Posts Tagged ‘social network’
Foursquare’s Dennis Crowley: Still deciding on Facebook Places
With , we’re all wondering how it will affect location-based services like . So I went ahead and asked founder and chief executive Dennis Crowley.
While Foursquare had a presence at the Facebook announcement, . Other location-based games, like Gowalla and Booyah, were a bit more vocal claiming integrations with Facebook.
The reason for the vagueness? Crowley said that Foursquare hasn’t committed to anything because the team still needs to try out the service. The company appears to not have had any early access to the feature and wants to “mess around with it for a week or two” before it determines how it will integrate. Crowley says they will have access tomorrow which appears to the same time the general public will have access as well, .
While Crowley admits that they knew Facebook would eventually do something around location, thinking it would happen at this year’s SXSW (South by South West conference), he isn’t worried about the social network being competition. Rather, he noted that Facebook will help teach people about location and checking in, making Foursquare even more popular.
Crowley also said that this feature launch validates what his company has been working on for three years.
“If Facebook thinks that location is a good idea, then we are on to something,” he said.
While Facebook might seem like a giant able to crush Foursquare, Crowley emphasized the different missions of the companies. The core of Foursquare is check-ins — getting people off the couch and into the world to try new things and share with friends — while with Facebook check-ins are just another feature.
Most importantly, Crowley said the key to Foursquare is that it remains fun and quirky, while Facebook appears to have lost that from its earlier days. Crowley isn’t surprised, he noted that when you have a product or service with millions of users, you have to tone down the personality of the company.
Luckily, he said, Foursquare isn’t at that point yet.
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Mobile social network MocoSpace hits 11M users
, the social network designed specifically for mobile devices, announced today that it has reached a milestone of 11 million users — with 500,000 users forming new friendships every day.
MocoSpace focuses on helping users expand their circle of friends. The service is accessible by any web-enabled mobile phone, so it doesn’t leave out users who don’t have the latest smartphones. It makes money through the sale of virtual currency and targeted advertising. The company recently ran ad campaigns from Sony Pictures, Spike TV and the US Census.
Statistics-wise, the site has been doing quite well. Analyst firm Ground Truth reports that it’s the fourth most visited mobile site in the US, and the site generates more than 3 billion page views a month. That large number of page views is likely attributable to the fact that it takes many clicks to accomplish something on a mobile site, but it also speaks to how sticky the site is for users. On average, users access the site over five times per day and spend 13 minutes per session.
The Boston-based company has raised $7 million in funding from General Catalyst Partners, Pilot Group, and former eBay executive Michael Dearing.
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Discovered a Fake Facebook
PandaLabs has detected a spoof page of Facebook designed to steal passwords from users of social networks. The content and the URL of the web page are identical to the actual page content service so it is very easy to convince a user to enter their name and password. After entering the password an error page which should alert and warn the user that he is on a specially crafted website. For reference you can see the image of this error:
Any data entered on this page fall into the hands of hackers.