The latest trend in social media is Foursquare, a website that helps people turn their virtual connections into real ones. You can do this on your own. I do, once a month, when I have lunch with Elaine Soloway and Bonnie McGrath.
I met Elaine hanging out at Danny Miller’s blog in the comments aisle, which usually is a pretty crowded aisle. Elaine met Bonnie through a friend of a friend on Facebook. Bonnie and I met at a party this past summer at Elaine’s house. I already knew Danny, though I haven’t seen him since I was in seventh grade at Peterson Elementary School. But as far as Elaine, Bonnie and myself, the Internet did indeed bring us together.
That’s not surprising, given what we have in common. We’re all mothers, we’re all writers, we’re all readers and, what may be our strongest bond, we’re all products of Chicago neighborhoods and still love exploring them.
But to get back to Foursquare, the new website that combines scavenger hunts with social networking. Players earn badges for multiple visits to city venues and freebies for winning the title “mayor” of a venue. The website records players’ whereabouts, so they can track, and possibly meet, other players in the real world.
To play Foursquare, you’ll need a smart phone and you’ll have to live in one of 21 cities. Chicago is one of those cities, but, according to an article in the Chicago Tribune, the city on the make is lagging behind NYC and San Francisco when it comes to Foursquare.
A lot of Chicagoans must be like me and can’t imagine having time to visit the same spot four times in a single day or four days in a row, unless it’s a bus stop. But don’t despair. What social media does best—whether it’s blogs, Facebook, Twitter, or Foursquare—is make it easy to find people who are just like you. This also is, I’ve read, one of the dangers of the Internet. As search engines become increasingly accurate at predicting our preferences, our search results may consist entirely of what we already know.
How about you? Have your online friendships made it offline? I mean, apart from sites specifically designed to match up people. If not, follow bloggers in your area who share your interests. You can research blogs by topic at Technorati. If you have my kind of luck, you may connect and reconnect with kindred spirits on the Internet.
Not at all. Foursquare is played in the real places rather than in a virtual world. If you have a Twitter account, enter #foursquare in the search box on the home page to see what others think about it.
So if four square like Yoville?