Matthew Panzarino reports for TechCrunch that Foursquare no longer allows private check-ins on iOS 7.

Foursquare explains the change:

“As Foursquare continues to grow, we have decided to remove the ability to privately check in,” the entry states. “If you don’t wish to share your location, we’d encourage you to still use Foursquare to get out and explore awesome places nearby!”

Although this only applies to iOS 7, it is only a matter of time before this is implemented on web and other mobile platforms.

This decision speaks to Foursquare’s current direction on several levels. First of all, it coincides with the overall shift of the service away from a ‘check-in game’ to a recommendation engine. Removing the private option means that you can no longer use Foursquare as a ‘personal diary’ of visits, either. It is firmly a public network of curated locations in the vein of Yelp now.

Not a good idea to use a social app as a diary. If you want to keep a diary, go for a journal app instead. I use Day One, which supports recording of your location. Take a photo and save it to your journal along with the location data. A journal app would never choose to go public with your data.

Business Insider reports that Google is testing drone delivery.

Google hopes to one day use drones and self-driving cars to deliver purchases made through its new experimental services, sources told Weintraub.

Google is not the only one texting drone delivery. Ever since Amazon’s demo of Amazon Prime Air, UPS has revealed that it is also evaluating the use of drones to delivery parcels. Meanwhile, China is already using drones for delivery.

Joe Weisenthal writes on Business Insider about his use of Instagram to conduct real-time search.

Instagram isn’t perfect, but for the most part you don’t get re-posts (though re-gramming is a thing on a small scale) and you can fairly quickly establish whether a person’s photo makes sense in the context of their previous images. Whereas on Twitter lots of people are news curators, on Instagram people mostly all do the same thing: post what they see right in front of their eyes at that time.

Instagram search isn’t always perfect for news. For one thing, you have to search via one single hashtag, which is annoying. And you can’t search by location (though there are third party search engines that do this). And sometimes you get a lot of people Instagramming a shot of their TV covering news.

But the potential with Instagram is huge in terms of seeing exactly what people are seeing on the ground as events unfold. And it wouldn’t take much for Instagram (owned by Facebook) to improve the search and make it even more useful.

News on Instagram is crowd-sourcing of news. Many more pairs of eyes than news agencies can deploy, covering the news at numerous angles.

John Gruber writes on Daring Fireball about the Lightning adapter.

If the USB developers keeps to the proposed timeline for the implementation of the reversible USB plug, Apple’s Lightning cable would have already been in the market for four years

The Lightning adapter epitomizes what makes Apple Apple. To the company’s fans, it provides elegance and convenience — it’s just so much nicer than micro-USB. To the company’s detractors, it exists to sell $29 proprietary adapters and to further enable Apple’s fetish for device thinness. Neither side is wrong.

Apple doesn’t give a shit what everyone else is doing. To some, that’s what makes Apple great. To others, it’s what’s wrong with Apple. One side thinks, Why in the world should we have to wait until 2016 to have a smaller, reversible plug? The other side thinks, Why in the world would you want a proprietary, non-standard, expensive plug?

The future is now. Guess which camp I belong to.

Forbes reports that Microsoft might lose its revenue from licensing patents to Android phone makers.

Microsoft makes money out of many to most of the Android handsets out there. It’s a substantial chunk of revenue too. On the grapevine we’ve been told that HTC pays $5 a handset, Samsung perhaps as much as$10. We don’t know the total number as Microsoft doesn’t break it out in their accounts but books it in the same division as the Windows Phone licence revenues. And we’re all pretty sure that the Android royalties are larger in that division than the Windows Phone revenues.

Previously, I wrote about how Microsoft is making $2 billion from Android patents. This ruling holds a lot of significance because the judgement will be applied across the European Union, and the ruling is very likely to be the same in the US. It will be a big blow for Microsoft if it lost licensing revenue from the US and EU.

The Telegraph reports that Samsung tried to cover up an incident of the Samsung Galaxy S4 catching fire.

The owner of the phone contacted Samsung regarding the fire. Instead of looking into the matter, they asked the owner to prove that the phone caught fire. The owner recorded a video showing the damage to the phone and power cable, and then he uploaded it to YouTube.

Samsung responded with a letter asking him to take down the video. The owner was also told that if he wanted a replacement unit, he had to agree that he was responsible for the damage to the phone and that it was not due to a faulty product.

On top of that, he had to agree that he would not talk to anyone about the incident. The phone owner posted another video revealing the details of Samsung’s letter instead of complying with their demands.

This is a poorly handled customer service incident that could have been avoided if Samsung had given customer service greater priority.

The phone owner was previously an iPhone user and had experience with exchanging a faulty unit with Apple, which he described as a straight forward process.

Apparently this is not an isolated case where a Samsung Galaxy S4 caught fire. Earlier this year, a Galaxy S4 was reported to have exploded and burnt down a Hong Kong apartment.

It is extremely irresponsible for Samsung to attempt to silence a customer who was doing the public a service by creating awareness over a faulty device. Samsung should be addressing the issue and educating customers about how to use the device safely.