Foursquare and the UK: Forearmed and Forewarned

At 33 Digital Towers, we’re always playing with the next big things on the web, looking for the latest tools and services that might add value for our clients and eventually become an integral part of the Digital PR we do every day.

One of the services that has caught our eye recently is foursquare. For those of you that haven’t heard of it, foursquare is all about helping you find new ways to explore the city. As 33 Digital’s Drew Benvie describes it, “foursquare is a new social networking application that has been getting the early adopters spending a little time away from Twitter of late. It mixes microblogging (like Twitter), location-based check-ins (like Dopplr) and adds a layer of game theory, like unlocking prizes an badges for certain achievements.” Responses to his post from early adopters make foursquare out to be the next new app to give Twitter a run for its money.

To play, you need to tell foursquare where you are, so they can tell you which of your friends are nearby. It’s called “checking-in” and you can check-in from a park, bar, museum, restaurant, whatever. Every check-in earns you points and interesting check-ins earn you badges. The more you explore, the more you unlock – making it a compelling reason to keep checking in and unlocking new badges.

Foursquare have also made a system that allows you to track all the cool things to do in whichever city you’re in - both the things you’ve done (your “Top 12″) and the things you want to do (your “To-Do” list).

It’s available as an iPhone app, as a mobile client, or you can play through texting a shortcode number – very similar to how you can send Twitter updates.

The founder of foursquare describes it as a system that learns as it grows, and because it’s city-based, it really does become a valuable community. Have a look at this interview he did with Edelman’s Steve Rubel recently:

So, eager to play along, I signed up. As it’s only available in American cities and one European city (Amsterdam), I set my location to NYC. Though it’s fairly restrictive at this stage – until they launch in London in the near future – you can still find and add friends, so I went ahead and looked through my Twitter contacts to see who was also using it. I found several contacts on there, including Ged Carroll and Dave Stone, and proceeded to friend request them. All well and good so far.

Until I started getting confirmation emails that people had accepted my friend request. Rather than coming from a generic email address, e.g. noreply@foursquare.com, the email address contains the individual’s personal email address, e.g. bob.smith@gmail.com. I thought this was strange and might have been an error at first, but then as several more came in, all with that person’s personal email address revealed, it became clear that this was a fault on foursquare’s part. What is shaping up to be a competitor to Twitter could be cut short if people’s personal email addresses are revealed at every stage. Data protection is a particularly big issue in the UK at the moment, as the recent debacle around Spinvox showed. A quick check on Google showed that no one else had noticed the problem.

The team at foursquare though have made it easy to leave feedback on the service. As well as a Get Satisfaction tab on the website, there’s also repeated call’s to action to leave feedback throughout the site. We took the liberty of leaving our feedback and will update this post with any comments we get from foursquare or its community. That’s part and parcel of starting up a new service, you learn from the community, and with foursquare launching in the UK soon I’m sure they’ll take everything on.  It’s an important lesson for all web companies, both for data protection and ensuring that bugs and feedback can be left quickly and easily.

I’m sure this won’t hinder foursquare’s success and we’ll still be using it like mad when it launches in London. If only in an effort to get our favourite coffee shops to sign up and give us the discounts we’d always felt we deserved