You can now find deals in any town without having to be in the neighborhood. Look for the deals tab to browse and find specials anywhere, select a city and click anywhere on the map to find foursquare check-in specials, Mayor specials, Newbie specials or Loyalty specials using checkinmania.
You can now add CheckinMania Map to your own website by adding a small snippet of code to your website. You can customize the size, you can set default location, select the services you want displayed and default service to start - Foursquare, Gowalla, BrightKite or Twitter.
Here is the link to customize and get the code
Not the typical check-in method you see in foursquare, gowalla or facebook, but some cool new optional features that will be very useful:
+ Notification to check-in once you arrive at a place
+ Automatically check-in when you arrive a particular destination
+ Automatically checks you out of place when you leave
Full details at Google Mobile Blog
Photos from @Instagram, @Picplz and @FoodSpotting will be pushed to @foursquare, the new foursquare iPhone app will also support adding photos with check-ins.
New foursquare iPhone app features include:
Android, BlackBerry and WebOS will also get the photos feature soon and photo sharing to facebook and flickr also coming soon according to foursquare blog. Foursquare has also added support for full check-in history. Developer API support for these new features will be available soon.
(via @foursquare)
Expedition 25 Commander Douglas H. Wheelock became the first human to ever use a location-based service from space. Doug checked in from the International Space Station and unlocked the new NASA Explorer Badge.
Read full story at foursquare blog: “One small step for man, one giant check-in for mankind”
Location based game app SCVNGR has launched new apps for iPhone and Android. SCVNGR now has about 500,000 users and growing fast. The iPhone app design looks a lot like facebook iPhone app with new feature including a improved activity stream, dashboard and a social map to view your friends on a map. More details can be found on the SCVNGR’s blog.
Photo via @techcrunch
FireFly is the new Location based Check-in service that is based on Twitter Places API and uses the twitter social graph as your friends. The iPhone app design is very similar to foursquare or gowalla, you can check where your twitter friends are checked-in, you can browse nearby places and check-in, and also attach pictures with check-in. It is not clear if the it just shows friend check-ins done using this app or does it also pull tweets with location tag from twitter.com, it does not look like it pulls location tagged tweets of friends. Foursquare and Gowalla tag check-ins with twitter places, it will be cool if Firefly can pull tweets with location tag into this service, then it will have aggregated stream of check-ins for twitter social graph. Overall it is a well designed app, but the big question is, is it just filling a hole that twitter can implement on their own?
(BTW, http://checkinmania.com/twitter will show all tweets tagged to a location, easy to look up tweets from a particular location)
Facebook today announced “Places” feature which will allow users and friends to be tagged to a location a.k.a check-in to a location.
Here are some of the features of Facebook Places:
- Check-in to a location
- Tag friends to a location
- Find friends nearby
- Post photos/messages to a place
- View people checked-in at the same location you are
- Businesses can claim ownership of a place by verification
Gowalla, Foursquare, Yelp and Booyah have all announced their partnership to integrate Facebook Places API. Facebook has also made read APIs available, search and write APIs are in closed beta currently (checkinmania.com will be adding facebook tab as soon as the search API comes out of closed beta). The Facebook Places feature will be available on the facebook touch mobile website and iPhone app starting today to all US users.
(picture via @techcrunch)
