Gowalla and Foursquare is photos.  Photos on Gowalla are posted to Facebook, but not Foursquare, and Gowalla does not retrieve pictures from other services.

Gowalla tries to match its database of spots to Foursquare's database of venues.  It's not perfect, though.  When there isn't a matching spot, or Gowalla doesn't have it matched, it will still update your foursquare friends, but the checkin won't count for points or towards a mayorship.  

Footfeed

Footfeed is an app that allows you to manually manage which spots match with which (on Foursquare, Gowalla, Facebook, Latitude), and then check in to all of them in one fell swoop.  The app is a full featured replacement for any of the other services, with the exception of pictures.

You can report unmatched or mismatched spot/venues to Gowalla and they will add them to their database.  Both Gowalla and Foursquare allow you to submit updated/corrected information, and to manually add missing spots.

Personally, I use Gowalla, but I have the Foursquare app installed, and most of my friends who check in do so on Foursquare or Facebook.  Occasionally when I know that Gowalla doesn't match up the spots correctly (and I'm not posting a picture), I will use Footfeed to check in.

Google Wave and Privacy

The important thing to consider when you're thinking about privacy on Google Wave is that it's not fundamentally any different from e-mail, Facebook, or a wiki.  When you send someone an e-mail, they can choose to forward it along to whomever they want.  When you post on Facebook, your friends can see it and comment (or pass it along, if they copy and paste it).  When you post on a wiki, someone can come along and change it.  Wave doesn't change any of that, it just automates the process of sharing and changing and brings it all together.

Google isn't developing Wave as an internal proprietary system that they maintain control over (like Facebook).  They're making it like e-mail, which means that anyone can set up a Wave server, and it should work the same, and inter-operate seamlessly with Google, and everyone else out there with a server and a peering relationship.  This in itself dictates that users will have limited control over who sees what information, and how they can control it.

In a closed system, it can be possible to un-send a message, or to prevent someone from easily passing along what you send to them (at least, in the same form).  Wave is not a closed system.  Once your information hits a foreign server, you can have no control over it, and so in order to create a consistent system, once your information is sent to any other user, you can't take it back.

What kinds of controls are possible?

If you have any kind of information, you can send it to certain people, and not to others.  You cannot prevent them from sharing that information, but you can refuse to accept their changes to the canonical version of the information (at least, canonical according to you).  So it is theoretically possible to divide people into three categories with respect to information:

1. Those with no access.  These people don't know about the information at all.
2. Those with limited access, who can read, but not change the canonical information.
   
3. Those with full access, who can both read and write changes back to the canonical information.

With wave, at least as the Google Wave preview is currently set up, there are only two categories: 1 and 3.  If you add someone to a wave, they can change it, and they can add more people (and robots) who can read and write back to the wave.

So using Wave means that you must trust those who you share with, not because Wave makes it possible for information to be passed along to more and more people (or to everyone), but because it makes doing so very easy.

One thing that is not currently in the preview, but will be in the final product (nay, protocol) is federation.  Federation basically means that Wave will eventually be like e-mail, because Google will agree to exchange Wave information with Yahoo, and Microsoft, and Apple, and even Bob's computer in his parents' basement.  Everyone except, hopefully, spammers, but I'm sure they'll find some way in.  Joe@googlewave.com will be able to add suzie@acme.com and frank@microsoft.com to the same wave, and it will not be any different from adding bob@bobsparentsbasement.com.

I'm not certain what Google's plans are for the 2nd category.  Personally, I would find it quite useful to allow only certain people to edit, but a larger set of people to view (and possibly comment on), but not edit a blip.  This would be perfectly doable in terms of federation, except that a foreign server can perform any action that its users have a right to do, so granting write access to suzie@acemwave.com might give craig@acmewave.com write access too, depending on how the acmewave.com server is coded.

Actually, I've been thinking a lot about writing a robot that would allow me to expose the content of a wave to the public through a website (e.g., a blog), and allowing the users of that website (optionally including anonymous users) to interact with the wave using the website and the robot as their proxy.

Basically, it would be a lot like Bloggy, but without needing to make the wave public, and with finer-grained control over user actions. The first step would be to make a robot that simply reads the wave contents, and posts them on the web, updating the website whenever the wave is updated.

Blogger.com and the Broken Comment Form: Third Party Cookies

A while ago, I noticed that, for some reason, when I was on a Blogger blog on the blogspot.com domain (such as this one), I was no longer seen as "logged in", even though when I went to the Blogger home page, or clicked the "Sign in" link on the upper right hand corner (or the "B" icon on the upper left), I was automatically signed in with my Google account. This was only a minor annoyance to me (it prevented the "edit" icons from showing up for me on the widgets my own blogs) until I started using the in-line comment form for my blogs. This feature puts the comment form right below the post on its page, in stead of opening a separate window or navigating away to a special comments page. I like it because it allows for immediate comment gratification, and a smooth user experience. The problem was that now my comment forms seemed to be broken if I was signed in with my Google account. (Google owns Blogger, and they transitioned away from the old Blogger IDs to Google accounts a while ago.) After doing some research on this problem, I came to the conclusion that the source of the problem was Firefox: specifically that Firefox (since version 3.0) has the default setting of blocking all third-party cookies. (However, if you upgraded your profile from a previous version, you may still have the old default setting left over.) A cookie is a bit of text that a web site can store (in order to read back later) to track information about a visitor to that website. A third-party cookie is a cookie that is loaded by a script that is not hosted on the same domain as the site that you are visiting. Most third party cookies come from advertisers, whose ads are loaded and, in the background, like to keep track of which ads a user has seen and at which sites they have visited. There are a few companies that like to collect as much information as possible, and the fact that they have their advertising tendrils on so many sites gives them a disturbingly extensive ability to track users' browsing habits. This is why the makers of Firefox decided to block third party cookies, except for those sites that the user has specifically granted permission to allow access from other sites. I agree with their assessment, and don't want to re-enable all third-party cookies, but I also want to allow certain sites that I trust to know who I am. Blogger is not nefarious in its desire to "track" me on blogs: it simply wants to let me log in, manage my blogs, and post comments. So, how do I let Firefox know that blogger.com should be allowed to track me on non-blogger.com sites? Here is the answer: Go to the settings menu. This can be found under Tools -> Options on Windows and Edit -> Preferences on Linux. I'm not sure where it is on Mac OS X, but I'm sure it's not hard to find. Once you're there, select the Privacy panel, and under "Cookies", click on the "Exceptions..." button:

Type "blogger.com" into the text field and click "Allow":

You're done. Click Close and exit the settings menu.

The next time you log in to Blogger, external blogger sites (such as those on blogspot.com, as well as custom domains) will know who you are.