Posts Tagged ‘foursquare’

Over the past few months, I’ve been using FourSquare more regularly. FourSquare is a social networking service/game that you can use to track your whereabouts. It is typically accessed via an app on a mobile smartphone (Droid, BlackBerry or iPhone). The idea is that you earn points each time you arrive at a location and “check-in.” You earn more points for new places that you discover/visit vs. returning to your usual spots. But the points are virtual — they’re only a valuable way to tell who gets out who doesn’t. From my point of view, FourSquare is the perfect global economic stimulus solution — it encourages users to spend time exploring new places and money. What government or marketer wouldn’t love this thing?!

Well over the weekend, FourSquare sent me an alert that one my friends was at the Nike Factory Store, a nearby discount outlet. As soon as I saw it, I wanted to send him a note and ask him if there are any good deals on Nike running gear (I think that their Dri-FIT products are the ultimate but that’s a topic for another blog). While I could have called or sent him an email, I wanted to send him a text and ask but that feature wasn’t available. I swear that I looked EVERYWHERE and came up empty handed.

While FourSquare is a great tool that allows you to keep up with your friends, it is missing a texting feature that allows you to quickly “chat” with them. Text messaging is the preferred mode to communicate, especially when you’re mobile (source). If it was there, I would have another reason to get out and stimulate the economy.

This blows me away. I’ve been researching, playing with, somewhat obsessing over location-based gaming, check-in apps for the last few months. You can often find me standing outside of a place I’m about to enter, furiously opening apps, checking-in, and then firing up the next app so that I can check-in on many different systems. Only way to learn about them is to dive in.

And yes, I’m locked into several “mayor” contests with folks, often resulting to dirty politics when necessary.

So I was shocked to see this article on TechCrunch about MyTown (passed to me by @kathlenehestir)and how its passed the biggies (Foursquare and Gowalla) in terms of users in little over a month!

Their secret? Apple featured their app for two weeks. Yep. Just goes to show you that in the grand scheme of things, not many people are using these services yet. Not to say I’m not a big believer in them, I sure as heck am!

Alright, gottta run, time to sign up for MyTown and add yet another check-in system to my routine…