Foursquare tracks location of its own panel of 10 million “always on” mobile devices. It has just extended its attribution reporting to include out-of-home media by tracking who comes close enough to an out-of-home display to have seen it. Since Foursquare can already track who visited a store, this new data lets it compare visits among exposed vs non-exposed groups.
It’s a slow news day but we can always rely on Facebook. Their latest news is a report that they “unintentionally” uploaded 1.5 million new members’ email contacts without permission, an accident that continued for nearly three years. Sounds like the woman in the musical Chicago whose husband died after accidentally running into her kitchen knife…ten times.
If you’ve been wondering what happened to Jamie, our Department of the Obvious intern, it turns out that assigning him to the Facebook Is Evil beat was a mistake because it’s a full time job. Jamie did stop giggling long enough to share this pair of items reporting that people would rather receive text messages than sales phone calls and are more likely to open a text message than an email. As Jamie points out, it’s also obvious this will change if text is overrun with irrelevant advertising.
Google lashed out at the Department of Justice’s threat to break up the company, calling the proposals “radical.” Among other things, Google says the proposals would threaten users’ privacy, stifle innovation and break Android and Chrome. Given the appeals process, it will likely be years before we know whether Google will stay in one piece.