beautiful bytes – Check-ins and check-outs
Facebook phasing out Places Check-Ins
Facebook has today announced plans to scale back its curiously unpopular feature Places Check-In. Rather than exist as a standalone feature, users will only be able to add their city-level location or tag a specific place in any post.
According to Facebook, the change was part of its new privacy and location sharing features, which include users having more control over who tags photos of them, who sees their updates and how they manage posting their location.
We had high hopes for Facebook Deals Check-Ins. With Deals Check-Ins, Facebook offered businesses the chance to set up a system that automatically donated to charity whenever their customers checked-in. Technically they would still be able to if they so choose, but it won’t be offered to them as part of a Deals campaign and it wouldn’t be automatic.
Perhaps this is Facebook’s way of conceding that it cannot compete with Foursquare, despite having over 70 x more users than the increasingly popular mobile location service. Foursquare is continuing to grow and is rapidly rolling out new features…
Foursquare allows you to check into events
From this week Foursquare will allow users to check into events at certain venues instead of just checking into a location. So rather than checking in at a cinema, people will be able to say at ‘The Beginners 6:20pm’.
As well as making Foursquare that little bit more interesting, the new functionality will be more useful for events fundraising. It makes check-ins more personal and relevant, sharing what you are doing rather than just where you are. According to the official Foursquare blog:
Hopefully this is an indication that users can start creating events. The Facebook events function has proven extemely useful for charity runners, bikers and bungee jumpers who want to share what they’re doing with their friends. Watch this space…
Jumo acquired by GOOD
It was confirmed this week that social innovation website GOOD has acquired Jumo, the social network that empowers people to do good. GOOD’s plan for expansion is to create ‘a powerful online content and social engagement platform’.
GOOD has an engaged community of three million monthly users who read and interact with their content. Jumo also has a group of activists, but also 15,000 socially driven organizations. The amount and terms haven’t yet been released but it could be quite exciting. Aggregating their users is a great move and we’re really interested to see where this might go. ‘A content and social engagement platform’ is quite vague but hopefully it will be somewhere that people can enjoy spending real time and can find voluntary work or a charity to donate to easily and appropriately.
Excitingly, they will also be making their codebase open sourcing to enable other social entrepreneurs to use their progress for their own endeavors.
And Finally …
Snooze is a new iPhone app that donates 25 cents to charity every time you indulge in the daily morning battle with your alarm clock. Powered by the LetGive network, the app records how many times you hit snooze and gives you the opportunity twice a month to donate the value of your Snoozes to one of their chosen nonprofits.
We’re huge fans of anything that makes donating as simple as possible (resisting the urge to write ‘so easy you could do it in your sleep’) and this appears to be quite a fun and strikingly unconscious way to give.
The only real shame is that the money is donated to the generic LetGive brand who will distribute it across the charities that it chooses. One snoozer reviewed ‘you can’t learn more about the charities in app‘ in the app store. It seems like a great way to generate a little bit of income but wouldn’t engage people with your charity or cause enough for them to go on and support further. It has made donating as simple as possible, but also a commodity in itself that removes supporters from the cause.
Lucy J
