matty.co.za

Earlier this week, pop­u­lar geo-​​social web­site, Foursquare, enabled their “Foursquare every­where” fea­ture. Since it’s incep­tion, the com­pany has offered their ser­vice (allow­ing users to “check in” at places and to dis­cover new places in their area) in a select few cit­ies. With the grow­ing pop­ular­ity of geo-​​social web­sites such as Foursquare and Gowalla, the demand for access to Foursquare in non-​​support cit­ies has, over the last few months, grown substantially.

The “Foursquare every­where” ser­vice allows users to spe­cify their cur­rent city via a text box instead of a drop­down selec­tion menu of avail­able cit­ies. When logged in, how­ever, it is dis­played as “else­where”. Some form of mod­er­ated city addi­tion would be really bene­fi­cial here, in my opin­ion. There are def­in­ite pro’s and con’s to the choice of retain­ing exclus­iv­ity within Foursquare. It is due to this choice, I believe, that many poten­tial Foursquare users have chosen Gowalla, which has no restric­tion of exclus­iv­ity on their ser­vice and allows check-​​ins at any point as well as point cre­ation, stamps for check­ing in, pins for accom­plish­ments and vari­ous other fea­tures sim­ilar to those of Foursquare.

Over the last few years, each year or two has seemed to have had a “buzz word”. The last year or so was Twitter, the concept of tweet­ing and how it all worked and integ­rated into the aver­age inter­net user’s daily online life. Before that was the Facebook craze, people find­ing old friends from their school days and join­ing groups about going out on the week­end, dis­cuss­ing pop­u­lar top­ics of the moment or how much they love kit­tens. These trends don’t seem to fade away, but rather seem to over­lap in a way, retain­ing their status while the next big one rises to the fore.

I see 2010 as the “year of the check in”. People will use ser­vices like Foursquare, Gowalla and any other ser­vices that arise from this grow­ing trend, to share their exper­i­ences, find new places, meet people who share com­mon interests and, essen­tially, as another tool in their social net­work­ing tool belt. Geo-​​tagging of images and tweets, Google Maps exten­sions for Flickr, Tumblr and Wordpress.com exist. This (although hav­ing been around for some time now) seems to be the logical next step.