All posts tagged foursquare

3 Cool (Social) Mobile Applications

by admin on 5 May ’11 in Cool Stuff, Culture, Digital, Free Stuff, Mobile, Networking, Technology, android, community, facebook, iPhone, social media, twitter with No comments

We as human beings are inherently social. Therefore, it’s no wonder social media has grown into a massive powerhouse.

The mobile platform has acted as somewhat of a catalyst in social media’s growth—allowing us to do everything (plus more) on the go. Sure, most people access Facebook or Twitter from their mobile devices but that’s just the tip of the social iceberg. There are many applications that have social features independent from popular social networks as well as ones that include sharing different kinds of content on your preferred outlet of choice. Here are three  social mobile applications you should check out:

Application: Soundtracking

Platform(s): iPhone

Cost: Free


Soundtracking is an innovative application that lets users share what they’re listening to with their friends while simultaneously creating its own micro-network of users. People love to share content (on Facebook, the average user produces 90 pieces of content a month) and they share everything from photos and videos to what they are eating and where they are.

The developers behind Soundtracking noticed this and decided to give users the opportunity to share the songs that they love listening to. This application is packed with features and when it comes to sharing your music it gives you a few options:

  1. Share what is currently playing on your iPhone.
  2. Use the ‘Sound Check’ feature to listen, identify and share music playing around you.
  3. Manually search for songs and share them with your friends.

Once you have selected a song you can then share it on Facebook, Twitter or Foursquare and can even add a photo, your location or a short description if you like. Users can also check out what music is trending as well as follow individual users so that the music they share will show up in your feed. This acts as a great way to discover new music or nostalgic classics that you nearly forgot about.

Application: Beluga

Platforms: iPhone, Android

Cost: Free


Group messaging has become popular lately as well. Beluga is an application that allows users to create ‘Pods’ or groups to which they can add friends and all share one conversation. You can get all your friends in on it whether they have the application or not. If they don’t, Beluga allows them to receive and reply to messages via text message.

Users can also set up events, specifying a time and place to meet up with their friends—making this an extremely useful tool for planning a night on the town while keeping everyone in the loop. Of course users can also add things like photos and locations to their messages, adding depth and content to conversations. The coolest part is that this application is free and can essentially replace costly text messaging plans. We’d recommend keeping an eye on this application because it was recently acquired by Facebook and we are curious how Zuckerberg plans to use it in his quest for world domination.

Application: Words With Friends

Platform(s): iPhone, iPad, Android

Cost: Free, $2.99 (ad-free version)


Words With Friends is an office favorite amongst some of us at Squeaky. Launched almost 2 years ago in July 2009, it has since become somewhat of a social gaming phenomenon. Based off the classic board game Scrabble, Words With Friends allows users to connect and play with each other one on one. You can connect with your real life friends or just play a random opponent. The cool part is you can make a move right away or wait a couple of days and make your opponent sweat it out.

The application also features in game chat so that you can talk smack to your opponent or urge them to hurry up and make a move already. And if you get sick of playing random opponents you can try and invite some of your friends to play via Facebook and Twitter as well. We think the application is nearly perfect although some features could be added to make it even better:

  1. The ability to play games against multiple opponents could add complexity and put an interesting twist on the game.
  2. A landscape mode would be nice.
  3. Preventative measures against cheaters using Scrabble helpers and other such applications.

As social beings, it’s hard to imagine a world without peer-to-peer interaction and we will most likely never see that day. Instead, we will probably see even more applications, websites, and anything else we can imagine tie into the social realm.

Free Friday: Soundtrckr

by admin on 31 Mar ’11 in Cool Stuff, Digital, Free Stuff, Mobile, facebook, iPhone, twitter with No comments

soundtrckr

Looking for good new music on the go? Try out Soundtrckr, it’s like Pandora but with way more features and plus it’s free.

This amazing little app recently launched just over three months ago and has quickly grown to half a million users. Using a similar algorithm as Pandora, it allows you enter an artist you’d like to listen to and then plays music by that artist as well as similar ones.

Not only can you create your own stations but you can share them with your friends as well as listen to the stations your friends have themselves created. You can even discover new friends by browsing nearby stations that people in your area have created.

One of the other cool features that applications like Pandora lack is the ability to share what you’re listening to on your favorite social media outlets as well. Connect your Facebook, Twitter and/or Foursquare and share what you’re listening to with all of your friends. Once you’ve shared it on one of these your friends can then tune in to your station via the web.

For now it’s also ad-free which is a nice plus since most free apps make you put up with pesky advertisements. So if you have an iPhone, Windows Phone 7 or an Ovi by Nokia go grab this cool app. Or just check it out on the web.

Museums and Social Media

by admin on 23 Mar ’11 in Cool Stuff, Culture, Digital, Fashion, NYC, YouTube, art, company culture, facebook, marketing, social media, twitter with Comments Off

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It seems as though everyday we hear new stories about how social media is helping businesses market themselves and communicate with their audiences. Centers for art and culture such as museums are no different and are somewhat of a dying breed with budgets being cut across the country. So museum directors and curators have taken to the web and social media to interact with people and get visitors into their museums.

Utilizing Twitter, places like the American Museum of Natural History in NYC created their first ‘Tweetup’, an after-hours, invite only tour free of charge. The only catch was that all visitors had to Tweet, Check-in using Foursquare, share photos using Twitpic and Flickr, update their status on Facebook and record and share videos on YouTube. People love Tweeting and sharing content on their various social networks. It’s one of the biggest trends right now in the digital realm and by recruiting people to share their experience on Twitter as well as other social networks, the museum is able to market themselves to all of these participants’ networks as well as create some buzz for themselves.

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Free Friday: Social Media Monitoring Tools

by admin on 4 Mar ’11 in Digital, Free Stuff, Google, YouTube, facebook, marketing, social media, twitter with No comments

Social Media Logos

We all know how important Social Media is to a business but with so much out there it becomes a convoluted mess trying to manage them all. So to celebrate Free Friday, we’ve decided to provide you with a couple of free tools you can use to monitor and manage your social media outlets.

Hootsuite is a highly efficient tool for monitoring and managing multiple social media accounts. You can get streams from Facebook (both profiles and/or pages), Twitter, LinkedIn, Foursquare and a bunch of others. You can also schedule all of your status updates, tweets, etc., ahead of time and choose which outlets you wish to publish them to. We like Hootsuite because it also gives users the ability to customize their interface. You can move your streams around, delete unnecessary ones, and even filter them by keywords.

In addition, Wildfire Interactive developed a free social media monitoring service that allows you to measure your performance on Facebook and Twitter, track your competitors, receive alerts related to your social relevance, and get custom-tailored recommendations based on your exposure.

Postling is another great tool that brings all of your social media outlets together in one place. Like Hootsuite, Postling allows you to set up scheduled updates and in addition to Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, they allow users to sync social platforms such as Flickr, YouTube, Blogger and Tumblr. On top of that, you can track reviews people write about your business that are published on your Yelp or CitySearch pages as well as monitor the web in real-time or via RSS.

These tools are great for managing all of your social media outlets but in order to efficiently monitor all of them you need to seriously consider analytics. You could—in theory—upgrade to a paid version of either of the aforementioned tools and get a ton of analytic and tracking data but since today is Free Friday we won’t get into that costly endeavor.

Instead, consider using free services like Google Analytics which only requires embedding a bit of code into your page. Google provides a huge amount of data and is super simple to use. In addition to this you may have also heard of AddThis. If you haven’t then I’m sure you’ve seen it in action. AddThis adds sharing functionality to content on your pages. It too only requires embedding a bit of code and although you may not be able to use it directly on a social outlet it tracks where your content is being shared. Users can choose where they’d like to share (Facebook, Twitter, Email etc.) and AddThis tracks it all. This can give marketers key insight on where to focus their efforts.

In the spirit of Free Friday if you have any useful Free social media monitoring tools we’d love to hear!

Groupon valued at one billion dollars! Holy cash cow!

by admin on 19 Apr ’10 in Enlighten Me, Fashion with No comments

Social coupon sharing site, Groupon, has now joined the exclusive billion dollar club with the likes of Facebook and Twitter. This is a remarkable feat considering that Groupon only caters to 54 cities in the U.S.,  which pales in comparison to the global reach of the other two social networking behemoths. And, to really appreciate this billion dollar number remember that the much publicized geo-location service, Foursquare, is valued at a mere $80 million.

According to statistics from Compete.com, Groupon’s site traffic has more than quadrupled over the past year. What Groupon has going for themselves is the ability to directly tie-in a simple, but genius business model. When consumers decide to participate in the deals posted on their site Groupon receives a cut of the profits, which some have suggested is as high as 30% of the overall revenue generated by participating vendors. This is a great chunk of change and a practice that future online start-ups should try to emulate.
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