WTH is that foursquare thing?

So, lately, I keep getting asked, “What is that foursquare thing that has been making up the majority of your tweets/Facebook posts?” Very basically, foursquare is a “location-based social gaming” service. As you’re out in the real world, you use foursquare to check into the places and establishments that you go to with each check in earning you points and badges and in some cases, special discounts.

Say you go out to McDonald’s. You check in via your mobile phone. If you check into that McDonald’s more often than anyone else has, you become “mayor” of that McDonald’s. Now, I haven’t heard of any McDonald’s doing so, but let’s say Mccy D’s knows about foursquare and runs a special: Free Quarter Pounder for the foursquare Mayor. If you are the Mayor, you’re pretty happy, dining on free nom nom’s. If you’re not the Mayor, you probably want to be, so you’re likely to keep going to that McDonald’s, trying to become Mayor.

As you’re checking into places, you also earn badges for special events. The first badge you earn is the Newbie Badge, which you get automatically with your first check-in. There are a few well known badges, and many more secret/unknown badges. There’s the Gym Rat badge, which you get if you go to a gym 10 times in a month; a Don’t Stop Believing badge for checking into three places tagged with “karaoke;” the School Night badge for checking into a venue after 3am; and, one of my favorites, the Douchebag badge, for checking into a place tagged “douchebag.” For the more unknown badges, you just have to keep checking in and be surprised when you earn them.

So, what is the draw to the service? It’s really that every time you walk out the door now, you have a game to play, and something to earn for each stop. You may hate a particular bar (because the bartender is a douchebag) but if you go there any way, you earn a badge (Douchebag badge!) for having stopped there. And, it’s not like another location-based service I used before (brightkite) where I never really felt like there was a social aspect to checking in. foursquare becomes social once you start competing with your friends, family, and usually complete strangers to become Mayor of certain establishments.  After just two months of using foursquare, I already have more connections through the service than I did with a year, plus, of using brightkite, and, I’ve gotten more people to start using it over bk. foursquare just brings that extra something to the table.

I’ve actually been lusting over foursquare for many months now. At first, foursquare was city specific. I’m in the Philadelphia metro area, but I never actually go to Philly, so for a while, the service really had nothing to offer me. Then they went global, so I signed up for an account, but only to be disappointed to find there was no Blackberry mobile app, which is pretty essential to me. Sure, there was (and still is) the m.foursquare.com site, however, I think if you’re site needs a “m.___.com” site, you really ought to just create an actual app for the big smartphone contenders. Just my thoughts there. Anyway, foursquare finally pushed out an official beta version of the Blackberry app and now I can stop lusting from the outside. Their website is clean, as are their mobile apps, and the service is seriously easy to use.

There you have it… that foursquare thing.