What is Foursquare? #4SQ
This information is also available in: Nederlands
Foursquare (4SQ) is een location based social network. That means you can tell your friends where you are. Or your colleagues. Or your customers. Or your boss. Or the rest of the world.
4SQ contains a game element. You get points every time you tell your network where you are. Every sunday night the leaderboard resets itself, allowing newbies to make it to the top (at least for a short while).
Telling your network where you are is called “checking in”. The best way to do so is by using your cell phone. 4SQ offers applications for iPhone, BlackBerry, Android, Palm and for the remaining phones there is a web version. If you want to check in, your phone checks your location and 4SQ tells you where you might want to check in. These are the places that were defined by people who checked in earlier. If your place is not listed, you can add it. Mind correct spelling, addresses, upper/lower case voor cities etc. Your place will be used by future 4SQ users. If you name your place correctly, it will be easier for others to find it.
Anybody can check into public places. The person with the most checkins in a particular place automatically becomes the mayor of that place. There are places in the US that serve free coffee to the local mayor. Think what this may mean for your business in terms of customer experience or marketing!
Hot: It has become possible to mark a place as private. Only your friends can see where you are and the rest of the world can’t. This may be useful if you want to record a phone number with a place. You might even add a Twitter account to a place.
4SQ made me rethink my privacy strategy and my conclusion is that Twitter is for my contact with strangers (and friends of course), where Facebook is strictly for my friends. This means I won’t be publishing location checkins on Twitter, but only on Facebook.
I used to have a Facebook application that automatically updated my Facebook status upon every new tweet on Twitter, but I removed it. Facebook supports a number of native applications. Native applications can update Facebook status in native Facebook format, so Facebook recognizes what they are. This means you’ll find less frequent, but nicer looking status updates no Facebook from now on.
Some applications that offer native Facebookness are (but not limited to): Foursquare, Flickr, Shazam and Youtube.
Click here to get your free Foursquare account
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