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Tag: badges

  • Foursquare Might’ve Just Made Swarm Fun

    Foursquare Might’ve Just Made Swarm Fun

    Last May, popular location app Foursquare announced that they would be splitting the core functions of the app in two, creating an entirely new app called Swarm that mostly dealt with check-ins, friends, and the real “social” aspects of Foursquare.

    But to many longtime Foursquare users who loved the gamification elements of the app, there was a problem with Swarm. Mainly, Foursquare stripped much of the gamification aspects out of it.

    For one, Foursquare killed badges – those little tokens people worked so hard to earn by checking in at different places with different people across the network. Sure, Swarm debuted “stickers”, but they just weren’t the same.

    Even worse for fans of the classic Foursquare was the way Swarm handled mayorships. Gone were global mayorships, as Swarm opted to give users a “crown” sticker when they held the “mayorship” only among their friends.

    Now, Foursquare appears to have caved and is trying to reintroduce some of the elements that made it fun. No, Foursquare is still just the local recommendation app it’s always wanted to be – check-ins are still absent. But it is adding some fun elements to Swarm.

    “When we first launched Swarm, we focused on helping you quickly find your friends. We wanted to make it easy to see who was nearby and introduced messages so you could effortlessly coordinate meeting up. But we heard time and time again that while Swarm made those serendipitous hangouts possible, it could be more fun.”

    Fun, something Swarm has lacked.

    So in response, Foursquare is bringing back true mayorships.

    “You asked for mayorships, so we’ll be bringing them back soon. All your check-ins now will count towards them, so go out there and start conquering your neighborhood,” says the company.

    Badges are also coming back – kind of.

    When you first open the updated Swarm app, you’ll be asked to start “transmuting” your old Foursquare badges into new Swarm stickers.

    In fact, Swarm is rolling out a “gotta catch em all” 100 sticker book.

    Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley told TechCrunch that the game mechanics has become stale on Foursquare, but they could be given new life on Swarm.

    “The overall theme of our work on Swarm is about how we can make it more fun. When we split off Swarm we focused on the core utility of finding friends nearby, and then we built messaging into it, but there was a minimal amount of game mechanics. We wanted to revisit Foursquare game mechanics, which had become stale, and reinvent them with this new release,” he said.

    “The old foursquare was full of fun and playfulness, and when we split the apps, Swarm lost a lot of that. Now we’re putting that fun back into Swarm in a big way.”

    Soon, Swarm will also add something called “Coins”, which will let users compete with their friends on a leaderboard. According to TechCrunch, Coins will “take into account the value of your check-ins, stickers, etc.”

    You can download the new Swarm app now. Hopefully this kicks the dust off what was already becoming a rather tedious app.

  • Foursquare Now Tells You When You’re About to Level Up an Expertise Badge

    Last month, Foursquare made a pretty significant update to both the check-in screen and location pages on their iOS and Android apps. The update brought large, swipable photos front and center, added relevant info like hours, rating, and more to location pages.

    When users check-in, they’re now being presented with a new screen as well. Users may be given some interesting stats about that particular check-in, like “63 check-ins with the same friend” or “X check-ins at BLANK in the last 60 days.”

    One new “stat” that AboutFoursquare noticed popping up recently involves badges. Foursquare, once notoriously secretive about their badges and badge requirements, is now letting users know exactly when they are about to reach a new level on an expertise badge.

    Expertise badges first launched in 2011 as a way to get users involved in checking-in at multiple locations in the same category. Let’s take the “Bento” badge, which is for sushi restaurant check-ins. Upon checking-in to 5 different sushi places, you’ll earn Bento level 1. Five more (different) places, you’ll earn Bento level 2. This is the way that every expertise badge works (and there are dozens of them).

    Now, when you check-in, Foursquare may let you know how many more check-ins you need to reach the next level.

    “You’re X new BLANKS away from unlocking BLANK badge – Level 3!” it might read.

    A minor tweak to the Foursquare app, but one that’s telling of the direction of the company. Foursquare once guarded the secrets of their badges, as they wanted them to be an organic part of the experience. That’s still probably true, but since Foursquare is now focusing on becoming a true local search option, it may seem silly to be so stingy on the badge info. Plus, progress reports like this could promote more check-ins.

  • Instagram Launches Badges to Promote New Web Profiles

    After seeing signs that it was on the way for a few months, Instagram finally launched web profiles for its growing user base. Accessible by going to Instagram.com/username, the web profiles feature your profile photo, bio, and all of your recent photos. Instagram also gives users the ability to like and comments on photos, as well as follow new users via the web. Instagram used to put of of its eggs in a big mobile basket, but they have been slowly but surely moving toward a bigger web presence.

    Now, in order to promote that snazzy new web profiles, the company is unveiling Instagram Badges.

    “Today, we are very excited to launch Instagram badges, a tool that will help you link to and promote your Instagram web profile. Add them to your personal blog, brand website, or campaign promotions to direct new followers to your Instagram web profile and encourage others to discover and engage with your Instagram content,” says Instagram in a blog post.

    All you have to do is log in and visit the Instagram Badges page. From there, you can select which badge you want to display on your blog. There are currently 5 different options – 4 different sized camera logos and one that reads “view on Instagram.”

    All that’s left to do is copy your code and add it to you site. Now, people can easily find you on Instagram and interact with your content from the web.

  • Made in America Festival: Check-in on Foursquare, Snag Some Pretty Sweet Perks

    Besides the points, badges, and generally satisfying feeling you get for checking-in with Foursquare, merchants have been known to offer perks for customers that use the app. Walk around your town, you’ll probably find a store that gives 10% off for a first check-in, or a coffee house that gives free drinks to whoever holds the mayorship.

    But on a stage as big as the Jay-Z/Budweiser-sponsored inaugural Made in America Fest, Foursquare has to up their game.

    And that’s exactly what they did with the new #MadeinAmerica offer. Check-in on Foursquare, and receive a new custom badge for your troubles. That check-in also gains you three neat perks while at the festival:

    • Express entry at the main entrance, so you can blow past the suckers standing in line
    • Access to a special area, the Budweiser Beach Deck (I hear there will be DJs)
    • Finally, 20% of the merchandise at every tent at the festival

    The “express entry” perk is only good for the first 1,000 people to show their badge – but hey, it’s a good thing to shoot for.

    The Made in America Fest begins this Saturday in Philadelphia. Along with headliner Jay-Z, attendees will be able to hear sets from Skrillex, Pearl Jam, Passion Pit, Drake, Mike Snow, and many more. If you’re unable to attend the festival, we’ve heard that it may be streaming on both YouTube and Pandora.

  • Stanley Cup Playoffs Get Their Own Foursquare Badge

    Things are heating up on the ice, as the NHL’s best are in playoff mode. Yes, hockey fans, the Stanley Cup playoffs have arrived, and Foursquare has a brand new badge to celebrate.

    It’s simple – all you have to do is follow the NHL on Foursquare and check-in at certain times, with certain shoutouts to get the badge:

    Follow NHL on foursquare to get insider tips about your favorite teams, players, and arenas. And, even though you may never get to touch the The Cup, you can unlock the Stanley Cup badge by checking in to any playoff game, or by checking in anywhere during one of the games and mentioning your favorite playoff team (make sure to follow NHL on foursquare first!). Don’t forget to share photos when you check in!

    The NHL is also promoting more Foursquare specials, including buy one get one free hat deals at the NHL store in NYC.

    @NHL
    NHL    Have you checked into the #StanleyCup Fountain in @TimesSquareNYC for your exclusive @foursquare #NHLStore special? http://t.co/mCvShu5R 29 minutes ago via SocialEngage ·  Reply ·  Retweet ·  Favorite · powered by @socialditto

    Tonight, last year’s champion Boston Bruins take on the Washington Capitals in Game one of the Eastern Conference finals. Make sure you put down your beer and check-in for this exclusive badge.

  • Mozilla Open Badges Enters Public Beta

    Mozilla has been playing around with the idea of Open Badges since 2010. If you’re not familiar with the concept, think of it like game achievements applied to what you see, learn and do on the Web. Mozilla has partnered with some major players over the past year and has been testing the concept with them. Now it’s time for Open Badges to take on its next big challenge – a public beta.

    Matt Thompson, communications director for Mozilla, announced on the Mozilla blog that the Open Badges Infrastructure has entered into public beta. Badge issuers and developers now have access to the software that will allow them to build badges. The point is that people will build badges to recognize achievements made “online or out of school” according to the Open Badges Web site.

    The Open Badges program has already been around in some form for the past year with major players like NASA, Disney-Pixar and 4H developing for the program. To make the deal even sweeter, you can also link up Open Badges with Mozilla Persona that adds a “reputation layer” to your online ID.

    The new features coming with the Open Badges public beta today are as follows:

    New tools for badge issuers. A new and improved badge issuer API makes it easier for any organization to award their own digital badges for learning, skills or achievements.

    New ways for users to manage their badges. Improvements to Mozilla’s “Badge Backpack” make it easier for users to store, manage, import and group badges earned from multiple sites through a single location.

    New tools for badge displayers. A new displayer API will make it easier to display digital badges across the web, from personal web sites to social networking platforms.

    New documentation and privacy features. Including an updated privacy policy, terms of use and FAQs for developers.

    Erin Knight, Mozilla’s Senior Director of Learning, provided some more clarification on the launch of the beta. She says that Mozilla is going to start speeding up the new releases for Open Badges to every two weeks. The hope is that they can get from beta to version 1.0 by the end of the year.

    If you want to start working with Open Badges right now, check out the developer documentation and source code. You can also learn more about Open Badges and maybe even earn your first badge.

    I’ll be the first to say that Open Badges is a really unique concept that gamifies how we display our real world accomplishments. By turning our accomplishments and skills into a digital achievement, more people might be pushed to achieve something greater. We already have people spending ungodly amounts of time to earn achievements in video games so the same should be true for a person spending a lot of time to learn astrophysics.

  • Foursquare Announces Winners Of Global City Badges Contest

    Earlier this month Foursquare announced that their #visitUS initiative, which let users compete to get their city a special Foursquare badge, had gone global. Foursquare users from around the world were asked to create detailed lists that highlighted the best spots in their particular cities. Foursquare said that detailed lists with 40-50 entries that included photos and insider tips would be the most likely to win the contest.

    Today, they have announced which lists have won their cities their own badge on Foursquare. Here’s the full slate of winners:

    Asia
    Doha, Qatar
    Mumbai, India
    Seoul, South Korea

    Africa
    Casablanca, Morocco
    Kumasi City, Ghana
    Tunis, Tunisia

    Oceania
    Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
    Manado, Indonesia
    Perth, Australia

    The Americas – North America
    Ciudad de Mexico, Mexico
    Kingston, Jamaica
    Trois-Rivieres, Canada

    The Americas – South America
    Caracas, Venezuela
    Montevideo, Uruguay
    Santiago, Chile

    Europe
    Bologna, Italy
    Ghent, Belgium
    Guimaraes, Portugal
    Riga, Latvia
    Vienna, Austria

    Apparently, users from the Americas and Europe were the busiest, so those areas were awarded a couple extra winning cities. An example of a list that won its city a badge is “The City of Dreams,” user Vivek V’s tour of Mumbai, India.

    According to Foursquare, we’ll have to wait a couple of months to see what the new city badges look like. IN the next few weeks, new badges should be rolling out for Amsterdam, Jakarta, Rio, Bangkok, And Buenos Aires.

  • Foursquare City Badges Contest Goes Global

    Would you like your city to have its own Foursquare badge – given out as a reward for checking in at specific locations? Foursquare has just announced that they are opening up their Foursquare Cities contest to the world.

    Back in January, Foursquare launched their #visitUS initiative which allowed users to compete to get their city its own badge. Users were asked to create a Foursquare list that highlighted some of the best spots in their city, complete with photos and insider tips. Foursquare said the best lists would inspire which cities were awarded special badges.

    And earlier this month, they announced the winners of that contest – Des Moines, Baltimore, Richmond, Oklahoma City, and Stamford. Now, the contest is spreading to the rest of the globe.

    The steps are the same. Foursquare wants you to make a list detailed 40-50 of your city’s best spots, complete with tips and photos. Once you make the list, you should share it via Twitter:

    1. Create a list at foursquare.com/lists. Make sure to include the name of your city and the #4sqCities hashtag in the name.
    2. Add your favorite places! Aim for about 40-50 (and no more than 70) of your town’s best places. Include a variety of spots, from restaurants and bars, to parks, monuments, and local businesses. Give your list some love by adding tips and photos!
    3. When you’re done, encourage your friends to follow the list (or even help you make it) by sharing it on foursquare, Twitter, and Facebook.
    4. Submit your list by sharing it on twitter with the hashtag #4sqCities by March 23. You can share your tweet with us here.

    The cities that get their own badges will be the ones whose members made the most detailed lists. According to Foursquare, 15 overall winning cities will be chosen, three from the following areas: Africa, the Americas (minus the U.S.), Asia, Europe, and Oceania.

  • Foursquare, VH1 Partner To Save The Music

    Foursquare has partnered up with VH1’s Save The Music Foundation to raise money through check-ins.

    All you have to do if you’re a Foursquare user is follow VH1 on Foursquare, and check-in to a music venue (or specific concert, since Foursquare just started to let people check in to specific events). Once you do that, VH1 will give $1 to the foundation:

    Love going to concerts? Now you can save the music while you’re at it. The VH1 Save the Music Foundation is a non-profit organization dedicated to restoring instrumental music education in America’s public schools. For the months of March and April, VH1 will donate $1 when you check in to any concert or music venue across the country.

    As you can see, the promotion runs for the next two months. During that time there will be plenty of chances for Foursquare users to check in to venues – both SXSW and Coachella are happening within that window.

    VH1 kicked off Save The Music back in 1997, and the foundation works with school districts by providing new musical instruments for dormant music programs. Through their negotiations, they garner commitments from school districts to fund salaries for music teachers and work music classes into the daily schedule.

    If saving the music isn’t enough of an incentive to check-in, Foursquare is also offering a new badge for doing so (seen above).

  • Foursquare To Reward Heavy Users With Leveled Expertise Badges

    Foursquare is about checking-in, so that your friends can see where you are. And lately, Foursquare has been making its service more and more about discovery, by introducing Foursquare lists and the all-new Radar function that uses your location to give activity suggestions.

    But for many people, Foursquare’s true fun is always going to be the gamification – points and badges. And on that note, Foursquare has announced an upgrade to its badges system.

    A subset of the Foursquare badges that you can earn with check-ins are called “expertise badges.” They include things like “Zoetrope” for checking into a desired amount of theaters and “7-10 Split,” for checking into a certain amount of bowling alleys. There are 24 current expertise badges, all of which reward users for “who they are and what they know.”

    Today, Foursquare announced that they will begin leveling up these expertise badges, rewarding users who continue to explore their interests on the service. From the official blog, here’s how it will work:

    The rules are the same for all your areas of expertise:

    You hit Level 1 for checking in five times to a place in a category, or three unique places.

    Level 2 is for five unique places.

    And from there, every level up is five more unique places, so you get rewarded for exploration!

    For instance, I’ve earned a level 2 Bookworm badge for checking into 5 unique bookstores. You can now view your leveled expertise badges in the “trophy case.” There you can see what level all of your friends have achieved for the same badge:

    Forsuqare hopes that these experience levels will improve tips later on down the road. If you’re looking for a pizza place in a strange town, you’d probably give more weight to a tip from a level 8 Pizzaiolo over a level 2, right?

    They are also unveiling three new expertise badges today: Herbivore, Hot Tamale and Bento. You can probably make a good guess as to the check-ins required to earn those new badges.