March 2010

Foursquare Logo

Location-based social networking is experiencing exponential growth at the moment! This is primarily because most phones now have GPS functionality which means that it is easy for application developers to allow you to determine your exact physical location and in turn provide location-based status updates to your social network (i.e. Facebook Friends, Twitter Followers etc.).

One of the pioneers of this exciting new trend is Foursquare. This application is built around the concept of “checking in” to various locations in your town or city. The idea is that when you visit a venue and ‘checkin’ via the Foursquare app on your phone, your location is broadcast to your friends.

“So, what practical use is this?” I hear you ask. Well, let’s pretend that you and your friends happen to frequent a pub in town on a ‘frequent’ basic. The app allows you to tag that as a check-in point and your friends will know when you’re there. Once they see you are there, they may decide to join you for a pint or avoid the pub entirely. This largely depends on your personality of course!

Foursquare uses  a ‘badge’ system which rewards users for checking in at certain places. For example, if you visit a cinema 10 times you’ll be rewarded with the “Zoetrope” badge! This reward-based system may initially seem childish but it does add a weirdly addictively fun aspect to the tool.

Foursquare integrates tightly with other social networking services such as Twitter and Facebook and the user can easily update these tools with their check-in information to further increase the possibility of friends receiving ‘location’ updates. Connectivity with these other social media tools also allows the user to search their contacts and followers for potential Foursquare buddies.

The more security-minded among you will no doubt ask “Well if my friends know where I am, doesn’t that also mean my enemies (e.g. Burglars) know where I am?” (Here is an interesting article on that very subject).

Moving swiftly on, with the good people at Google Buzz, Twitter and Facebook  all adding geo-tagging into their site,  the location-based networking space is likely to become increasingly more competitive in the future. However, Foursquare has a good chance of survival against these titans (at least until it’s bought by one of them!) due in no small part to its points-based competitive aspect.

You can sign-up for the Foursquare service here and for the iPhone users among you, you can also download the Foursquare iPhone App from iTunes.

Are you an experienced Foursquare user? Have you just started using the tool? What do you think of it? I’ve just started using the service and thus I haven’t formed an educated opinion yet. Like with Twitter, it always takes me a while to ‘get’ these things. So please, feel free to make a comment below and let me know your experience.

Related Articles:
This Year Twitter Fundraisers, Next Year FourSquare Fundraisers ….
iGroups: Apple’s New iPhone Social App in Development
Rolling Out New Site Focused on Location-Based Social Networks
Geotagging Made Simple

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