Review: Adults Can Play FourSquare, Too

Every month, staff members of Independent Software attempt to bring you an unbiased review of various software products, applications, gadgets, etc. to familiarize you with their uses.  This month, we evaluate a newly booming social networking tool, Foursquare.

The Venture: Foursquare, a location-based social networking website that allows users to “check in” to places like restaurants, offices, and parks to announce their presence, and to see whether or not there are friends at places nearby.  With almost 1.3 million users, Foursquare is slowly becoming yet another popular social media site.  The company was founded in 2009 by Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai – funded by the likes of Union Square Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz.  Wikipedia reports that Foursquare is “being pursued by Internet giant Yahoo! Inc., which has offered as much as $125 million for the service.”

The Product:  Foursquare can be seen as a sort of mashup of Facebook, Twitter and Google Map Applications.  A location-based social networking site that allows a user to have friends (Facebook), shout at their friends (Twitter), and share your location (Google Maps), it’s positioned as a useful way to find places and people close to your location.  Users “check in” to a venue to announce their presence, and are able to see others close by, but can also see tips and offers added by businesses or friends.  Checking in to certain venues will allow you to unlock badges, which adds a certain game-play quality to using the application.

Uses:  Foursquare has uses for the average person, but also for businesses.  Beyond the average use, business can use Foursquare to provide special discounts and to generally increase their visibility to Foursquare users in their vicinity.  Foursquare has released a new tool venues can use to track visitors and to push out special events or prizes for dedicated customers (for example, how about a free complementary drink at your favorite bar sound?).  Venues can identify and systematically reach out to devoted customers, creating an additional engagement tool for businesses.

Five Tips:

1. Download the App, Friend Your Peeps – Unless you got a new laptop holster you’re dying to try out, you’re going to want to download the app to your mobile phone.  And since this is a social media app, you’ll need some friends to observe what you’re doing.  Although Foursquare’s mobile “friending” process can be a little tricky, you can always ask your friends to help.
2. Check In – Check in at your favorite locations, let your friends know where you are.
3. Shouts – Shouts are short messages that you can write to friends about the place you are currently in.  For example, if there are special happenings where you are at, you can write shouts to have your friends join you.
4. Build your “Top 12” List – The Top 12 list is used to tell your friends what your favorite 12 spots are, what to do, and what kind of tips you want to share with them.  You can also check out your friends’ tips on their favorite joints if you happen to be around the area.  This helps generate more customers for FourSquare users and maybe, just maybe those spots will become their favorites as well.
5. Become a Mayor – You become a mayor when during a certain time period, you have checked in the most times.  Mayors may get special treatments depending on what venue you are the mayor of (free promotional items, complimentary food, etc.).  Moreover, it creates a friendly, but fierce competition where many are vying to become the mayor for sheer bragging rights and unique, exclusive experience.

Indie’s Rating: 3.5/5

Foursquare is an innovative idea, but it’s currently tailored towards more narrow group of people – in particular, social media enthusiasts, gamers, and those who have a lot of friends using Foursquare, seem that they would get the most out of the tool.  Foursquare is generally more valuable if you know a lot of people (people you would like to run into, that is) who are also using Foursquare, or if the user travels often to new places and want to seek out the “gems” that many travelers or first-time visitors may not know about.  For people who have much more routine schedule (office workers, college students, etc.), FourSquare may not be as effective or fun.  In terms of overall trends, Yahoo’s interest in Foursquare is not surprising – while Foursquare is an interesting point solution, our belief is that for Foursquare to become truly mainstream, integration into another application would make it a more effective and useful tool.

Related Links:

- How to Make Money on Foursquare - Inc. Magazine, February 19, 2010