

NASA and Foursquare team up for the first extraterrestrial check-in - noelsequeira
http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/22/foursquare-space-astronaut/

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zeteo
"...unlocked the NASA Explorer Badge..."

And so our space program takes yet another small step towards being replaced
by wishful thinking. NASA is scrapping one real exploration program after
another, while using precious orbital payloads to study rose fragrances and
ant colonies in 0G. If the 470th person in orbit is a "NASA Explorer", then I
guess we should just make Neil Armstrong a Deep Space Admiral. Then we can all
pretend like we've colonized the galaxy while we play EVE Online.

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noelsequeira
Fascinating example of PR done right (by Foursquare, NASA and and JESS3).
Quite sure this is going to be picked up by pretty much every blog and
newspaper.

Yup, not everyone has quite the same leverage, but you have to hand it to
these guys for pulling this off!

~~~
ugh
I think Nasa does some of the best PR there is. Far from all of it is great
but sometimes they have awesome ideas and execute them in an excellent way.
The anthropomorphized Mars Phoenix on Twitter was just lovely and very
successful (<http://twitter.com/MARSPHOENIX>).

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charlief
JESS3 advising NASA, I am guessing there was a Foursquare partnership over
Facebook Places probably due to timing. If I can speculate for a moment,
Places probably didn't exist yet at the planning stages of the partnership as
this was probably in the works for a while.

If Places was rolled out just a bit earlier, and the right connections were in
place, they maybe could have been a bigger consideration by JESS3. I'd say
this is a big miss for Facebook.

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lesliebradshaw
Hi Charlie --

Thanks for your note, very reasoned and thoughtful. I was the strategic lead
from the JESS3 team and we did in fact talk with Places; hope to do something
in the future, but they aren't set up to handle larger initiatives... yet :)

Don't hesitate to shoot me an email with anything further:
lesliebradshaw@JESS3.com

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whakojacko
Check out the extra data they served in the source that went to space:
<http://yfrog.com/86ul8p>

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ojbyrne
Foursquare Labs seems to have an excessive number of employees.

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charlief
JESS3 also did NASA's Buzz Room (<http://jess3.com/nasa-buzzroom>)

<http://buzzroom.nasa.gov>

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Keyframe
My only exposure to foursquare was there was a point in time when some people
tweeted where they are with it, most people complained about those tweets and
then it all went away. Haven't heard about it since (I see no point in it).
Honestly, it sounds like something that will die sooner rather than later.

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shotgun
Awww, shucks. And here I was hoping ET checked in. _That_ would be the first
extraterrestrial check-in IMO.

