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Never forget to look outside of the USA as well for interesting developments
As Facebook and Google’s Orkut duke it out for traffic in India, another social network has quietly gained traction in the space. SMS GupShup, a Twitter-like service in India that is primarily accessed via SMS, has hit 35 million users (up from 26 million late last year) with 1 million users joining monthly.
There is a bunch more missing from Facebook Places, at the moment. I’m pretty certain that won’t last long.
Facebook Places appears to be off to a strong start, with integration into services like Gowalla, Yelp, and SCVNGR. But it also has some pretty glaring omissions, namely the fact there’s not really a good way to do much with Places data from the browser. Now PlacePop, a startup that launched at our CrunchUp in July, has fixed that with a new Facebook application that gives you an overview of how you friends are using Facebook Places. You can access the new application right here.Read more at feedproxy.google.com
PlacePop’s core product is an iPhone application that lets businesses create virtual rewards cards (see our previous post for more info). CEO Kent Lindstrom (who formerly ran Friendster) says that there are plans to integrate Places data into the PlacePop iPhone app (checking in on Facebook will count as ‘swiping’ your card at a venue).
Twitter has just announced a new beta service called Site Streams that sounds like it will blow our minds.
Basically, what this seems to promise is a way for websites and apps that let their users sign into sites with OAuth to quickly integrate a real-time flow of updates – without actually seeing it in action yet, it sounds like it could be a kind of competitor to Facebook widgets that have become pretty ubiquitous among many websites, including major publishers. It will be very interesting to see the first few implementations of Site Streams.