On Foursquare and the likes

Foursquare is like Twitter, many things to many different people. What I would like to start using it is to passively track location of my friends and use that information to decide on my future plans.

Knowing for example that someone else is also at University and that it’s lunchtime and that I’m nearby, would allow me to ping them with food related question.

This is something that is not practical without Foursquare as people don’t tweet their location.

The second important part is that I now suddenly leave breadcrumbs of my past behavior. I’m not exactly sure the depth of usefulness but for now I’d like to be able to draw a heat-map of my favorite places and maybe see how it compares to my friends one.

But there is one major obstacle – we need critical mass of friends on it. Foursquare doesn’t recognize Ljubljana as a city (it thinks it’s Vienna), so we can’t do proper evangelism for it. On the other hand Gowalla recognizes Ljubljana but doesn’t have Android client.

So the war for location tracking is just starting and the one that can deliver the best experience first and is willing to work with local mobile geeks will have an upper hand.