Foursquare has just added a little holiday season fun to its popular iPhone application. You can now upload photos and comment on other people’s profiles. This has made the website more social at a perfectly apt time of the year.
Users can post photos at the check -ins, tips, and venues. Apart from commenting on friends check -ins you can also receive comments and photos which will then become a part of your history page. These new activities happen on the check-in details page. Here the user will be asked to post a photo when they check-in just as they are asked to “shout” and later they may keep adding photos.
Privacy check has been kept by limiting the visibility of check-in photos to your immediate friend circle. Photos from your tips and venues pages will be seen by everyone, which only makes your pages more interesting. Although you can share your photos with your friends beyond Foursquare -on sites like Facebook and Twitter- , you can’t really share comments with them. They are only for friends logged in on Foursqare.
This new feature will definitely generate buzz among Foursquare users online and offline. Similar views are shared by Alex Rainert, head of product at Foursquare. He says, “The community of users that we have are already super comfortable with check-ins, so adding something like this to that mix should be pretty powerful”.
Popularity for the service is what Foursquare is aiming for and they definitely are thinking about making the whole experience more attractive by improving the personal archive -photos, comments, and check-ins. Rainert says, “There are interesting things you can do when people create media at places,”. He says, “We hope to build creative ways to let people browse and share that history in the future.”
According to Alex Rainert the photo feature was in the pipeline since a long time but had to be presented now as the holiday season is important from that perspective.
He also mentions some other products and features that are currently in the pipeline like export of photos to sites like Facebook and Flickr, comments tracking system and a better way to search and view old photos.
This brings Foursquare abreast of applications like Foodspotting, Picplz and Instagram which people already use for photo sharing. The facility will be available for Android users in the week and for BlackBerry users in January.