We were excited to follow Foursquare Founder Dennis Crowley (@dens) and Seismic Founder Loic Le Mur (@loic) running the New York City Marathon on Sunday! Earlier, Dennis had provided a Cool Mayor Maker Primer as heads up to the community. Using Mayor Maker (available free on iPhone), both Dennis and Luic were automatically checking into the New York City Marathon Mile Markers! The Blog AboutFoursquare and many users have provided us good feedback on Mayor Maker V1.

We appreciate all the feedback, and are happy to address the points:

1. What’s innovative in Mayor Maker?

Mayor Maker is the first app to do both automatic checkins and checkouts. The combination of check-ins and checkouts gives users and venues a good idea of how long they spend at their favorite places.

When you check-in to a venue, you see where you are “Currently At”, on the homepage. When you first launch the app, your mayorships are automatically added to your Favorites List, allowing you to automatically begin “strengthening” those mayorships when you visit them.

Because of Battery Life Optimizations powered by the Location Labs Geofencing Library, Mayor Maker can run safely on your device with Background GPS ON. Our controls allow you to turn Background GPS OFF anytime you may want as well. Platforms like Location Labs are ushering in a new era of automated, intelligent apps. We are excited to see what the next year will bring in our Platform and the industry.

2. Enabling Both Automatic and Prompted Checkins

A key tenet of the web and social media is empowering your users with tools and guiding them to use these tools wisely. Foursquare empowers their users by making its Venues database searchable and showing nearby venues for users to check into. Mayor Maker takes this one step further by creating a list of their favorite venues. For each venue, a user can define how they want to check-in or check-out (‘Automatic’ or ‘Prompt Me’).

We know users don’t want to check-in when driving by venues. The life of the party they may be, users probably don’t want to check-in to their favorite bars along their Tuesday morning commute to work. Therefore, in Mayor Maker V2, we plan to enable users to check-in after spending a set amount of time at a venue. Of course in V1, turning Background GPS OFF prevents unwanted drive-by checkins as well.

We also hear loud and clear that users would love to see Mayor Maker on the Android. Fortunately, the Location Labs Geofencing Library works on Android too, so we can make this happen!

3. NYC Marathon Feedback

We woke up early this Sunday in California to follow this weekend’s NYC Marathon on Twitter and Foursquare. If you look at the Twitter feed for @luic, you’ll see a very consistent stream of checkins from Mile 4 all through 26, the end. For @dens, you'll see consistent checkins during the first dozen Mile Markers and the last third of the race. The fact the checkins didn’t work 100% of the time at 100% of the Mile Markers teaches us all a lesson in the limitations of smartphone GPS. Particularly in dense urban areas like Manhattan and NYC, it is difficult to always get an accurate instantaneous GPS fix on your smartphone. The longer time you have to get an accurate GPS reading and larger area you have to work with, the better automatic checkins work. In the NYC Marathon use-case, our users set the checkin distance setting to the minimum: 150 meters. This illustrated the tradeoff that while smaller venue distances demand greater location accuracy from the device, they are not as reliable as larger venue distances are in guaranteeing a checkin.

But, the fact that both Dennis and Luic could use a free service to precisely tell everyone in the world their real-time Mile Markers during most of the race is pretty darn cool! No doubt, smartphone GPS technology has room to advance. Still, the performance from the NYC Marathon is not a bad benchmark for our whole industry to note, and improve upon in the future.

4. We Appreciate Your Feedback

We love hearing feedback on Mayor Maker. So keep going out, using Mayor Maker, and sending us your feedback to mayormaker@location-labs.com! We listen and keep innovating. Together, let’s take Location to the next level!

-Kedar Shah, Mayor Maker Product Manager, Location Labs Platform Team.

kedar@location-labs.com