Foursquare

I like Facebook. And Foursquare, and Twitter, and Instagram. I use all of them on my iPhone. And I'm intrigued by Roamz, a new iPhone application that weaves updates and photos from all of them into one stream about what's going on in your immediate vicinity.

The app, which debuted at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco last week, was created by a startup based in Sydney, Australia. It detects your location and displays items from the aforementioned services that have been geotagged as having happened nearby. It also includes its own feature for sharing updates … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Interviewed at the Web 2.0 Summit, Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley talked about how the location check-in app is becoming more passive.

"One of the big hurdles we have is that you have to think about using it," he said of Foursquare. "If we can lower that barrier, we can juice the experience."

That's why the company recently launched the Radar feature, which, once you turn it on, collects info about where you are, the direction you're going, and so on. It'll tell you if people you like are nearby, and "… Read more

On this week's show, a moment of silence for Dennis Ritchie, the father of the C programming language and co-creator of Unix. Another moment of silence for RIM, and the three-day silence of BlackBerry's email servers. Come ON, RIM. Keep it together! Also, Galaxy Nexus announcement coming Oct. 27? And Facebook wants to own your data for serious--like "it's a trade secret now" serious.

Foursquare has launched a new feature, called Radar, that helps iOS 5 users find out what's going on around them.

To get the feature to work, users can start following lists. Based on the focus of a respective list--Foursquare gave "101 Best Dishes of 2011" as an example--the application will find locations or establishments nearby that might relate to it and alert users. The service also lets users know when and where a group of friends might be meeting up nearby.

"The app doesn't even have to be open, it just works," Foursquare wrote in a blog post … Read more

Foursquare held its first-ever global hackathon a few weeks back, with developers and hackers gathering in cities all over the world, including Paris, London, Ottawa, San Francisco, and New York. All of the hackers had one goal in common: create some out-of-the-box idea on top of the Foursquare API. Not only did they accomplish their goal, but some of them even won prizes for doing so. … Read more

Recently Foursquare rolled out a new feature that allowed users to create and share a list of recommended venues and tips. Users can then follow that list, or if the creator allows it, they can even contribute to the list themselves. The Lists feature on Foursquare is fun to use, easy to share, and are very simple create. Read on to find out how to make one.

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While we recently learned that the successor to the Sony PSP wouldn't reach American soil until 2012, Sony has just announced a few of the social applications the PlayStation Vita will have access to via a free download from the PlayStation Store.

In addition to playing titles like Uncharted: Golden Abyss and Wipeout 2048, the PS Vita will be able to interact with popular social services like Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, and Skype.

The Vita will release in two models: a $250 Wi-Fi only version and a $300 3G-capable iteration. We're not sure yet if the Vita will support Skype over a 3G connection, but we'd be surprised if the 3G Vita's GPS capabilities were not taken advantage of by the Foursquare app.… Read more

Mobile apps are still not secure when it comes to storing certain personal information, according to a new study from security firm ViaForensics.

Dissecting a variety of apps for Apple's iOS and Google's Android, ViaForensics found that 76 percent of them store user names in cleartext without encryption, while 10 percent store passwords in the same way, making such data more vulnerable. Running a series of tests from November 2010 through June 2011, the security firm checked out apps from several categories, including financial, social networking, productivity, and retail.

Each individual app received a pass, fail, or warn … Read more

For Android users, there are basically three apps to choose from when it comes to one-stop social networking: HootSuite, TweetDeck, and Seesmic. They're all great hubs for your social network updates, and they're all really good at shortening links, geotagging, and adding pictures to your posts. For the most part, the three of them do the basics very well, which makes it hard to decide which to use. So, we're taking a look at some of the nuances that set the three of them apart.

First up is HootSuite, which requires you to set up a HootSuite … Read more