I recently got myself a full-time gig doing a bunch of stuff. Some of which includes researching different social media (mediums). Another part of my job is adding my undeniably intelligent insight to the company blog. I have been stumped when it came to a topic as of late until I came across several tweets on my twitter feed about a thing called Foursquare (www.foursquare.com). I kept seeing people tweet about becoming the mayor of a certain place that they went to a lot and I was confused. At first I thought it was another application like Farmville on Facebook. For the record, I detest Farmville. I've never played the silly and I never will (I should probably say I don't want to, saying "never" has always been dangerous for me... ex: I will never pierce ______, now 14 piercings later I must say I was wrong). Just seeing people's updates in my Facebook friend feed makes me want to scream, so I hid them (the updates, not my friends). Back to the point... one day I was browsing through blogs dedicated to social media and I came across a post about foursquare and the opportunities it was creating for businesses to reward customers. This caught my attention. So foursquare wasn't just another Farmville app for bored people with no better distractions on their browsers, it was a legitimate social networking site. Interesting. I dug deeper, searched for more articles. I found that Foursquare was created by the same people who created Dodgeball and eventually sold it to Google. Google disappointed these young genius (plural, genii? haha no) by not putting enough funds into the program which had a considerable about of users and eventually they left Google. Google then dropped Dodgeball without explanation, maybe it was too busy acquiring and ignoring other ventures, I don't know. But their drop of Dodgeball gave our genius crew room to create and improve their neglected child. Now we have foursquare.
I'm done with this current history lesson, now I'll move on to what I find most important, my experience with the site. Of course after reading about Foursquare's possible perks I had to try it. I mean, I could potentially be notified if one of my friends was in an area close to me when I went out, or I can see what recommendations people have for sightseeing or exploring my city. GREAT! So I sign up, and get my cell phone linked in... then I start texting my lovely new profile where I am at. I wonder how this is going to help me at all considering I am not posting the address and my In-n-out location can be very vague in San Diego. No worries I say to myself, I'll just edit the location when I get back to my computer. At least it shows that I have checked in at the right time.
Next day rolls around (I must say I don't go very many places so my Foursquare feed might be a bit dull) and I text again, this time with a new location for my lunch. When I get back to the office I try to edit the location that I have text in. I ran into some problems. 1) The sandwich shop I went to wasn't listed, some others downtown were, but I'm not downtown, I'm up north 2) I spelled In-n-out wrong (I know, unacceptable for the native californian) in my text and couldn't fix the check in.
I became frustrated and accidently erased my sandwich check in for the day. I realized later that it was still the same day and in an effort to learn this new thing I should work with the time lie. After adding in the North County location of the sandwich shop I text my check in (spelling everything exactly the same as it was entered in the computer before, capitalization and everything) and lo and behold, it worked. I even received the Newbie badge for being the first person to check in at that place. Awesome.
I wish this meant that all my problems with this social networking site were done and buried but alas they were, and still are not.
Here are my current grievances:
1) if I don't get the exact name/location of a place correct when I text how will I see if my friends are around me?
2) How do I check in online? I guess it has to be through my phone web browser. Unfortunate for sure, the screen is tiny and I'm not sure it will always work. I don't want to text because of grievance #1 above.
3) I have no friends on this thing, none of my facebook friends are on it and neither are my twitter followers or those I am following.
I can't blame number three on the website itself, it has no power over how many friends I do or do not have. Nor does it have power over the lame factor of those friends I do have who refuse to get themselves in the twitter or foursquare world. The loser-atti. (I don't really know where that came from, just go with it.) My friends aren't really losers, I mean, they have me as a friend, how could they be. I do really like my made up word however, so it stays.
The other two are probably more user related (again, blame on me) than them but I'll keep it as my grievance until I figure out how to use the site better.
I look forward to growing my "friend" list on yet another website. We'll see how long this profile lasts.
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