One of the biggest issues with the growing number of location-based services (Foursquare, Gowalla, Yelp, Blippy, etc.) is how difficult it can be to be a “watcher” as opposed to a “participant”. Many people, including myself, have no interest in broadcasting their locations publicly, but would be interested in seeing what other people are doing and what they have to say about the places they visit.
The solution to the watch vs. participate dilemma is FourWhere, a free service created by Sysomos (a client) that makes it easy to see the places visited and commented on by people using Foursquare, Yelp and Gowalla. Using data from the three services and the Google Maps API, FourWhere provides a user-friendly way to access the location-based world without having to register for Foursquare, Yelp, Gowalla or FourWhere itself.
FourWhere is easy to use. All you do is search for a city or address. When you click on any of the red dots on the map, comments appear about a particular location from Foursquare, Gowalla or Yelp users.
FourWhere launched in March featuring information from Foursquare. The response was so enthusiastic that work soon started adding Yelp and Gowalla, and updated version of FourWhere launched earlier this week.
For more coverage of FourWhere, check out CNet in which John Lowensohn said he:
“really like the idea of having one place that aggregates not only the tips from these sites, but, more importantly, the check-ins. When done right, and given a sense of time, Fourwhere could prove itself as a very powerful tool for showing what’s hot and what’s not based on a much larger group of users than any of the three services could offer on their own.”
