The Coming of Foursquare

The concept of Foursquare is simple enough - you use your mobile phone to check-in at places across your city. This simplicity follows in the shadow of Twitter, which in its infancy was a mobile platform that allowed you to update people on what you were doing. Twitter has since outgrown those humble beginnings with loads of applications and functionalities. Twitter now boasts 23.6 million users and after signing deals for content search with Google and Microsoft is now turning a profit.

Does Foursquare have the same potential as Twitter? That is the question we were left asking ourselves. To be honest a few people in the office have tried Foursquare, but the “thrill” of checking-in with our whereabouts lost its appeal very quickly. We may want to act like we own our local coffee shop, but we don’t want to check-in every time we visit it (twice daily) to become Mayor of it.

There are currently 170,000 users on Foursquare. It is hard to gauge how many of them are active and how many are like those of us in the office who tried it a few times and got bored. How does Foursquare stay on the Twitter path toward mainstream adoption? What every good social media app does - release your API. Releasing an API is how social media apps thrive. It basically means a company of 7, like Foursquare, can have the masses develop their product for free. Giving it more relevance, more functionality, and more sophistication.

Foursquare on their recent API release:

We’re super excited to announce that our API is now live.

It’s something that’s been in testing with a small group of developers for the last few months. Even during this phase, we’ve seen you guys make all sorts of interesting applications using our data:

-       an Android app
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-       a venue popularity tracker: SocialGreat

-       
a foursquare layer on Layar


-       a location-based game: MobZombies

-       an integration with Peek Mobile devices: PeekMaps

-       an RFID/Oyster card-based checkin system: FourTap

-       a way to find deals nearby based on your check-in history: Yipit

-       a Wordpress plugin

-       a Firefox plugin

-       a check-in diary: Last Night’s Checkins

Foursquare is following in the footsteps of another social media titan - Facebook. Harvard University (birthplace of Facebook) recently partnered with Foursquare to offer students, faculty, and visitors a new way to explore and discover the ivy covered campus.Location based social networking is definitely trending right now. We will have to wait and see how exactly this plays out before we can look at this types of apps as platforms for marketing opportunities though. In the meantime let me boast in my newly claimed Mayorship of Common Sense NMS (beat you to it guys).