I’m gonna be honest, when all my friends were bugging me on Facebook and Twitter with their 4Square statuses, I was annoyed. Profoundly. Leave me alone! Give me a break! Not another buzz tool!? After some more social pressure (from my social media communities), I registered. Just to save my spot and reviewed a few spots. Maybe I am just grumpy.
But as Michelle Blanc and Tom Webster say it beware of sharing your location with everyone on your social networks, if they can figure out where you live. And good stalkers can do that.
Webster says he would use the application in an anti-social way, getting all the freebies from the store owners, but not sharing his location. He also talks about badge fatigue. True. How long can we be excited by a badge? And how many hours will I spend to get the “recognition”. None (for me), but my friends do. Still, his community must know via his badges. And they are cute. They are the equivalent of Hello Kitty’s for geeks, see a list of Foursquare badges from Tony Felice here.
Foursquare is a service that allows users to share their location with a group of friends from “checking in” to a restaurant, business or other venue when they arrive. The company encourages the businesses to recognize Foursquare users in some fashion, such as a bar awarding free drinks to their most frequent customers.With the new tool, businesses will be able to see a range of real-time data about Foursquare usage, including who has “checked in” to the place via Foursquare, when they arrived, the male-to-female customer ratio and which times of day are more active for certain customers. Business owners will also be able to offer instant promotions to try to engage new customers and keep current ones.“If a restaurant can see one of its loyal customers has dropped off the map and is no longer checking in, the owner could offer them incentives to come back,” said Mr. Walker. There will also be a Staff page available to each business that will allow employees to interact directly with customers using social networks.Foursquare recently partnered with 30 small businesses to test the tool, and it plans to gradually roll it out to another 900 businesses in the coming weeks.
The Brookly Museum plans for FourSquare API integration/MashupsShelley Bernstein, chief of technology at the Brooklyn Museum, sees promise in the Staff pages. “Basically, the new statistics tools give us the ability to promote a personal face for our staff so we’re not just seen as an institution,” she said. “We’re wrapping all of this into our Web site through Foursquare’s A.P.I.’s, and we allow people to interact with staff and have the opportunity to engage with them in new ways
