Thursday, February 7, 2013

Foursquare’s Voice Media Group Data Integration Goes Live

Foursquare’s Voice Media Group Data Integration Goes Live

Last month, Foursquare announced a partnership with Voice Media Group, publishers of regional magazines like Miami New Times, L.A. Weekly, and Village Voice. The partnership brings Voice Media Groups’s products like “Voice Places” and “Best of” to Foursquare’s location services.
Today, that partnership goes live as VMG content should now be integrated into Foursquare.
“A couple weeks ago, we announced our partnering with Voice Media Group to bring you a ton of great tips, lists, and tens of thousands of events related to arts, culture, and food in cities across the U.S. Today, you can see those events when you open up the app. To find great goings-on near you, just open up Explore and tap through to your favorite places. You’ll see things like gallery openings and author appearances, along with the movies, concerts, and sporting events we already show you,” says Foursquare in a blog post.
The new data from “Voices Places” and “Best Of” will be seen in over 50 different venue categories spread across 11 different markets. Those markets include New York, Los Angeles, Denver, Phoenix, Houston, Dallas, St. Louis, Miami, Minneapolis, Palm Beach, and Orange County.
So, when you’re browsing Foursquare and come across a venue in these major cities, you may just see some additional info like reviews, upcoming events, and other cool tips.

About Josh Wolford
Josh Wolford is a Writer for WebProNews. He likes beer, Sriracha and movies that make him feel weird afterward. Mostly beer. Follow him on Twitter: @joshgwolf Google+: Joshua Wolford StumbleUpon: joshgwolf

Twitter Shares Some Search Ranking Details


As previously reported, Twitter has launched some new search-related changes for its iOS and Android apps.
Here’s what Twitter said about search in the announcement: “Search results now surface the most relevant mix of Tweets, photos, and accounts, all in one stream (similar to the stream in Discover). We’ve also added a new search button to Twitter for iPhone, letting you search from anywhere within the app. (This button was already available in the Android and iPad apps.) Look for the magnifying glass icon next to the button you use to compose a Tweet.”
In a separate blog post on the company’s engineering blog, Twitter talks a bit about how it ranks search results.
Youngin Shin of Twitter’s search quality team (Twitter has a search quality team) explains, “When a user searches, different types of content are searched separately, returning a sequence of candidate results for each content type with a type-specific score for each. For certain content types that are displayed as a single group or gallery unit, such as users or images, we assign the maximum score of results as the representative score of this content type. The result sequences for some content types may be trimmed or discarded entirely at this point.”
“Once results of different content types are prepared, each type-specific score is converted into a universally compatible score, called a ‘uniscore’,” adds Shin. “Uniscores of different modules are used as a means to blend content types as in a merge-sort, except for the penalization of content type transition. This is to avoid over-diversification of content types in the blended result.”
Twitter Search
As Shin explains, all pieces of individual content are assigned type-specific scores called “raw” scores by their corresponding services. Raw scores are then converted into uniscores using type-specific log-linear score conversion functions. According to Shin, the chance of a converted score taking its value in [0, 1] is at least 95%.
Read the full post here. It’s an interesting look into the back end of Twitter Search.
About Chris Crum
Chris Crum has been a part of the WebProNews team and the iEntry Network of B2B Publications since 2003. Follow Chris on Twitter, on StumbleUpon, on Pinterest and/or on Google: +Chris Crum.