Friday, February 12, 2010

foursquare: localized micromessaging

Every now and then I like to share my thoughts with others via twitter. I really don't know how many of my followers really read what I am posting, but I admit that it can be hard to keep up with all the micromessages that people share. Lists, as introduced a while ago, are not bad in order to organize one's contacts, but what can make tweets more relevant is a connection to a specific physical resource. I guess this is one of the ideas behind a fairly new social network service called foursquare, where you explicitly check into specific places such as a restaurant and leave a note for your contacts to stay informed. Quite similar to services such as Qype except that you tell the service where you are (if you want to) and you can leave as many utterances as you like. That not only makes it a great tool for social recommendations, but also for store owners who can address their customers and tell them about the latest promotions. Very promising, but we need to see whether this service will really take off. My very first impression seems like a good precondition to give it another try ...

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