You may have heard about by now. Heck, you may be using it. Or you may be surprised (or annoyed) in your Twitter stream or your Facebook news feed that people are telling you where they are all the freaking time.
I was asked about it at work, and as the social media guy, I decided to sign up and give it a shot.
I'll give you the quick overview here. Foursquare is what they call a location-based service. You "check in" at a location (many locations are already on it, or you can add new ones). Foursquare knows what's near you because your phone has GPS on it.
There's also a game aspect to it – you rack up points and earn "badges" along the way, and if you're the person who checks in most often at one place or another, you become "mayor" of that location.
The first thing that I noticed was an immediate backlash from some of my Twitter friends (not just followers – these were people I have come to know, communicate with, trust and respect very much on Twitter and in real life), including one who assumed I must have been lobotomized (not really, but the comment was really funny).
After a day or two, I decided I'd give it a couple of weeks, but that I'd stop sending updates to Twitter. I've stopped using it now entirely.
Here's one thing I would get out of Foursquare if I had continued to use it would be if I checked in at, say, the , Foursquare would alert me if one of my other Foursquare friends was also there. Chances are I would have found that out via Twitter or someone would have mentioned they were there on Twitter and I'd have found them anyway.
Foursquare might be better in a bigger city with more locations in general and more people using it. One thing that immediately comes to mind is businesses could offer, say, half off happy hour specials to the first 15 people to check in after 5 p.m. Another use might be if I were in a place I'd never been, I could open Foursquare and see what was around – although if I were looking for food (which is probably why I'd use it), I could use and get the reviews along with it.
I'll be at next week, maybe I'll pop open Foursquare a couple of times to see what I get, but I'm not expecting to be blown away.
April 13th, 2010 at 16:34
Welcome back to the land of sanity, Josh. I probably would have disowned you if you hadn’t come around.
I agree the Foursquare could have its uses — especially in the business model you point out above — but right now it’s too annoying and silly to have any place in my life. And frankly, I’m predicting it’s going to have a fairly short shelf life. Or Twitter will buy it.
April 13th, 2010 at 16:36
Anything that auto posts to twitter is going to get a backlash. I think only problem with foursquare is that it’s set up to do that by default. However using the shout out feature to put a personal message in with 4sq location info is generally accepted and useful.
I use it (in the same area you do) just to locate other friends when I am out doing something as simple as grocery shopping. It’s nice to say hi, or introduce yourself to twitter friends you have but have never met irl that you might never know were there.
Sure I could see that info from a tweet, but when you follow a lot of people it’s easy to miss something, especially when you are out with friends or family and don’t want to spend the whole dinner watching twitter.
It’s just more convenient, even here in upstate ny where its not used as much nor adopted at all by businesses…
April 13th, 2010 at 19:29
Dan –
I’ll probably do more of this; try stuff out for a couple of weeks so that I can speak/write about it from an informed standpoint. Most of it, I envision abandoning. If you’ve seen the Add This things, there are 273 social networks to share on from them. That’s just nuts.
Wolfman –
Thanks for the comment. I think my friend P said it well once in a talk — you can follow me on Twitter, connect with me on LinkedIn, be my friend on Facebook, locate me on Foursquare, or do any number of things. Or you can be like poor Josh over here and have to hear the same thing four times.
I’m a stingy(ish) Twitter follower (my following to follower ratio is closing in on 1:5), I’ve dropped about 150 not-actually-my-friends on Facebook, and if my friends want to find me, a text message works really well; for Twitterers I want to meet, a DM’s great. Everybody else, my email is easily find-able.
April 14th, 2010 at 22:08
You may not remember that I questioned a lot of people about the FourSquare thing when I first noticed it. I couldn’t quite figure out the appeal and thought maybe it was an age thing.