Foursquare

I’ve been using the mobile location service Foursquare for sometime now.  From a user perspective Foursquare appears, on the surface, to be nothing more than a game. Check-in more times than your friends and claim the title of “Mayor” of a location. So what? In much the same way that new Twitter users are stumped by the question “What are you doing?”, new Foursquare users find the act of checking in at a location somewhat pointless. As a friend of mine says, other than enabling stalkers what exactly are you getting out of it?

It’s true that the current actual value of Foursquare to the average user is minimal, if you stay mostly in your home town, you might find you are checking in at the same location as friends, possibly you might get a recommendation for an alternative to the location you are at, but that’s it. If you travel then you are likely to get more from it in terms of recommendations for places to visit, things to do and the potential of meeting other users – the core of Social Media.

However, just as Twitter as a service has spawned numerous add-on services and applications (see OneForty for the definitive list), so Foursquare is doing the same thing by opening up their API.  The heat map of my checkins below was created by WhereDoYouGo.

Ok so it’s a pretty picture but, again, so what? Imagine being able to layer your friends check-ins over the top and see it all graphically. You would, at a glance, literally be able to see the “hotspots” of your location. Much more useful, now add to that augmented reality applications like Layar – put the two together and you have a real-time city guide written by you and people you know.

Imagine being out for an evening, hold your cell phone camera up to a bar front and instantly see layered over the image reviews by people you know, see who you know who is in the bar without going in and what the special offers are for users of the application. Sounds like science fiction but all of the tech to achieve this already exists and is rapidly converging on a phone near you very soon.

Ready to sign up? Go on try it, and send me a friend request at the same time.