giwm:
Woo hoo!
Darren Smith has agreed to help us out with some wireframing, sketching, visual designing and user experience over the next few weeks.
He’s an awesome guy and we really work well together. All of us at GetItWithMe are really happy to have him on board as we turn up the heat on our latest work.
Foursquare is a location based social networking application that combines microblogging & location sharing with a casual multiplayer game (rewards, badges, free drinks and shizzle). Learn why mashable thinks foursquare could be the next twitter, here.
I had a chance to try out Foursquare earlier on this month when I was in New York, but today Rey’s on going harassment of the development team led to a rather exciting twitter message being sent to him. It appears Foursquare will be released in London soon!!
If that isn’t exciting enough in itself, I would like to whet your appetite to a future that might just change how we go about our day to day lives. It was an announcement of a new feature in Foursquare that got me thinking about how I would like to use the application. Below is an exert from the Techcrunch review of this new feature.
“…The most important new feature of Foursquare 1.4 is that it now allows you to see who is checked into any venue at any given time. While previously, you had to rely on your main “Friends” tab to see a stream of where people were checked in, now you can click on any venue, click on the new “People” tab, and see who is there. If you see someone you are not currently friends with, you can click on their name, and you will load up their profile where you can add them as a friend. On that profile page, you can also see their Twitter stream (if they have hooked up their Foursquare account to their Twitter account) and their Facebook profile (if they’ve hooked that up).”
So it appears that not long from now you’ll be alerted about people in your vacinity that you might find interesting. This could be based on a profession or industry (via keywords of a Twitter feed), or similiar interests (based on your Facebook info), or mutual friends or colleagues (based on LinkedIn), or specific personal preferences, like a single 22yr old Asian dancer (based on match.com settings)…etc… The point is all, well, some :) of this information is already available about us on the internet and Foursquare is the application that can bring it together and truly make it useful. It will ‘connect people’. Hold on, isn’t that Facebook’s tagline?
Anyhow, this is going to have a profound effect on society. Computers have regularly been publicized as reducing the social skills of our youth, but in 5 years time it’ll be praised for allowing people to meet, who would never have done so before. Long gone are the days when you go into a coffee shop to read a book by yourself or do some work on a laptop, because these places will become social hubs, places to meet new people, chat and make connections. Humans are social creatures. We want, we need to be around people in order to be happy. Its an innate need. Unfortunately society has ingrained into us, at least in the UK, and especially in London, that you don’t talk to strangers.
As a consequence of giving people a reason to make first contact, we will chat more. Be more open. Be more free. From a business perspective users of applications such as foursquare will be at a huge advantage, purely because of the ability to make so many connections.
Furthermore, cafe/bars will start to become hang outs for specialized interests. For example, people who like the outdoors, travelling or extreme sports might end up frequenting a particular place just to see if there’s anyone about worth bumping into to share their experiences with. This type of societal grouping happens already (for example, sports bars), but they will become self organised, self made, and will evolve over time.
Just think to yourself next time you’ve popped in for a coffee, what do each of these people do?.. and don’t tell me you wouldn’t want to have a quick chat with someone who has that same, rare, passionate hobby as you. Quite often the only reason why we don’t want to chat to that stranger next to us is because it’s SCARY. It’s daunting to START talking to someone new. Technology will help us get over our psychological issues by giving us a reason to talk, a common ground in which to start a conversation from. It will bring people together.
Foursquare (or another similair app, maybe Gowalla) is going to change how we live our lives. Now, how do we early adopters make the most of this?
