ReadWriteWeb

If you are looking to try to keep track of all the places from whence you post your mobile photos, a new site that launches today called VenueSeen.com might be the place you want to visit. The idea is that they geolocate and collect photos from a variety of sharing sites, including FoodSpotting, Foursquare, Instagram and Facebook. They don't collect any photos from Pinterest at the moment. Think of them as what Nimble.com and Gremln.com have done for coordination of your overall social networks, VenueSeen is attempting to do for your photos.

On the face of it, the statistics are impressive: 20 million registered users and 2 billion check-ins. But as location check-in app Foursquare celebrates 4sqDay (16 April = 4 squared, geddit?), how many people still regularly use the service? After all, manually checking in to places is going out of fashion isn't it? Aren't next generation location apps like Highlight and Glancee the New New Thing in location? What's more, Instagram grew faster than Foursquare and it is, in a sense, a location app too (you typically take photos when out and about). So is Foursquare really as popular as the statistics the company released today suggest?

See more of Rob's cartoons at Noise to Signal

The good folks at Backupify.com have put together this interesting infographic this week that attempts to calculate what an individual Tweet, Facebook user and other social media elements are actually worth in dollars and cents. And perhaps to no one's surprise, the most expensive item is an individual review on Yelp. This was done by dividing total company revenue by the amount of pieces of content. Given that many of us are paid per blog post, there is some method to this metric.

Also not surprisingly, given its anticipated valuation, each Facebook user is worth more than $100, the most of the nine services examined.

Foursquare just made what it called "a little announcement", but it's really not little at all. It's switching away from the Google Maps API to OpenStreetMap. For the map images, it hired MapBox, a start-up that makes pretty maps out of OpenStreetMap data. Starting with foursquare.com, foursquare's maps now use MapBox Streets.

Foursquare cites Google's decision to start charging for access to the Google Maps API in October as the reason it started looking for alternatives. But it sounds like it just made more sense to the team philosophically, too. "We love the idea of open data," the announcement says, "and were happy to try it out."

Foursquare has released a new Web version of its Explore tab at foursquare.com/explore. The mobile version of Explore, which launched last March, is for finding stuff to see and do nearby. Today's release of Explore for the Web helps with planning interesting things to do from the desktop or iPad.

In its announcement of Explore for the Web, Foursquare says its mission is "adding an 'interesting' layer to the whole world, tailored just for you." Foursquare Explore draws on the check-ins, tips, lists and interests of your friends to put a layer of "interesting" - which is apparently a noun at Foursquare - on a map. This is a challenge to Google Places and Maps, which is racing to add "interesting", but Foursquare's 1.5 billion check-ins give it a strong position.

For a service that only exists on one platform, Instagram has been wildly successfully. The photo-sharing app for iOS is now on track to hit 15 million users, which as a post SocialFresh points out, is how many people are using Foursquare today.

Among mobile-first social services, Foursquare is arguably the biggest right now, but the geolocation check-in app is on track to be surpassed soon, despite being a year older than Instagram and being available on every major mobile platform and having a highly functional Web-based UI.

It's the end of a big week here at ReadWriteWeb. For one, we just got acquired by SAY Media. As I sit here thinking about what happened in 2011 and what's to come in 2012, I keep in mind the simple fact that soon ReadWriteWeb will be operating under a very clean look and feel in this brave new tech world. What does that have to do with 2012 predictions? Not much. Just thought I'd remind you about the state of tech news right here and now.

Which brings me to my 2012 predictions for Facebook, e-commerce, location and social networks, the four areas I've been watching closely since I joined the rad team at ReadWriteWeb this past October. Come along to the next page!

Social media is supposed to be all about engagement and authenticity, but sometimes it can feel so distributed and overwhelming that conversations get lost. A new web app called Engag.io has tackled this classic problem and offers a pretty good solution that I think you'll want to check out. It's in private alpha right now but we've got an invite code at the bottom of this post. That someone is making an app like this gives me hope that there are still great ideas that can be built on top of the most basic building blocks of the social web.

Engag.io, which gets its name from being the place for your online engagement input and output, is like an inbox for all your conversations on Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, Foursquare and blog comments. It's an inbox with analytics. It's built by the team behind content curation company Eqentia. Eqentia is ambitious but a little too complicated; Engag.io is very simple and the value of it will be immediately obvious to many people.

A new report from Forrester says that geosocial apps a.k.a. location-based social networks can "help increase in-store visits, your brand's visibility and consumer word of mouth by connecting people with their locations and their friends." Yet consumer adoption of location-based apps is very slow. In 2010, only 4% of U.S. online adults used geolocation apps monthly or more; that number grew to 6% in 2011. In 2010, 84% of US online adults did not know what geosocial app like Foursquare or Gowalla even were; that percentage has changed to 70% in 2011.