Street Fight Daily: Yelp Featured, Facebook Pulls Location-Aware App
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.
Apple To Feature Yelp Check-Ins Within IPhone Maps App (Bloomberg)
Apple’s coming iPhone map application will include Yelp’s “check-in” feature to let users broadcast their whereabouts to friends, according to materials Apple distributed to software developers. Apple Maps, which will replace Google as the default location service in software set to debut later this year, will allow users to communicate through Yelp without exiting the map and opening a new app, the materials show.
You Won’t Find Friends Nearby Anymore: Facebook Pulls Its Location-Aware Mobile App (TechCrunch)
Just as quietly and quickly as Facebook had put “Find Friends Nearby” online on Sunday, the mobile service to instantly add new Facebook friends in your vicinity is no longer there. The app let users find other Facebook users near them, and then quickly add them to their network: the service looked very rudimentary, but the concept offers potential ideas for how Facebook could develop such a service going forward.
NJ Hyperlocal Net to Rival Patch, Literally (NetNewsCheck)
“It’s almost like the anti-Patch concept,” Mike Shapiro, CEO and Publisher of The Alternative Press, said of Patch’s staffing model, which involves hiring a specific editor for each town to provide much of its coverage, augmenting with freelancers and unpaid bloggers. “Instead, you find somebody who wants to start their own newspaper. They’ve lived in that town a long time and they own it, so they’re not going anywhere.”
Groupon Challenged by Startups in Doling Loyalty Cards (Bloomberg Businesssweek)
About 900 million transactions will be conducted with cards connected to merchant loyalty programs in 2015, generating $1.7 billion in revenue for the providers, Aite Group LLC estimates. That’s up from $300 million in 2011.
Here’s Why Facebook Is Suddenly Pushing Local Brand Pages (SAI)
Pages for specific locations have seen a major pickup in activity on the social network in recent months. That’s apparently the result of a deliberate shift in the algorithms Facebook uses to determine what to show users, according to Rob Reed, CEO of Momentfeed, a Santa Monica, Calif.-based provider of location-based marketing services.
Local News Crisis: Why Newspapers Remain So Important to the Public (The Guardian)
The best local newspapers are embracing this challenge, and proving that in a world where there are a million views and interpretations of the news at the touch of a button residents, more than ever, need their local media to make sense of the digital cacophony around them.
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