For this assignment I choose Foursquare as my social media tools. Foursquare is a local search and discovery service mobile application which provides search results for it's users. By taking into account the places a user goes, the things they have told the application that they like, and the other users whose advice they trust, Foursquare provides reccommendation of the place to go around a users current location.
The service was created in late 2008 and launched in 2009 by Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai. Crowley had previously founded the similar project Dodgeball as his graduate thesis project in the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) at New York University. Until late July 2014, Foursquare featured a social networking layer that enabled a user to share their location with friends, via the "check in" - a user would manually tell the application when they were at a particular location using a mobile website, text messaging, or a device-specific application by selecting from a list of venues the application locates nearby. As of December 2013, Foursquare had 45 million registered users. Male and female users are equally represented and also 50 percent of users are outside the US. Support for French, Italian, German, Spanish, and Japanese was added in February 2011. Support for Indonesian, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Thai was added in September 2011. Support for Turkish was added in June 2012.
FEATURES
On August 7, 2014 , Foursquare 8.0 was launched for iOS and Android devices. The new application has changed the focus of the application to being primarily a local search and discovery tool, where users can "follow" others to receive local recommendations from them.
Local search and recommendations
Foursquare lets the user search for restaurants, nightlife spots, shops and other places of interest in their surrounding area. It is also possible to search other areas by entering the name of a remote location. The app displays personalised recommendations based on the time of day, displaying breakfast places in the morning, dinner places in the evening etc. Recommendations are personalised based on factors that include a users check-in history, their "Tastes" and their venue ratings and according to their friends reviews.
Tips and expertise
Foursquare eschews the traditional concept of letting users leave long-form reviews, and instead encourages the writing of "Tips" - short messages about a location which let other users know what is good (or bad) there. Tips are limited to 200 characters in length, but can include a URL to link to an external site with more information, and can include a photo. Tips can be set to expire after a certain amount of time, or on a specific date, which can be useful for leaving Tips about events or promotions at a venue that will end soon.
Users have the ability to 'Like' tips left by other users, which makes those tips more prominent. Users can also save tips left by other users onto their own to do list, ensuring that the user is reminded about them when they are nearby, and can "follow" any other user or brand to increase the prominence of that user's tips when they are navigating Foursquare. As a reward for leaving quality tips, a user can also earn "expertise" in a particular location (e.g. a neighbourhood or city) or category (e.g. Italian restaurants). Expertise is awarded based on the number and quality of tips a user writes, a tip's quality being measured based on the number of views, saves and "likes" it receives from other users. When a user earns expertise, their tips are made more prominent and a label indicating their expertise is added beneath relevant tips.
Tastes
Foursquare has a defined list of "tastes" in particular food items, styles of cuisine or environmental aspects, which users may add to their profiles to let the service know what they like. New users are presented with a list of words and phrases describing recognized tastes and they may select the ones that appeal to them. Users can change their tastes at any time, and can add and remove items from their profile. Foursquare uses natural language processing to match a user's tastes with the tips at nearby venues that mention them. It is then able to recommend nearby places to the user that match their tastes.
Location detection
Foursquare 8.0 uses its own proprietary technology called Pilgrim to detect a user's location. Pilgrim is able to guess a user's current location by comparing historical check-in data (previous users tacitly stating "I am here") with a combination of signals such as a user‘s current GPS signal, cell tower triangulation, cellular signal strength and surrounding wifi signals. In this way Foursquare can know a user's location without them needing to "check in".
Foursquare 8.0 features a 'Here' tab that lets the user see Tips about their current location. Pilgrim will guess the current location and the user is able to correct the selection if wrong. The tab displays information about the current venue, and includes a Check-in button. Tapping the button lets the user check in with Swarm, before returning them to Foursquare. If they do not have the app installed, tapping the button opens a page where they can download it.
Foursquare 8.0 also uses Pilgrim to track a user's location in the background. This enables the app to send the user push notifications of things that they might find interesting around their current location. It also uses this ability to learn about the kinds of places a user likes, based on when and how often they visit different venues. It then uses this data to improve a user's recommendations, and to gauge the popularity of a venue.
Ratings
In addition to leaving Tips, Foursquare 8.0 lets users rate venues by answering questions. The questions help Foursquare understand how people feel about a place, including such questions as whether or not a user likes it, how trendy it is, its cleanliness, how noisy it is. It also uses these questions to fill out missing venue information such as asking whether the venue takes credit cards, or whether it has outdoor seating.
Foursquare gives each venue a numeric score between 0.1 and 10 to indicate its general popularity when compared to other venues. Scores are calculated automatically factoring in check-in data, Tips and Ratings.
Lists
Users can add venues to a personal "to do" list, and to curated lists with any criteria. With the launch of Foursquare 8.0, adding venues to lists other than a to-do list was only possible on the website, but writing in August 2014, Foursquare chief Dennis Crowley has assured users that lists would return "in a big way" in the "soonish" future.
How to use Foursquare
How to use Foursquare
Download the Foursquare application to your cellphone
- An iPhone application for Forsquare can be downloaded from the App store.
- Link to your address book, Twitter & Facebook account. This will let you find where your friends are "hanging out" and you'll be able see if they're close by.
Start letting your friends know where you are or have been
- When you check in at onr of the many places listed, the GPS location will let your friends know where you are. Don't just visit though, as the idea is for you to leave details about the place, it's activities, things worth knowing, etc to help others make the most of visiting those some places. For example, you can tell your friends which doughnuts are the best, which clothes to try on, or which books to browse.
Add places you like that aren't listed yet
- You can add places and use the application wherever you go, wherever you're on the bus, in an art gallery or at the mall.
Look for your friend's tips
- See what they're enjoying or avoiding around town and you don't have to limit yourself to their tips alone. You can also see the tips of other users on Foursquare. If you don't know what to do, eat, watch, etc, see what others are reccommending on Foursquare.
Collect your rewards from businesses
- Keeps a record of your reccommendation levels and awards you with points and badges. You can keep track of these on the Foursquare website. If you manage to recommend or check in to more locations than anyone else, you can become the 'mayor' and receive rewards for participating businesses by way of appreciating your loyalty.
Weaknesses
Every social media tools have their own advantages and disadvantages. Disadvantages Foursquare is very common to our society. Same as Facebook, Twitter because every application have a place to check in to show where we go when hanging out. When we check in to any place of course our place is public to others except we change the post who can see our post either to our friends to friends or public but the most is we put public. Whenever we check in to any places, our location is public to strangers if your post is public for everyone. This way is very dangerous for women especially because women like to check in wherever they go without think who is around them that could harm them when they are alone. When you walk alone especially ladies, do not check in wherever you go because you open the chance for the strangers or kidnappers to kidnap you. Check in every places you go, you make kidnappers job easier to find you because they already where to find and how to find you.
Benefit of the tools to the net citizens
Foursquare is a mobile social networking tool that allows users to check-in at a venue to connect with their environment and collect awards for sharing their experience. For businesses, Foursquare is a free service that can be utilized to increase opportunities for brands to connect with their customers and share their latest news. Here are three ways that your business can benefit from using Foursquare:
Increase your brand awareness
To increase brand awareness, post updates to communicate any news, specials or upcoming events that will appear on the user’s newsfeed. Updates should typically promote what makes your business distinctive and interesting. Additionally, all business pages are automatically added to Foursquare’s page gallery that promotes suggested and trending pages. This feature increases your page visibility and the potential to receive more “likes”.
Create customer loyalty
Reward your customers and increase repeat business by offering a promotion when customers check-in at your venue. Promotion specials that are unique and exclusive to Foursquare users will attract new customers and reward the existing ones for visiting again. For example, a coffee house’s “free drink on your first visit” and “10% off your third visit” special will not only pique user’s interest in visiting your location but encourage them to come back again. Creating special promotions for your business page also gives you the opportunity to think outside the box (not all promotions have to be a discount).
Gain insight on your customer demographics
Once your location is claimed for your business page, Foursquare offers free analytics that allows you to discover who is visiting your business and how often. With this information, you’ll be able to diagnose how many check-ins you’re getting a week, how many users share their Foursquare posts on Facebook or Twitter and which customers are first timers or frequent flyers.
This is the example of using Foursquare. I can show what is the most popular in Kuching, Sarawak. Whenever you want come to Sarawak and a place to full your tummy, you can find in Foursquare. I suggested you one place in Kuching, Sarawak the place that I have been with my family; Topspot Food Court.
Conclusion
Net citizens in this century have a very strong relationship with technologies we have now. When social media tools can connect to others in everywhere, places, and time, we also know what happens to our society or what is new around us or other places. Foursquare is one of the application that have a very strong connection to our society especially in businesses. With Foursquare we know where is the new open shops, what foods is reccommanding from our friends social media network and where is the places don't give a good service or foods.
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