Kansas City SEO

Foursquare posted yesterday on its blog announcing some news about changes in its service offering. Here is the opening paragraph from the post.  Click on the link above to read the whole post for more information.

We wanted to update you on recent improvements we’ve made to the controls that help users manage what foursquare account information is shared with others. Our goal is to make it easy for you to share check-ins with your friends when you so desire, and to hide such information when you want. Accordingly, each time you check into a venue, we give you the option to share your check-in with friends (or keep it private), and share this information with your friends and followers on Facebook and Twitter if you’ve opted into linking these accounts to your foursquare account. 

I am glad to see Foursquare is concerned with privacy and continual improvement.  Look for them to grow as a major player in the local social space.

Have you been following the growth of local social media? We have had ratings and reviews for a long time thanks to Yelp and some Internet yellow page websites (IYPs). Other websites are now joining the fray and changing the game. Take a look at foursquare and gowalla to see a couple of examples.

Foursquare is an interesting new website that allows people to check in at businesses and earn rewards for visit and check-in frequency. It is catching on thanks to the growing prevalence of locationally aware devices such as iPhones, Treos, Blackberries, etc. It is fun, gives people a fun use for their locationally aware devices, and let’s friends and family know where you are at when you are out on the town.

Gowalla is a location-based social networking game created by Alamofire. It is very similar to foursquare in that users ‘check-in’ at spots in their local vicinity, either through a dedicated mobile application or through the mobile website. As a reward users will sometimes receive items from check-ins. Items have developed to become a promotional tool for the game’s partners lik Incase. As of March 2010, there were approximately 150,000 active users on Gowalla.