Connecting the Dots / An Agency Blog

If you’re a regular reader of the Engine Digital blog you’ll know that I’ve been chronicling the story of location based social broadcasting since Foursquare was released here in Vancouver last September. After spending months with the application and touting the benefits for Vancouver small businesses, stalking your friends, and mayor fights with complete strangers, I decided to enact an un-install.

Which is kind of sad really, because being an early adopter I had to take a lot of abuse, ridicule, and un-follows from my friend network for all the “check-in” broadcasting I was doing. I went to bat for that app when it counted, and now all my friends are starting to jump on the Foursquare bandwagon with “I’m here and there” tweets and wall posts showing up all over the place, along with friend requests from users who I thought would never do Foursquare. But too little too late, friends! I’ve moved on. I’m sure you’re all dying to know what made me breakup with the New York based application known as Foursquare. Well truth is, I’ve found someone else. Actually, I mean something else, and it’s called Yelp.

Yelp, the user submitted review site that came online in 2004 and has been flirting with Google over a multi-million dollar buyout deal lately (a story that’s giving the site an aura of longevity) just recently added the ability to check-in. For me, it just made so much more sense to use Yelp for my location based broadcasting since it offered more channels in which I could talk about myself –the crux of any social interactivity, really– and it offered the network that had to put up with this kind of content some value. Not only could I say, “David was here,” I could add photos of the food I ate or the ocean I was looking at, pontificate in text for as long as I pleased what I thought about it, add it to a sharable list that organized it into a genre like “most romantic places EVER!!” and of course, I could compete with other users for bragging rights for most check-ins or active social life.

While Foursquare is still trying to work out a way to partner with businesses in some kind of discount for check-in strategy, I can pull my social network into an immersive experience that allows my friends to learn all about the place that I’ve been. Now that’s value! What was the value with Foursquare if someone wasn’t actually interested in tracking me down? A trophy case of vector graphics like their badge program? I knew the mobile app was pretty pointless, but it was first on the block, and I’ve been meaning to chronicle this type of technology since it hit Vancouver, so I had to go there. However, consider the Foursquare chapter of this saga closed.

So, to anyone that’s friended me on Foursquare in the past week, don’t get offended when you don’t hear back from me because I’m not there anymore. And Gowalla? Don’t bother. To me it’s just a Foursquare re-skin with a slightly more interesting name. Instead, I encourage you all to friend me on Yelp, or you’ll be missing out on my 3am check-ins from McDonald’s, complete with photos and a 3000 word description on the pleasures of McNuggets dipped in special sauce. Total value! I kid, I’ve been going to some amazing places lately.

I would also like to say, in closing, that as we move through this story, I’d like to restate my original thoughts on location broadcasting: that it’s new, and that it may seem pointless now, but it’s definitely here to stay as it evolves into a mainstay of online networking. I’m not sure what the next chapter of this story will be, but I hope you’ll follow it, and get involved by letting me know your thoughts on the apps you use to broadcast your location, or if you even want to partake. Considering the Techcrunch article that was just released today, outlining Facebook’s involvement with location tracking, it’s not going to be a story without controversy. We’ll save that chapter for next time though, since it’s my turn to try out the 3D goggles.

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• Foursquare & Layar Team-up
• Foursquare Launches in Vancouver
• FourTwit – FourTat: A Post Launch Foursquare Check-In
• For Retail, Location Is Everything
• Hello World.

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