[mayanklahiri]

A while ago I wrote a short piece about how location-based services will be 'hackable' for a long time (the specific piece was about gaming Foursquare with nine lines of Perl). Given how easy it is to game any location checkin service, what incentive will advertisers have when their deals are monopolized by a small group of Perl+wget armed, obsessive compulsive script kiddies? I don't know enough about marketing numbers--presuming that vendors give out deals to bring customers back to their store, do they care if the deals are systematically monopolized by freeloaders or bargain hunters?

[catshirt]

During the live broadcast, a Facebook employee asked Mark how Facebook planned to handle people from fake check-ins and fake people tags, and his answer was that you have to show the retailer your phone in order to redeem the reward.

He also laughed at the question while answering it. Classy.

[thwarted]

This seems like the kind of hubris that will come back to bite him in the ass.

Maybe someone can take a screenshot of their iPhone showing the deal, then send it to their friends.

[drpancake]

In case anyone's looking for a startup idea: a cheap way of validating check-ins seems like a good bet to me.

(See: Shopkick)