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As Foursquare evolves, it wants to help you find either new places to check out or lead you to places where your friends have already been. Mixed in with that is recommendation technology to show you places that you might be interested in based on where you’ve been before. Today, Foursquare updated its iOS and Android apps with an advanced search option that lets you control how the service seeks out new venues for you.

In its blog post today, Foursquare “dares” you to get “super specific” with your searches. Basically, the company is saying that they have enough data to find any place that you could imagine. One of the example searches is: “A cheap sushi place that’s nearby and open now, but that I haven’t been to yet.” Again, this is a search performed based on all of the data that Foursquare has collected over the years, but its first move into a more conversational search experience. Companies like Google are jumping on this bandwagon as well.

When you perform a search like the one suggested above, you just get results as you’d normally expect. Foursquare is processing these inquiries surprisingly fast, which means that you’re likely to settle on a place quickly:

The interesting part comes with the new filter options, where you can home in on a venue based on whether you or a friend have checked in before, by price, if the venue has a special or if you’ve saved it to check out later:

With these dynamic search and filter options, Foursquare has made the jump to become a true utility that might even cancel out a Google search or a Yelp deep-dive. That’s a pretty bold thought, but when you think about how much data Foursquare has, a lot of things that we haven’t even seen yet are possible.

The filter options make all of this data more manageable and of course, usable, to get you to try out more places. It’s also an incentive for more businesses to adopt Foursquare’s offerings, such as specials. If people start filtering their searches in the way that Foursquare suggests, then it behooves these restaurants and bars to have multiple specials lined up and ready to go. Think of it as a highlighted ad in Google search.

Today, Google updated its Google+ app for Android to get up to speed with all of the changes announced during last week’s I/O Developers conference. In all, there were 41 new updates, including a new stream, photos experience and Hangouts.

The Android version has all of that, and one new feature — a new location section.

Where the Anroid app really shines is with the photo capabilities. The updated Google+ app now has the auto backup, highlight, enhance and “auto awesome” functionality that the desktop version has. It’s really handy to be able to enhance your photos directly within the app, rather than waiting until you get back to your computer or relying on Google to do its magical synthetic wrinkle removal, even though it’s cool.

To make it easier to “make plans and meet,” Google+ has broken “Locations” out into its own section. Now, when you share your location with certain Circles, your friends can easily find you by tapping on that section. Naturally, it drops everyone’s location onto a Map, which makes it seamless:

Location is something that hasn’t been a great piece of Google+ to date. The service currently picks up where you are and asks you for your explicit location, not really telling you who will get to see it. With the Location section and controls, it’s easier to manage and can turn into an experience similar to that of Foursquare.

The stream is getting all of the features from last week, too. The auto hashtags will let you drill into new content, hopefully sucking up all of your free time. It turns the Google+ experience into something like Wikipedia, where you can just keep tapping on relevant content and hopefully find some new people to follow along the way. While you’re not going to get the new three-column layout on your smartphone, the drilling down is actually fun.

We’ll await the iOS update, but expect the same items to find their way into that version. All of these enhancements are made to entice you to do a little bit more in Google+, as the company doesn’t really expect you to jump ship from one network to another. The features are more complementary to one another in this update, giving a better experience to new users, which is the most important demographic for Google to focus on right now. Those of us who have tried Google+ already have our minds made up as to whether it’s useful or not. It’s the stragglers who haven’t seen it from the beginning that need to be wowed.

Asian e-commerce juggernaut Alibaba has paid $294 million for a 28 percent stake in AutoNavi, a location, GPS, and mapping company based in Beijing. The end goal, the companies said, is a combination of the two entities’ areas of expertise: physical location and online retail.

In a press release, AutoNavi states it plans “to share certain data, including AutoNavi’s map data and location-related information of the merchants on Alibaba’s e-commerce platforms … AutoNavi and Alibaba will also cooperate in the areas of map engine, location search, navigation, and cloud computing services and will
cross-promote their respective products and services, with a goal of developing new location-based business models.”

The deal itself is structured so that one of Alibaba Group’s wholly owned subsidiaries will purchase 28 percent of AutoNavi’s fully diluted outstanding shares. Alibaba executive vice chair Joseph C. Tsai and Eddie Wu, Alibaba’s mobile product president, will both gain seats on AutoNavi’s board of directors. The deal should close soon pending regulatory approval.

In a statement, Alibaba chief Jack Ma said, “This new alliance reflects our vision for the future of the mobile Internet.”

“With Alibaba’s support, AutoNavi will be able to establish a massive platform of points of interest (POIs) related to the kinds of services our users seek every day,” said AutoNavi CEO Congwu Cheng.

“The alliance will also enable us to create an innovative monetization model by providing consumers with a one-stop service application that integrates merchant information with POIs search, data mining, payment, and other e-commerce activities.”

AutoNavi was founded in 2001 and currently employs 2,000 people. The company had its $100 million IPO in the United States in 2010.

Image credit: fcasadei/Flickr

Filed under: Deals

The promise of social checkins has always been that they’ll make money by revealing to marketers where you are and when you want to buy stuff. Payments startup Square thinks it can do ya one better: telling marketers where you already bought stuff and where you’re likely to want to buy more in the future.

In a chat with The Verge, Square discovery chief Ajit Varma said, “We can tell you that people who like X might also like Y, and it’s a true representation of what you’ve bought.”

Making shopping recommendations isn’t exactly cutting-edge anymore. After all, it’s how old-school behemoth Amazon sells you so much crap and how equally old oldster Netflix keeps you glued to your laptop screen watching old episodes of Breaking Bad long after you should have been asleep.

But Square has a very slight advantage: It knows not only what you buy, but exactly, geographically where you buy it. And it knows not what your interests or “likes” are, but what you actually put plastic to magnetic strip reader for.

The big missing piece in Square’s data treasure trove is something online retailers do very well: tracking what you almost bought and what you might want to look at again, and trying to predict when and where you’ll change your mind and push the button on a purchase decision.

Square has made some big pushes toward more rapid growth (which means more user data) lately. It launched a cheap-o, $300 Business-in-a-Box program to help would-be small business owners get off the ground. And it’s selling its credit card-reading dongles everywhere, from Starbucks to Verizon.

Currently, Square is processing around $10 billion in consumer purchases each year.

Filed under: Social

In an update to its iOS and Android apps released today, Twitter began allowing users to specify trends based on location or their own interests.

Users can also customize their Trends panel to display topics trending in a particular location or based on the content they already follow in the app.

The app update also modifies some aspects of user experience, including allowing users to invite social contacts to join Twitter from the mobile app and automatically notifying both the original poster and the re-tweeter when a user replies to a retweeted tweet.

Twitter also continues to invest in Vine, bundling improving playback into today’s update. Earlier this week, the video app began allowing users to shoot video from the front-facing camera on their mobile devices.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

This infographic tells the life story of Apple co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs in a series of photographs that retrace his steps from his birthplace in San Francisco to his final resting place in Alta Mesa.

Many of Jobs’s milestones happened in California, but his company made its way across the U.S. before becoming a global phenomenon. Apple’s main campus has been in Cupertino, California since 1993; the first retail store actually opened in Tysons Corner, Virginia in May 2011.

See more details in this infographic by CheapFlights.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

After completing a somewhat troubled fundraising round earlier this month, Foursquare is investing in the places database it has developed from user check-ins, but the work leaves unanswered the question Foursquare has thus far been unable to answer: how to motivate users to continue to check in.

The company today posted a job announcement for a product manager to lead work to leverage its database that put the contradiction front and center.

“Your role will be to continue to develop our places database and place pages into the most comprehensive and highest quality source of location data,” the announcement said.

The listing shows Foursquare working to build out its role as the chief provider of location services, in keeping with the vision Dennis Crowley laid out at South by Southwest. Work on the location database reveals an attempt to simultaneously offer a consumer-facing product that offers local search and a B2B product that delivers data through APIs.

But both of these alternative models for the company that pioneered location-based social networking continue to rely on the very check-ins that the platform has had difficulty driving.

“It has always been important for us to be both a product and a platform,” said spokeswoman Laura Covington in an email interview.

The job description revealed a simultaneous effort to use the data the company has gleaned from its 3.5 billion cumulative check-ins and to somehow entice users to keep checking in.

“You’ll work on projects ranging from building tools so our users and tens of thousands of super-users can contribute new data and places; build signals such as timeliness, cheap vs. expensive, and good for groups from our 3.5 billion check-ins; and surface personal and social history for users when they arrive on a Place page after an Explore search,” the job posting said.

To maintain a database that can provide information on price and location and power Foursquare’s local search service, Explore, the company needs check-ins to continue.

“Foursquare has become a powerful tool for search and recommendation, but they are built on top of our 3.5 billion check-ins. The more you check in, the smarter Foursquare gets,” Covington said.

But because the opposite is also true — the fewer users check-in, the dumber the database will get — the product side of Foursquare has to survive in order for its latest efforts to take off.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Foursquare today launched a redesign of its website today that puts its local-search functions front and center, in keeping with what the company did to its mobile app earlier this month.

Use of the ‘Explore,’ or local search, feature has doubled in the past few months, according to Foursquare, as the company tries to move away from being a location based social network to competing with Yelp and Google Local Search.

“You don’t need to check-in to use Foursquare. With billions of data points, we can always help you find the best places to go,” the company said in its announcement.

The updated website highlights local search content by bringing contact information, events, photos and tips onto each venue page.

The service still leverages check-ins, however, by drawing tips from current activity to “highlight the things people talk about the most.”

The website also shows users which of their contacts have checked-in where to deliver personalized tips. It also uses an algorithm to suggest similar places at the right hand side of venue pages.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Will Facebook’s “Graph Search” be a threat to Google, LinkedIn, Yelp, or Foursquare asks a question on Quora?

No, No, No and Definitely Not. Yet.

The key is expertise.

Beneath the obvious user delight, Facebook is betting a lot on Graph Search’s core ability to connect people with what they’re looking for accurately and immediately. And obviously as the middle man, they stand to gain. Fair enough.

But will Facebook’s imminent functionality be a threat to well established vertical searches like Google, Yelp, LinkedIn and Foursquare?

All of the four kinds of search you can do today: Photos, People, Places and Interests, bear commercial implication. But the most immediate remain People and Places, which as bloggers speculate may pose a threat to Yelp, Foursquare, Google (Places) and LinkedIn (People). So, let’s take simple examples and compare Facebook Search with the other four searches.

Facebook vs. Yelp

I started with a simple search for “bars,” something I presume will be a common search on any local product. Here’s what I got with Facebook. For starters, along with actual bars it also pulled up law and bar associations or offices which was a bit odd.

Now try the same with Yelp and you see how right away, they try to segment that query into the different types of bars you’re potentially searching for.

Once you get a set of results, Yelp then allows you (and this is the most useful feature on yelp currently) to convenience sort by “rating,” “proximity,” “price,” “open now,” or even better by neighborhoods.

I’ve gotta tell you; if you go out often, this filter is magical. But again, the filter is by utilitarian ratings by foodies and not by friends around you. More on that in just a second.

But before we leave Yelp, the third most useful feature on Yelp is their surfacing key elements of the review. So you’re at a restaurant and you’re wondering what’s the best thing on the menu. In days past, you’d have had to ask the person serving you but now you can rely on “the wisdom of an expert crowd” what’s the best food here and it works. Like magic.

Facebook vs. Foursquare

Back to the topic of friends which is Facebook’s biggest competitive advantage. If you do wanna take into account which restaurants your friends are frequenting (ignoring the fact that expertise is the key), then try Foursquare.

The first thing you’ll notice yet again is the structured data (categories like Bar, Sports Bar, Salon) right up front (similar to Yelp) that Foursquare now provides you; though not as in depth as Yelp, can still be a tad useful.

Digging deeper through the results, you’re gonna find them sorted by Foursquare’s own proprietary “Zagat number” that they conjure based on multiple data points.

Foursquare comes up with its score by looking at tips left by users, likes, dislikes, popularity, check-ins and it also weights signals more heavily for local experts.

They also show you a self-selecting group of folks who you know. Chances are most of these folks are more prone to bar hop than your other friends. But still Yelp really nails it with their community that they have nurtured for many many years who continue to write meaningful reviews that makes a world of difference when it comes to local search.

Facebook vs. Google Local

While on the topic of a Zagat number, Google recently bought restaurant ratings site Zagat which now powers their Google Local ratings.  Zagat which originally started off compiling restaurant ratings of the Zagat’s friends, does something very similar to Yelp and the model here is yet again – expertise.

Facebook vs. LinkedIn

Shifting gears to people search, Facebook’s people search is three years after LinkedIn launched its faceted people search. I know because I helped launch it at TechCrunch Disrupt where product manager Esteban Kozak demoed it right before CEO Jeff Weiner went on stage. (Disclosure: I no longer work at LinkedIn and don’t own any stock either) My mind was blown when I first saw what we could do with faceted search on LinkedIn both from a user experience perspective and I’m sure recruiters have found even more value from it.

Take a look at this demo video we shot in 2009 that shows you the plethora of signals a site like LinkedIn uses to hone in on the right professionals in a search. Easier said than done, and much like with Yelp, these signals have been gathered over many many years and such a search isn’t something you can turn on willy-nilly.

In all four instances the quality of Facebook’s search is insipid today compared to the robust community based expertise that the four sites have either built or bought .

The key is expertise. 

Now granted there are many things Facebook could do to build or buy their way into each of these verticals but the key point is that strength in local search across People and Places is not “friend” related, but rather “expertise” dependent and it takes years to build that. And frankly, I’d go with the critical reviews from experts in these fields and that’s an area that Yelp, Foursquare, Google and LinkedIn have Facebook beat.

Filed under: Facebook, Google+, Linkedin, LinkedIn Features, Local Search, Location, Mark Zuckerberg