Latitude vs Foursquare

Latitude Check In

A while back I wrote about using location-based social networking tools for business purposes.

In that post I cited Google Latitude as an example of Live Location Transmission (a tool that sends an approximate location of your phone to your friends) and Foursquare as an example of a check-in based tool (that requires users to manually inform the service that they have arrived at a particular location).

About a week ago, Google released a new Check-in feature for Latitude, which effectively turns Latitude into a hybrid of both kinds of services. I've spent about a week playing with Latitude check-ins, and I thought it might be useful to do a comparison between it and Foursquare. Probably the best way to do that is to highlight where the two services are different.

The most glaring difference between them is their catalogue of locations you can check into.

The Database

Add a new venue in Foursquare

When using Foursquare, if you want to check into a place, but you can't find the place you're sitting in the Foursquare system, you can create it yourself. It allows you to either enter the address manually, or pick up your coordinates from your smartphone's GPS, give it a name and then catagorise it (is in, it's a gym, or a restaurant, or an office building or what have you). Once you've added the place to Foursquare, other users can check into it too.

The advantage is that you're not limited by the existing contents of the database. The drawback is that it relies on humans to create the content... and humans make mistakes. You'll soon see that many places are mis-spelled, named incorrectly or in the wrong location. Only the person who originally created the place can change the listing, and if they don't know how to do that, then you sit with bad data in the system.

Latitude works differently, however. It draws its list of locations from the Google Places database. While Places is an enormous database, it's not complete, so you'll often find (especially in South Africa) that the place you're looking for isn't available.

While the data that's in the system tends to be well managed and curated for accuracy and that sort of thing, adding new places to the catalogue is kinda difficult. (In South Africa it seems impossible to add a place unless you're the owner of it)

Availability

Since Foursquare launched two years ago, they've made a constant effort to make their service available on as many different smartphone devices as possible. As it stands, I've yet to find a smartphone that isn't supported by Foursquare in some way or another. There's even a Chrome extension that lets you check in from your desktop. Foursquare also allows other application developers to connect to their service, so you can check in from other apps like TweetDeck.

Latitude check-ins, being a brand-new service, is still only available in one place: Google Maps for Android. I have little doubt that it'll be supported in future versions of the Google Maps for Mobile applications for other smartphones, and maybe even for the Latitude desktop view, but as of right now they're not yet available.

Syndication

A popular feature of Foursquare has been the ability to re-post your check-ins into your other social-networking sites. By default, it allows you to immediately post into Twitter and Facebook. If you've set up your syndication properly, you can send your posts from there into other services like LinkedIn or Google Buzz.

Latitude also allows you to send out your check-in alerts, but so far only allows you to send them to Google Buzz. This has its advantages, as you can configure Buzz to have your Latitude check-ins only appear in certain people's feeds, but the down side is that not everybody uses Buzz yet. If you want your check-ins to appear in Facebook or Twitter, you have to use some kind of third-party syndication app to make it work - which is a bit of a pain.

Unique Features

Latitude and Foursquare each have some features that have no analogue in the other. Let's look at a few of the most notable ones:

Foursquare:

• The gaming component: In addition to being a social networking tool, Foursquare also has a built-in game. Each time you check in you earn points, and you compete against everyone else in your city in a weekly contest. You also earn badges for your activity, and if you check into a given location more than anyone else, you become the "Mayor".
  
  With the exception of a few establishments who offer discounts and specials to their mayor, the gaming side of Foursquare is basically just for fun.
• Tips and To-Dos: When you check into a place, you have the option of leaving a tip. Something like "Try the bacon and salami pizza!" for example. When someone else sees your tip linked to a place, they can add it to their "ToDo" list, and a reminder will pop up when they check in reminding them to try the bacon and salami pizza
• Check-in History: Foursquare keeps a complete history of all your check-ins, and even allow you to export that history in a couple of different formats. My favourite is the way you can import it into your Google Calendar as an overlay - I've found it useful in reconstructing my movements for things like timesheets. (Latitude does keep a history of your movements and gives you some fun visualisations, but as far as I can tell your check-ins aren't included in that yet, and you can't export it to anything)

Latitude:

• Ratings: Latitude check-ins live in the same place in the Google Maps for Mobile application as Google Hotpot - a service for sharing ratings and reviews with the world at large, and your friends in particular.
• Automated Check-ins: If you frequently visit a particular place (your favourite coffee-shop, or your office building, for example) you can set Latitude to check you in automatically when you're in range on that place. This saves you the annoyance of having to thumb through the app checking in manually, and also saves you in case you forget to do it yourself.
  (I haven't tested this bit thoroughly yet, and I'm curious about how sensitive it is. For example, would it check you in if you're just driving past a place? I'll keep playing with it and let you know)

Wrap Up

All in all I'd say that Foursquare is probably still in the lead between the two - it's a more mature service with a more established user-base. However, if Google manage to solve the few problems with Latitude (and I predict they will), it will likely win out over Foursquare as the leading location-based social networking tool of 2011.

I've personally pretty much stopped using Foursquare now. I haven't removed the app from my phone yet though... I may change my mind again in the future.

Where Are You?

Scooby Doo: Where Are You?

If your business includes mobile workers - sales-people, consultants, drivers or that sort of thing - odds are somebody, somewhere in your company probably has to ask that question several times a day: "Where are you?"

Here's a scenario: you and one of your mobile workers are headed to a meeting at a client's premises first thing in the morning. You get there on time, but your colleague hasn't arrived yet. The meeting is starting, but there's still no sign of him. What do you do? 

What most people would do is pick up the phone and ask "Where are you?" But think about that for a sec. Your colleague is likely well aware that he's late for the meeting. He's probably frantically dealing with traffic, trying to avoid getting traffic fines, and grasping to the only remaining thread of his last frayed nerve. Do you really want to add to his stress by making him answer his phone in traffic, distracting him, and possibly even causing an accident?

No, of course you don't. But you also need to know what's happening so you can deal with the client in his absence. 

Here's another scenario: You've been CC'd on an urgent email to one of your staff regarding a crisis at one of your clients' offices. You've seen her response to the mail indicating that she's on her way. This is an important client, and you'd like to know when she arrives so you can breathe a little easier. 

What most people would do is insist that she call you as soon as she gets there. But then you don't really want to break her stride... after all, she has important work to do there. Do you really need to disrupt her while she's busy placating a distraught client? But you need the info!

Fortunately there are some tools that can help us in these sorts of situations, and they don't require tapping into access control systems or installing GPS trackers in your employees' cars. They are what we call "Location-based Social Networking Tools".

You may recognise the term "social networking" as being the sort of thing that includes Facebook and Twitter. Location-based social networking tools fall into that category too, but as the name suggests, they're all about three things: location, location and location.

In broad terms, there are two different kinds of these tools: live location transmission and check-in based services. Let's take a look at an example of each.

Live Location Transmission Services

As the name suggests, this is a service that transmits the location of the person over the Internet, either in real-time or pretty close to it. The most popular of these services is Google Latitude.

Google Latitude

Latitude works through Google Maps for Mobile which runs on the user's smartphone. It uses a combination of GPS and network triangulation to figure out approximately where the phone is, and therefore where the person is. It then sends periodic updates back to the Latitude server over the Internet, which then forwards that information to the user's contact list.

If you and everyone on your team were using Latitude, you would be able, at a glance, to see where each of them are (or were as recently as a few minutes ago, depending on when the server last updated their position), laid out on a Google Map either on your own smartphone, or on the Latitude website.

This would be perfect for that first scenario: you're sitting in the client's meeting room waiting for your colleague. Wondering where he is, you whip out your smartphone and open Google Maps. You can now see that 11 minutes ago he was on or near the highway, roughly half-way between his home and the client's office. You can safely assume he probably won't be there for a while still, so you can suggest to the client that you start the meeting without him.

A new added feature of Latitude is real-time updates. If both you and he are using Android smartphones, you can set Latitude to give you minute-by-minute updates of his location for a short duration. This feature will probably be available on other smartphones in the near future too.

Check-in Based Services

These require a little more effort from the user than the other kind: when the user arrives at a place, she has to "check in", or inform the service that she's actually arrived. That information is then relayed via the service to her contacts. The biggest name in check-in based services is Foursquare.

Foursquare

Like Latitude, Foursquare is designed to run on smartphones. Although any mobile device with a web browser can use it. To check in, the user opens up the Foursquare app on their smartphone and waits for it to load a list of nearby venues (like Latitude, Foursquare knows where the phone is, more-or-less). The user then selects the relevant venue (the client's office, for example) and clicks the "check-in" button. Everyone on her contact list can now see that she's checked in there.

If you're one of her Foursquare friends, you can set your own Foursquare app to alert you when she checks in. Alternatively you can watch her Foursquare profile page on the Foursquare website, or you can plug your own Foursquare account into a Twitter client like TweetDeck or Hootsuite.

If you already use Facebook or Twitter, you can connect up your accounts and have your Foursquare check-ins transmitted to those other services too.

Things to Consider

As with most things, there are a few caveats here.

Privacy: some people aren't comfortable with the idea of their phone telling the Internet where they are. They find it creepy, and words like "Big Brother" come to mind. Before implementing a location-based tool as a policy, it's probably a good idea to discuss it with your team first. Also, look into the privacy policy of the tool in question so you can answer your team's questions. It might even be a good idea to try it yourself for a while with your friends and family so you can get a feel for it, and encourage your team to do the same.

As with most social networking tools, while they may have business applications, they are designed for personal use. Try to respect your team's privacy, and keep an open mind about what you see on their profiles. 

Precision and accuracy: Given that both of these services (and the vast majority of others like them, including Facebook Places and The Grid) are free of charge, you won't be able to get a 100% guarantee. Latitude is sometimes imprecise, showing a location that isn't actually where the user is, or having a large margin for error (indicated by a blue circle on your map). Foursquare, being a relatively small company, sometimes gets inundated and their service has to be taken offline for a couple of hours here or there.

If you're going to be using these tools, keep in mind that they shouldn't be used as anything more than a convenience. They're not (yet) reliable enough to use as evidence for things like KPIs.

Cost: Although these services are free to use, they both require transmission of data over the Internet, which can have a cost. If you aren't already, it would probably be a good idea to offer some kind of subsidy towards your team's cellphone bill to compensate for it.

I've used both of these services for personal and business reasons for quite some time, and I find them very useful. Another feature of both tools is that they keep a history you can refer back to later - particularly handy when filling in timesheets and that sort of thing. Even if you're not likely to use them for your team or mobile workers, I'd recommend checking them out for yourself, just for the fun of it!