* I am lead mobile developer at TweetDeck
* Didn’t do the iPhone app though
* 2 month beta
* 30,000 beta testers
* Working on it most of this year, with one other guy
* Widely well received
* Quite honestly awesome, you should download it.
* So anyway today I am going to talk about social GEO services and how we use them in TD
* Mobile app centric
* Though you could do it with HTML, but apps are proving popular on mobile devices
* There are 4 commonly known ones
* You activate it on your phone and it runs continuously
* So you have to figure out where friends are
* One friend who delivered goods in a van left it running so friends could appreciate how many miles he drove every day
* Opt out rather than opt in approach
* Very pretty
* Slow to appear on non-iOS
* Slow to release useful API
* But embraced explicit check-ins
* Leading, probably
* Explicit check-ins
* Prepopulates your friends from Twitter and Facebook
* Badges, leaderboards, competition!
* Very new, so who knows
* I don’t yet know anyone who uses it much, or thinks it’s anything special
* But considering userbase, it’ll be impossible to ignore, even if it sucks
* 4sq seems to have “won”
* So we decided to integrate Foursquare in preference to the others
* I’m this cool, and these are the cool places I go. Somewhat.
* Serendipity (people would turn up, I’d check after leaving work, less need for formal arrangements)
* Follow me on 4sq
* Socially acceptable checkins (work, daily coffee)
* On twitter you unfollow people who only tweet about their breakfast
* Socially acceptable venue creation (mum’s house, your house)
* Overshare, holidays
* We focus on Foursquare, but are bringing FB soon
* We’d support everything if we had the manpower and it wouldn’t ruin the UI
* Better with more context
* Walking directions map (encourages you to get places late!)
* Spent a lot of time here, lots of info without crowding
* Android makes it hard
* Uses “window of interest” approach
* API limitations. Can’t get top 20 venues across zoomed out area so zooming out sucks