Mini-Road Trips: FourSquare

For those of you unfamiliar with FourSquare, it's another social site (life FaceBook or MeetUp or some other two word website) with a unique feature. It uses the gps in your smartphone (if you don't have one, stop reading til you get one :-P) to find all the nearby areas in your vicinity. After that you “check in” to the place your in and then you can read tips on the location, see people that were recently there, and sometimes even get a discount of some kind by showing an employee that you logged in there.

What makes it the potential for an adventure is the game that they've implemented in to it. For every place you log in you acquire points that you can use to compete with other FourSquare players. More importantly you can acquire badges for logging in to specific places a certain amount of times. I just got the photogenic badge, which you get when you log in to three places with a photobooth. You can even attempt to gain mayorships by logging in to that spot more often than others.

It may not sound like a lot of fun but it's a great way to get you off your butt and explore the area you live in. Get out there and log in to your favorite spots, upload a picture of the location, leave a tip and a comment, then move on. Wander around aimlessly until you find a location that a lot of people have logged in to and then go check it out there and repeat the process. You'll feel a strange sense of accomplishment as the site rewards you for providing more information on the site.

This is a great site to both get off your butt and do something but it's also a great way learn more about the place you live and the interesting spots that others have been. Who knows, you may even run in to a fellow FourSquarer and strike up a conversation!

Oh, and be sure to check out my profile and add me when you start.