Foursquare: My *Most Used* iPhone App

With regularity, I am asked which app is my fave on the iPhone. Without hesitation, I respond with *Foursquare*.

I’m a Check-In freak. Restaurants, gas stations, people’s houses, towns…. you name it. It’s better than Facebook Places, and already retailers are getting on board with providing discounts for people who check into their establishments. It’s quite possibly the best location-based social app.

I love that I can check out the specials near me, and that even drives me to stop in at places I wasn’t expecting to stop at.

Sure, it’s handy for social planning, but its niche will be in retailer advertising, not in helping you meet up with peeps.

I love that I can control the privacy features with better granularity than FB Places. Because, really, some things just aren’t for all eyes :-D

Foursquare: not just for iPhone users, it’s available on all platforms. You need it. The more people checking in, the faster retailers will launch service discounts for Foursquare users. Giddy up!!

Now if only it had better camera controls ;-)

Too Square for foursquare?

With all the buzz on foursquare, and with Tara Hunt completing challenges all over the place, I had to try.

I see where it wants to go, and I hope it can get there quicky… but right now, it’s a little dodgey. Friend feedback and referrals are huge. It’s what’s going to drive retail in the future. Heck, it’s what going to drive EVERYTHING in the future. Foursquare is using us to build trust relationships, which will then turn into bags of gold, depending on the eventual advertising and marketing campaign that gets tacked onto Foursquare.

Perhaps I’m cynical, but you don’t build interesting applications for free. Foursquare needs development. It *needs* integration with Google. Don’t tell me to go to google maps to validate an address or a business name —- foursquare should be doing that for me! Don’t make me manually comply to a stylesheet, use the googleoutputs and do the damn formatting yourself! I know, I know —- it’s new and cool and geeky and is building a wonderful database of glorious things…. But it’s doing it on the backs of the great unwashed masses, which is fine, but make it easy!

I’m not going to give up yet, but by jeeze, i can’t wait until they make foursquare smarter. :-)