Why I’m sticking with Foursquare

Foursquare has come in for a lot of criticism recently. It’s been branded a waste of time, another Farmville and various other unsavoury names.

It was also recently highlighted that less than 10% of businesses would pay to have their profile on it, casting doubt on its usefulness to the business community.

But I’m sticking with Foursquare, despite this display of negativity for the following reason: it’s doing wonders for the next big thing, geolocation.

So much so that Twitter, Facebook and a whole heap of applications have followed it into the world of location ‘awareness’.

Geolocation services are nothing new. Satnav is the obvious one. It’s been helping drivers find their way around the countryside for years. Very useful, so rarely criticised.

But enter Foursquare, which essentially appears to be ‘just a game’ where users earn badges for checking into various locations. Businesses can promote themselves by offering incentives to the person who checks in most – the ‘mayor’.

It has many flaws. Business rarely get their heads round games. There’s only so much you can do for the mayor, and, perhaps most importantly, nobody gives a damn. In fact it’s really beginning to annoy people, particularly the scant information that accompanies a check-in when it’s shared on Facebook and Twitter.

Social media expert Sandy Stevenson, who lives in Scone, near Perth, said “If I wanted to be mayor of a virtual village in Scotland, I’d buy a Lego set and play with it.”

He vented this candid opinion on Twitter, to a raft of support.

Most agreed it is a waste of time. But a check-in takes all of ten seconds and, to be honest, you get more of a buzz from ‘creating’ a new venue than you do for earning points. I rarely check my ‘score’.

But I think the criticism is fair when the location is shared across other networks, such as Facebook and Twitter, and my advice would be to keep your notification within your Foursqaure circle (pardon the pun) until it reaches critical mass. Foursquare makes it too easy to share on Facebook and Twitter, and doesn’t provide enough value in the link.

The problem is, despite some 38,000 check-ins a day (IIRC) and having reached a value of $95 million in just over a year, it’s still a long way from critical mass. I was at a networking meeting last week at a venue in which I was the mayor. There were at least 20 other businesspeople in the room and I thought I would be able to make a Foursquare connection with at least one, but no, I was a Foursquare Wallflower, so I slipped quietly into reality for some face-to-face networking.

But I’m not going to forget about Foursquare just yet.

What Foursquare is doing best is marketing geolocation like nothing else. Most people are a bit wary of giving away their location. They see it as an invasion of privacy. Incorporating it into a game has proved to be a good way of shaking off that fear, and (and this is the good bit) Foursquare users are building, at no cost to themselves or the establishments they are doing it for, a geotagged network of business all over the world.

And while businesses on the internet usually have some form of mapping linked to their location on directory websites, Foursquare has location-priority, so wherever you are, you can find places, services, business, based on your location. Now if that’s not a good thing, I don’t know what is.

We need geolocation to power a whole new wave of online services like this, including augmented reality. So I’ll continue sharing my location with my Foursquare ‘friends’, but my Facebook and Twitter friends will be none the wiser. For now.