Foursquare

There has been a lot of talk about FourSquare.com as a new up and comer. There have been articles on Mashable.com calling it the next Twitter, and why it might be better. Well here in the Cave of the Head of Lettuce, I have been exploring this up and comer and I have to say while the concept seems good, and there is a lot of possibilities on the development of this company and the directions that they could choose to go to make their tool both a profit engine and a cultural phenomenon like twitter became in ’09.

If you have not tripped into FourSquare yet, it is a little like twitter in that the goal is to say a lot with out saying a lot. As a user, you update where you are geographically by “checking-in from various locations that you visit, like restaurants.  You get points for checking in from locations which seems to have some strong potential for marketing if they can figure out how to harness this system with out upsetting those sensitive to such issues. It does not seem to be trying to be twitter as it does not seem to be a platform to voice everything, instead it is more about voicing where you go and throwing out ideas for others who are looking for something to do. I imagine this will be very successful among the college crowd and those who go out regularly as you can easily go and look and see what everyone is up to, or what new things in the area you might want to try.

If you can get those in your “crowd” to embrace this tool and join in with you, you could find the tool very useful, as there is no longer the need to see what everyone is up to.  I imagine a natural tie-in for this tool would be to work with Google’s map where you go feature so the system reports when you get there rather then when you have time to say you got there. The question then becomes how much info about what you do during the day is to much info to share.  Would you want your boss to be able to easily see where you went for lunch, or where you were the night before you called in sick?

Imagine tying the two together though for someone who needs to keep a log of their mileage for business travel, many people need to keep a log, but few do. This could be the birth of a mile tracking log for those who need to track such things.

I have to say I am really excited about this new tool and the Head of Lettuce will be looking to see how to help businesses leverage this piece of the social media puzzle.