(2009-07-30) Foursquare Becoming Popular

Will FourSquare become the leading Location Based Service? (It's co-founded by Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai from Dodge Ball.) You earn points for every check-in - unless of course you check-in at the same locale all the time. You're rewarded with more points for being adventuresome (exploring different parts of the city), for hitting up multiple spots in one night, and eventually for the tips other people try and the To Do-s you complete (Real World Game)... should you check-in at the same location a few times, you'll become the mayor of that spot, and though it sounds silly in theory, in practice it's incredibly sticky... Another differentiating factor about Foursquare are tips and to-dos. As a user, you can add tips to locales to tell your friends and the general public about the key things they need to know about a venue. Say for example the local pizza place has a discount every Tuesday night, you'd add that info into Foursquare, and then anyone nearby can see the tip and save it as a to-do to their personal check list... Yes, almost every social savvy app and startup now how has some type of Twitter integration, but Foursquare has done it better.

They'll be building in more features to make it possible for venues to get value out of the application... Take The Marsh cafe in San Francisco - now this is genius - they've put up signs indicating that the Foursquare Mayor drinks for free.