i was beginning to hear a lot about foursquare in the past few months, actually more after i saw most of my local twitter friends i know, tweeting their whereabouts via foursquare. and in the past few month i decided to explore and experience foursquare myself. i find that its a next big thing after twitter! while as per mashable, it
maybe the next twitter!
to start with i have always been very impressed with the idea of using location based targeting with social networks (though i understand that people always may not want to reveal their locations and may be averse to this concept). however foursquare takes it to the next level intelligently by using the entire concept as if it were a video game.
the idea that strikes me about this is that it allows me to know if my friends are nearby, what are they doing, what are they recommending and if there is a possibility of collaborating and doing something together-without having to ask or trying hard to describe in 140 characters.
for an example: i brought kids to a local rest house last night to watch the '
panjut' show,
updated my whereabouts via foursquare; voila! it appeared on both my facebook and twitter feeds. let's take twitter: if you click the word 'here', it will come out a small version of google map of my location (
here's the latitude). aren't that kewl?...
take note that april is a busy month for perak people as its the sultan's birthday month. i will elaborate more on this on the next blog post.
by the way i have always believed that the idea of social networking is not so much about making friends out of strangers-but about sustaining and enriching our relationships with existing and real friends.
the N76 app of foursquare is awesome and convenient, though sometimes i am not able to use it fully i.e. the thing is i seems to be very forgetful to update it. take the
gatsby street fair recently, i didn't update ler... LOL!
p/s even though i haven't blog about gatsby street fair, the pics already up on
my flickr anyway...
so how does foursquare work?
foursquare allows users to ‘check-in’ whenever they visit a place. this place could be a local chai shop, a vegetable market, your gym, a café, a cinema hall, restaurant, a hospital and what have you.
when you ‘check-in’ you can ‘shout’ about the place to all your friends and maybe write something in your ‘to do’ and ‘tips’.
based on your location visits foursquare can recommend you about similar places to explore nearby, and as you explore and check-in you gather points. i guess that's good enough explanation about foursquare. find out more about it
here.
don't forget to add me on foursquare
here; hmm... i wonder who else in kuala kangsar is using this application ;)
