Check into Foursquare, Gowalla, Places, and Brightkite with Footfeed
While Facebook Places and Foursquare reign at the top of the location based services ecosystem, there are other players like Gowalla and Britekite. It is unwieldy to check into multiple accounts when you arrive at a location so most users choose one to the exclusion of others. However, each service has different features which have maximum benefit when users check-in often. An application that lets you check-in once to multiple location based services would solve this problem, and one is provided by a free iPhone app called Footfeed.
Checking In
Footfeed uses APIs to connect with six location based services: Gowalla, Foursquare, Brightkite, Latitude, Facebook, and Twitter. When you use Footfeed to check into these services, you get the points, badges, and rewards built into those systems as well as those of Footfeed. When I tested the app I found that rarely would any given location show up on all six of the services. The designers of Footfeed anticipated this and allow you to match a location by seeing if it has a different spelling on the services where it did not appear. Like other location based apps, you can opt to share your check-in on Twitter or Facebook.
After you check-in using Footfeed, you get a report of how the check-in affected your status on various services. For example, on Foursquare you’ll learn the identity of the mayor of that location, how many days it will take for you to become mayor, and the number of points you’ve earned. You’ll get similar information for Gowalla. Checking into a location also lets you see any tips left by others who have checked in there as well as the your history of check-ins at that location.
Finding Deals and Tips
Facebook’s recent announcement of their Deals programs highlights one of the biggest business benefits of locations based services: promotions. By checking into a location you can find discounts and special offers from nearby businesses. Footfeed allows you to see nearby deals on Foursquare as well as other apps like the Pepsi Loot app.
While deals are offered by businesses, tips are created by users. Footfeed also lets you see nearby tips about the best items to order from restaurants near you location, which restrooms are the cleanest, and many other types of user generated content.
Integrated Friends
Footfeed also compiless all of the friends you have across location-based services into one list. So, you can see the dates and times of their latest check-ins. I also saw that many of my friends have accounts on multiple locations based services, but the one that was used the most was Foursquare. While you can see friend activity on Footfeed, you cannot add or remove friends through Footfeed.
Footfeed offers an easy way to use multiple location based services with one app. Use it to do multiple check-ins with a single click, manage your friends across platforms, and find hot deals and cool tips on the go.
Category: Apps | Tags: brightkite, check.in, Deals, facebook, footfeed, foursquare, gowalla, latitude, location based services, single check-in, twitter
About the Author Anjuan Simmons is an emerging technology consultant and freelance technology consultant currently working as a Director at Adverlyze, an online marketing strategy company. Anjuan has previously worked for Accenture and Deloitte. He has an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from the University of Texas at Austin and an MBA from Texas A&M University. He can be found on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/anjuan and on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/anjuan.
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