check.in checks out of closed beta

May 18th, 2010

If you’ve got an itch, scratch it. We are firm believers in making products that we want to use, and that our users ask for. Earlier in the year, while the media was pouring gas on the “location wars” story, a number of our more active users were expressing frustration about using multiple services. Here is a perfect example:

So we did what seemed obvious – we built an application that solved the problem and let us check into several services at once. check.in is an HTML5 application that you can use on a range of mobile devices, notably iPhone and Android phones. It allows you to check in to Brightkite, Foursquare, Gowalla, Whrrl and TriOut in one simple process. It also returns information back from each service – have you collected points? Ousted the mayor? check.in will tell you.

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Check it out

To use check.in, just point your browser to http://check.in

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Check.in has been in closed beta for a while, but today we are taking off the wraps and making it available to everyone. During the beta period we’ve made a number of performance improvements and rolled out a bunch of features:

The ability to customize privacy settings for each service (share with friends or with everyone?)
Sharing settings customizable service by service (do you want your check ins posted to twitter, Facebook, etc?)
Returning awards and virtual goods service by service – achievements, awards, points, majorships, badges, etc

A lot of our beta period was spend optimizing the place matching behind check.in. Each service uses a proprietary place database, so a key to success is matching places across each service that might have different spellings, address formats, or other quirks but actually be the same place.

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Stats so far.

Its fascinating to dig through some of the numbers – check.in provides a valuable oversight of user behaviour across a range of services. Here are some things we’ve found to date. We’ll be sure to share more soon:

Over 6,000 users used check.in during the closed beta (invite only) period, generating over 135,000 checkins
The average user checked in over 20 times
More than 2.3 million places were queried during the beta period
Most users check in to two or three services
Brightkite, Foursquare and Gowalla dominated the services used (though Whrrl was added later and TriOut is limited to a small geographic footprint)
Friday is the busiest day for checkins: it sees over 30% more activity than Sunday which is the quietest day.

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Next steps?

So we scratched our itch – what next? We’d love to hear ways you’d like us to evolve the service. A lot of users have asked for Yelp integration, but we’ve failed (so far) to persuade them to open their API. There has also been talk of native apps and integration into Brightkite’s apps. We definitely hope to release an open API soon to allow you to build your own ideas and scratch your own itches on top of check.in. As always, let us know what you think.

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Posted by lanky at 9:23 PM in Uncategorized

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