NASA and Foursquare team up for the first extraterrestrial check-in | Hacker News Reader

NASA and Foursquare team up for the first extraterrestrial check-in

techcrunch.com

28 pointsnoelsequeira11 comments

"...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.

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!

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).

Thank you Noel for the kind words. We had a great team and collaboration, really thankful for the opportunity.

Feel free to reach out any time: lesliebradshaw@JESS3.com

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.

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

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

Foursquare Labs seems to have an excessive number of employees.

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

http://buzzroom.nasa.gov

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.

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

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