Social Networking, Foursquare | featured news

Foursquare is having troubles convincing investors that its valuation shouldn't shrink, a sign of a cooling toward social media startups in the wake of Facebook's messy initial public offering.

Some companies are leaning on social media like Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare for advice on what products to bring to market.

Foursquare is rolling out its first revenue product as the company moves from focusing on user growth to generating cash. The new Promoted Updates enables businesses to send promoted content to users. These updates will appear at the top in a prominent position in the “Explore” tab in Foursquare. That’s the section of the app that is for users to find businesses nearby. The Promoted Updates, like Google search ads, there is “intent” there while users are looking for a restaurant, bar or other business nearby, says Steven Rosenblatt, Foursquare’s chief revenue officer. Businesses pay on a “cost per action” performance basis for these ads. In some ways these updates are also like Twitter’s promoted Tweets.

Even as it struggles to become mainstream--just 4% of online adults use location-based social networking services--Foursquare has just released several statistics that point to the company's staggering growth over the past year, as well as usage patterns and the locales in which it has yet to catch on.2010 was "just insane," Foursquare wrote in a blog post.

JustSpotted plans to sift through people’s tweets to identify those that claim celebrity spottings, and then to place those celebrities’ whereabouts on a map in real time. It would be similar to the now-defunct GawkerStalker, but it would be faster. (It’s not a novel idea. Last year, start-up OMGICU proposed to do the same thing, supported by text messaging and tweets, except its service requires active user participation rather than data-mining the whole Twitter community like JustSpotted will do.)

No need to cry when foursquare is down...you've got options.

Mobile check-in app Foursquare's Monday outage happened after staff tried to fix one problem and somehow triggered another.

At an event on Wednesday, Facebook unveiled Places, their new location element that allows users to check-in to venues. Obviously, this mimics the core feature of smaller startups like Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt, and dozens of others. The move of the big boys into this space was inevitable, but it is somewhat surprising that it has taken this long.

Facebook's 500 million-plus users will soon be able to track friends' whereabouts across the United States, as the world's largest Internet social network adds technology to increasingly tie its virtual world to everyday life.

Booyah's MyTown game shows that location isn't everything.