foursquare

-Let's everyone know exactly where you are. Literally - exactly.-

New social media services like Twitter and Facebook allow users to "check in" online and update a "status" or some other type of update to broadcast to the rest of the world. Many people use these updates to tell people what they're doing and when they're doing it. If that's not enough for you, a new app called foursquare takes this concept to the extreme - it allows you to broadcast your exact location (usually an address or street corner) to all of your followers. Users can acquire "points" for checking in to various locations on weekends and non-business hours, and they can also acquire "badges", which are a kind of virtual trophy, for checking in to certain places or doing a certain number of check ins. Users who check in to an area the most in a certain period of time are promoted to "mayor" of that area or city. You can even sync the service up to your Facebook or Twitter account and have your foursquare updates come up there, as well. Additionally, each user has a "leaderboard" of their friends (much like a lot of modern day online video games, specifically on Xbox Live) that ranks users based on points.

The app for foursquare may be new, but apparently the service is not. It has apparently been around since March of 2009, according the service's Wikipedia page. I have not heard of anyone using this personally, however, so it still sounds fresh and exciting to me.

The app for foursquare is available for iPhone, Android phones, Blackberry, and Palm devices.

Though an app like this seems to only have the practical aspect of telling everyone your exact location at a certain time, the game aspect seems to be essentially useless. However, it seems like an interesting way to make a person's daily travel more interesting, so long as it doesn't become an obsession, which is entirely possible for some people. There will be a handful of users who make it their goal of the day to acquire the most points and check ins and take the game way more seriously than others, but that seems to be the nature of games, especially when your results are broadcasted online for others to see, such as with this service and the previously mentioned Xbox Live. But back to its practical applications, I could very easily see this being useful when your friend is somewhere but they don't know the exact location, but they can get it from foursquare, and you can put that in your GPS in the car and drive their without exploring endlessly or getting lost unnecessarily. Concepts like this make all of the inter-connectivity of everything really shine, and really show how all of these new services and technologies are paying off in a really positive way, and not just as a way to become the virtual "mayor" of Smalltown, USA.