Foursquare

When I lay awake at night, it is usually because I'm thinking about the future of social networking. Now that I have discovered Foursquare I can rest easy knowing that the future is a competitive bar hopping game users play with their acquaintances (I should've guessed). Foursquare is a relatively new social networking site that asks the question "where are you?" rather than, "what are you doing?". Foursquare has some buzz surrounding it as well as financial backers that include Kevin Rose (Digg) and Jack Dorsey (co-founder of Twitter) to name only a few. Similarly to Twitter, Foursquare is building upon this buzz in an effort to attract financiers and encourage people to try out the service. Unlike Twitter, Foursquare has some very promising revenue possibilities that include sponsoring from different stores like coffe shops or bars (locations where foursquarers like to meet up with friends).

Despite the fact that the premise of Foursquare seems to limit its audience to urbanites, and that it needs to attract many more users, I think Foursquare could easily become incredibly popular (at least within cities like New York) and start generating revenue withing the next few years. Foursquare seems to be expanding upon the idea of Twitter, where users can let anyone know what they are doing wherever they are doing it, and focusing that information in a way that encourages ACTUAL SOCIAL INTERACTION (you might be too young to remember this). Instead of tweeting "I just drank one tasty cup of coffee. Be jealous" I can use Foursquare to let everyone I'm connected with know "I'm at Starbucks in Union Square. Come chill with me." This is a major difference, people. Foursquare is indeed the future of social networking because it is utitilizing the foundations of networking that sites like Facebook have developed and the easily accesible quick information Twitter has brought to the table to encourage users to bring these elements together and utilize them in a way that returns the "social" aspect of networking back to its interpersonal home.

I really hope that Foursquare can begin to garner more users (so that there are people using the service that I actually know) because I can see this service as not only becoming really popular, but incredibly useful as well. Especially for those of us who sometimes have nothing really to do and no one to hang out with (not me though because I'm super popular and cool and just don't even worry about it). I know that technology will one day rise up and kill us all, but I think I'm starting to like some of these new fangled techno driven ways of communicating.