Keep Track of Friends and Loved Ones with Foursquare

A quick one before I head back to the airport to fly back to Sydney.

With the rise of location services in recent years people have been able to find places close by when the time suited. In an earlier post, I wrote about WorldSurfer which allows you to use sources such as Google or Wikipedia in conjunction with the compass in your iPhone or iPad to discover nearby places of interest.

What if you wanted to see where your friends and family were?

There is a great service called Foursquare which allows you to “check in” to the various places you visit. The service has been up and running for a while so you should find most of the places you will go but you can always add in a place if it is missing. There are badges you can earn for doing various things like checking into several places that have photo booths or going on a boat. If you check in at a location more often than anyone else, you also get to be “mayor” which may offer perks at some establishments (although I am not social enough to reap any such benefits). People can also leave tips for each location such as what is good on a menu or what areas to avoid.

That stuff aside, you can keep track of when and where your friends have checked in the recent past. So if you are out and about you might discover nearby a friend or relative nearby. Otherwise, in my case, it was handy for keeping track of where the missus was in the world on her travels whilst sparing expensive international calls when Skype or VoIP was unavailable.

Of course, Foursquare can be hooked up to Facebook and Twitter to let everyone know your whereabouts. Having said that, you can choose on a per check in basis if you want to let your friends know where you are as well as if you want to publish your location to Facebook and Twitter. With any sort of social networking interactions you may want to exercise caution in sharing such specific information as it does impact upon your privacy.

So whilst some people may find Foursqaure fun in terms of its badges and mayorships others may simply use it for the tips and checking on friends and family. As expected, there are client applications for iPhone, iPad, Android and Blackberry devices so you should be covered (unless you have a Windows Mobile or WebOS device where clients are a bit thin at the moment). Check it out when you get a chance!