FourSquare has been active in the USA for a while, soon it will be available in lots of cities, but for now the list includes London and Amsterdam in Europe.
So what is Foursquare?
Foursquare is a new Social Media application that allows you to combine mobile comuting and integrated mobile GPS positioning to create a location based awareness of what you are doing and who you are with, or could be with. By partnering with businesss that ‘play along’ foursquare in their own words:
aims to encourage people to explore their neighborhoods and then reward people for doing so. We do this by combining our friend-finder and social city guide elements with game mechanics – our users earn points, win mayorships and unlock badges for trying new places and revisiting old favorites.
Like Chocolate?
Here is a venue in London offering free truffles just for checking in, but as they say in all the best jokes – you have to be there! So, a new form of footfall marketing for retail, a gimmick, or a neat idea?
I’ve downloaded the iPhone app (there’s one for most other types of mobile operating systems too) and I’ll start checking in (telling the system where I am) and shouting about it (effectively a tweet with information about the location, that others can use to inform them about it) when I am next in a supported city – probably London.
Why bother?
It’ll bring real time real people reviews to real places faster than any guide and enables offers and specials to be available to those in the know. I think it’ll be one of the bigger Social Media ‘things’ of 2010. Do you agree?
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