02
Nov

A few nice facebook places images I found:

Infographic matrix: Foursquare vs Facebook vs Gowalla vs Yelp vs BrightKite vs. Where.com vs Booyah vs. Loopt comparison guide

Image by Mark Fidelman
The location based social networking space (LBSN) fascinates me. And with the arrival of Facebook Places the space is going to heat up fast.
But when I first set out to discover the ideal LSBN for my lifestyle it was a difficult process. There were a few comparison guides between Foursquare and Gowalla but nothing that covered all of the major players in the space. Therefore the process (at least for me) took several weeks and several experiments with each of the Tier 1 LBSN’s.
Well instead of making you suffer through the same process, I decided to make an infographic decision guide matrix for you in order to help you decide which LBSN to use.

Location Based Services (LBS)

P1290432

Image by Zero-X

22 Responses to “Nice “facebook Places” photos”

I’ve a question… what do you mean with "limited" in the API Foursquare block? As far as I know you can do everything through their APIs…

Luca Baldini
November 2nd, 2010

Luca, as a business you can’t pull historical information about who/what/when from their API’s. You also can’t do write queries. Also the info given in the API is very limited.

Mark Fidelman
November 2nd, 2010

Psst… Foursquare is available on Palm: foursquare.com/palm

sirgeoph
November 2nd, 2010

SirGeoph – Sorry missed that one. Will do an update shortly.

Mark Fidelman
November 2nd, 2010

"This photo was taken yesterday in San Diego, California."

.schill
November 2nd, 2010

.schill – LOLShould say "created yesterday in San Diego" but that wasn’t an option.

Mark Fidelman
November 2nd, 2010

I work at Brightkite – how is the API limited? If it’s limited, I’ll be happy to un-limit it.

ljharb
November 2nd, 2010

Isn’t Google Latitude worth adding to the picture? Except that: awesome graphic, thx a lot for sharing!

mirjoran
November 2nd, 2010

[http://www.flickr.com/photos/ljharb] ljharb – As a business: Can you show me how to build an historic view of all my customer checkins, reviews, rewards etc. in a pivot like table?
If you can (my developers tell me it can’t be done) then I’ll change the infographic. Thanks for your comments.

Mark Fidelman
November 2nd, 2010

[http://www.flickr.com/photos/mirjoran] MirJoran: I looked at Google Latitude but it didn’t meet the requirements of the list. Perhaps my next version (due out soon).

Mark Fidelman
November 2nd, 2010

seekomega – While respecting privacy, ie, only showing you public checkins – sure. api.brightkite.com/objects.html details how you can, for example, call brightkite.com/objects.json?place_id= 356a192b7913b04c54574d18c28d46e6395428ab&filter=checkins,notes,photos and get all of the public objects at that place.

Obviously as the client, you’d have to page through the data using the `limit` and `offset` parameters, and then do your own view analysis and manipulation – but all of the public data is available in this fashion.

Brightkite doesn’t have reviews, but you can use `tips=1` to grab only tips, which might serve a similar function.

As for rewards, that would be badges. Our badges API isn’t publicly documented yet, and displaying the data tying it to places is still in development (our badges are quite new).

ljharb
November 2nd, 2010

[http://www.flickr.com/photos/ljharb] Thanks for the reply. Your API is more advanced than I realized. Still need more though 🙂 I’ll remove the "limited" soon.

Mark Fidelman
November 2nd, 2010

Great work!

tattoo design school

Asiace
November 2nd, 2010

Seekomega, excellent infographics. Thanks for compiling it.

In addition to Latitude, you might also consider Qype.com, the European equivalent of Yelp and clear leader in Europe in this space in terms of usage and coverage.

(disclaimer: I don’t work with Qype but they are using our LikeCube.com personalized recommendation engine for locations)

Manu Marchal
November 2nd, 2010

[http://www.flickr.com/photos/skotworld] I’ll look into that thanks. Any other European LBS nominations?

Mark Fidelman
November 2nd, 2010

[http://www.flickr.com/photos/fidelman] @Mark thanks for the reply!!! I was not thinking at the business side… I’ve looked again at the foursquare API and I agree with you: "limited" is the right definition!
By the way, great job!!!

Luca Baldini
November 2nd, 2010

I just updated the infographic to show Foursquare’s Palm support and removed the "limited" from BrightKite’s API (although it still has limitations).

Mark Fidelman
November 2nd, 2010

BrightKite is moving away from location support, though. It’s all about Group Text now. Read their latest blog entry.

I’d also like to point out that BrightKite is 90% spammers as evidenced by their public "Everybody" posts page. I’m sure that 2.2 million number is inaccurate when you look at the high spam post count BrightKite has.

homeward_angel04
November 2nd, 2010

Great! nice work. It would be great to add svngr and aki aki here.

playgroundmaker
November 2nd, 2010

..and http://www.playground-maker.com, although we are still in beta. Create your real world games in a few clicks.

playgroundmaker
November 2nd, 2010

Here is:
SCVNGR (www.scvngr.com) undisclosed number of users, Game mechanics:earn points and unblock badges&real-world rewards, API:Yes,Dashboards: YES, Platforms MAC OSX and Android, User benefit:: create and do challenges, CEO: Seth Priebatsch, in ten words or less: play and discover cool places, gaming engine+social platform.

playgroundmaker
November 2nd, 2010

Great Job Mark, I really like the infographic. I had posted a similar topic on my blog post. You’re infographic was so relevant I’d thought I’d add a second posting citing your work: invisibleinkdigital.com/digital-strategy-2/facebook-place…

Invisibleinkdigital.com
November 2nd, 2010