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.

Just when I was starting to worry…

After the first couple of weeks on Twitter, tweeting about very mundane tasks, getting a grip on what the site was really about, I finally fell in love with Twitter, essentially, for one purpose: the flow of information. When news happens, it’s on Twitter long before any editors can approve an article for web publishing, and before the major news outlets (eg. AP, Reuters) even send out notices. I remember specifically a plane had crashed, and news of it spread on Twitter. Michael van Poppel of BNO News called the coroner’s office in the town the plane crashed, to the shock of the clerk that answered the phone. Poppel tweeted out that the clerk asked, “How did you hear so FAST?” And that’s where I think the real power behind Twitter lay. Something happens, and the Twitterverse knows instantly.

When Trending Topics were moved from the less-than-obvious search page, to the home page, I was quickly disappointed to find that memes were taking the place of information. #3turnoffwords and #3turnonwords hit the trends and are still being tweeted about. I’m not sure why I was so surprised by this. I expected there would be fun and games, but I suppose I didn’t imagine the games would quickly out weigh the information. I started thinking Twitter was losing a small bit of that information flow. It’s always nice to have a reminder that things just aren’t what they appear. I think that, most likely, Robert Scoble deserves credit for this one.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declares victory in the Iranian Presidential election, the government shuts down mobile phones, and access to YouTube and Twitter within Iran, opponent Mousavi accuses Ahmadinejad of rigging the election, and Tehran is set ablaze by protesters. Twitter is flowing with real-time updates, photos and videos of riots, and police action. Meanwhile, main stream media, specifically, CNN, is running Larry King discussing David Letterman vs Sarah Palin. Enter Scoble. “CNN: you should be ashamed. Horrid news judgment today. Absolutely horrid.” It didn’t take long for disgust towards CNN to migrate from FriendFeed to Twitter.

As I type this, #iranelection, #cnnfail, Tehran, and Mousavi are all in the top five Trending Topics. Although CNN has been the one graced with a failtag, it’s not the only main stream media that’s ignoring the events taking place in Iran. In a retweet, Scoble points out that all of the networks failed. Luckily, Twitter’s on this story. Otherwise, who else would?