foursquare

If you didn't see Shaun White destroying the competition at the Men's Olympic Halfpipe Finals in Vancouver last night, check out the video and prepare for a face melt, and don't forget to watch our interview with the man himself! And there's even more good news: it's Thursday, which means Natali Del Conte is on today's show! We start off the show with a quick news recap from the Olympic games, then NDC tells us about last night's interview with Justin Timberlake.

The first story of the day is about PleaseRobMe.com, a new Web site that uses geolocation check-ins from Gowalla, Brightkite, or Foursquare to exploit folks broadcasting their unprotected abodes. The vulnerability assumes that you don't have a roommate, and, of course, it doesn't say where your houses actually is, but it certainly highlights the continued lack of privacy surrounding this latest batch of social networks.

The Barbie poll results are in. Over a half million votes were cast, and the public chose her next career: Computer Engineer! The new doll will hit shelves this fall and will feature a binary code patterned shirt, a pink laptop, a teched-out watch, and a Bluetooth headset. We all agree that Barbie isn't the best toy for young girls, but we can still appreciate the cultural relevance, even if everything she owns is blasted in bright pink. Besides, it could be worse: auto-tune Barbie with talk-box accessory, anyone?

Foursquare is fast approaching its first anniversary. The free social service, which lets people share their location with others from their mobile phones, launched at last year's South by Southwest festival. It has since gone on to become a Web 2.0 darling in a way that its predecessor Dodgeball (also from one of Foursquare's co-founders) never did, due mostly to the growth of users with GPS-enabled smartphones.

But short of its badge system, which awards heavy use with virtual trophies, the service has always been lacking a sense of reflection--a way for users to look back on … Read more

On today's show, Amazon gets called out on price-fixing, even though Macmillan wants to charge too much for e-books. AT&T redefines "unlimited," and Microsoft is redefining the bar code, Apple got the fake Flash out of its iPad ads, and big news! Jason had his baby, and Molly's coming back to Buzz Out Loud full time as of next week. Yeah, you read that right. Not a punk. See you Wednesday! -- Molly

Congrats Jason Howell! … Read more

Among the new features is the idea of "checking in" to a local businesses, which will let you alert your Yelp friends that you're there--complete with a push notification. Yelp will also reward repeat visitors by denoting them as "regulars," with the most often visiting party getting a special badge.

Sound familiar? You might have used Foursquare or Gowalla, … Read more

Attention, suburbanites: You, too, can be the mayor of your local Home Depot.

That's because New York-based mobile location-sharing service Foursquare has made a subtle but big improvement. It's no longer restricted to a list of a few dozen cities in North America and Europe, which means that people anywhere in the world can use their mobile phones to "check in" through the service. (Foursquare currently has applications for the iPhone, Palm Pre, and Google Android, as well as a BlackBerry app in development and a mobile Web site.) The new feature is considered to currently … Read more

Earlier this week I wrote a post about how I didn't like that I couldn't alter the Facebook Connect privacy settings for updates from Foursquare, an iPhone app that shares my location through a GPS-enabled city directory. It didn't make sense to me that Facebook Connect information was automatically visible to anyone who had access to posts on my "wall," whereas privacy settings on a third-party app embedded directly on my profile were much more fine-tuned, allowing me to restrict them to specific subsets of friends.

I've been e-mailing back and forth with Facebook, … Read more

Privacy on Facebook has been front and center this month as the company has rolled out the controversial revamp of its user privacy settings. One thing that's thankfully stayed intact has been the ability to restrict the third-party applications on your profile to specific "lists" of friends--so that you can, for example, block your Mafia Wars activity from everyone who's not on your "People Who Know About My Mafia Wars Addiction" list.

But for stuff on my profile that was published through Facebook Connect rather than an app "built" on the platform, … Read more

Could the geolocation wars be the next browser wars? Maybe. There's a fresh $8.4 million in venture funding for Gowalla, a game-like mobile app that lets you "check in" to locations around the world, see where your friends are, and swap virtual goods along the way.

The Series B funding round, announced Wednesday, is led by Greylock Partners with contributions from Shasta Ventures, Maples Investments, previous investors Alsop-Louie Partners and Founders Fund, and individual investors Ron Conway, Kevin Rose, Gary Vaynerchuk, Shervin Pishevar, Jason Calacanis, and Chris Sacca.

Interestingly, at least two of Gowalla's individual … Read more

We are already seeing people offering special deals to the Foursquare "mayor" of their businesses. Today, BART (one of the San Francisco Bay Area's public transit systems) is announcing a partnership with Foursquare to reward users who check in on BART. Foursquare is introducing a special badge for regular riders of BART and offering $25 promotional tickets for the first three months of November to random users who have checked in on BART.

Programs like this are going to be what brings Foursquare into the mainstream. Foursquare already has a very loyal user base, but it still … Read more