Social Networking takes to the streets with Foursquare

With a faster growth rate than Twitter, Foursquare is fast becoming the most up-and-coming social network in the world. A little over 1 month ago, Foursquare grew by nearly 100,000 users in 10 days, taking the total number of users to somewhere north of 600,000. Another recent update revealed that there have been over 22million check-ins by its users. While that’s not the same as Twitter’s 50 million tweets per day, it’s a pretty impressive number for a company that is barely a year old.

So what is Foursquare ? Basically it’s like a giant role playing game. The whole system is based around called “checking-in”. It allows users to “check in” at various venues using either text messaging or a smart phone application. People who you’re friends with will then get sent a message to let them know your whereabouts and activities. From the other side of things, if you’re out and about on your own somewhere in or at home bored and wondering what to do, you can see where everyone else is at at and get yourself down to the party. Foursquare also allows you to create a “to do” list or add “tips” to venues that other users can read.

Foursquare also keeps track of where you go, how often you visit certain places and awards points, badges and titles based on your movements. These “badges” range from the Bender Badge, for visiting bars four nights in a row, or the Starbucks barista badge for checking in at three different Starbucks locations. If you check-in to a venue more than anyone else, you become the “Mayor” of said venue until someone else kicks you off the throne. Some venues are even offering special deals and in some cases freebies to their mayors!

While all this is going on Foursquare is gathering some very considerable review and guide data for all the best spots in a whole bunch of major cities all over the world. What foursquare then decides to do with that is up to the business but there’s certainly plenty of commercial scope. So much so it’s been reported Yahoo! Inc. is sniffing around to the tune of a $100 million speculated buyout. It will be interesting to see how this turns out, with Yahoo being poised to buy a hot internet property yet again. Before this, Yahoo was all set to buy Facebook , the largest social network in the world, for a billion US dollars. However, the deal ended up falling through as Yahoo refused to put up that kind of money for the social network. Whatever happens it seems the future for Foursqaure will be interesting one to watch.

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