Find Me on Four Square

I have to admit, I’ve become obsessed with Four Square.

For months and months I held off on downloading the application. I watched my friends check in and compete against one another, and I resisted. Why sign up for another time suck? And the truth was that I didn’t get the appeal.

But a few weeks ago I got curious and headed over http://foursquare.com to see what all the fuss was about.

People use foursquare to “check-in”, which is a way of telling us your whereabouts.
You’ll find that as your friends use foursquare to check-in, you’ll start learning more about the places
they frequent. Not only is it a great way to meet up with nearby friends, but you’ll also start to learn
about their favorite spots and the new places they discover.

I stopped reading…okay, hello, is it just me or does that to me sounds like a big giant box of CREEPFEST? I deleted Loopt off my phone for a reason.

I kept reading.

Every foursquare checkin earns you points. Find a new place in your neighborhood? +5 points. Making
multiple stops in a night? +2 points. Dragging friends along with you? +1.

And as you start checking-in to more interesting places with different people, you’ll start unlocking
badges. There are badges for discovering new places and for traveling to far away places. Spending too
much time singing karaoke or been hitting the gym consistently? Yes, there are badges for those too

Oh well, good. Relief. You get points for being creepy. That was case enough. And I signed up.

Shortly after creating my account, I scored the “overshare”, “crunked”, and “bender” badges, became mayor of my work and apartment building, and utilized it as an actual stalking tool to track down my friend.

Don't worry, Matt's going down. #1 will be MINE.

Yes, I accepted my creep tendencies, and it wasn’t long before I started sharing my Four Square testimonial with friends, family and clients.

Today, I started on my normal pitch routine with a colleague. “It’s a really cool platform, you can compete against you friends, find new things, utilize yelp functionality, and you opt in to the updates –” I stopped. You opt in. For a moment I actually thought about what I was doing. I was choosing to check into EVERY where I went. I selected the sacrifice of my privacy.

That’s what social media has become, though, right? Not only do we share our location on Four Square, but we can track friends down with the GPS technology built into Twitter, through status updates on Facebook and dozens of other iPhone applications.

So what does that mean? Complete transparency of yourself, your brand, your publication. Complete honesty. I get that, but does that mean you have to tell everyone everything? Do you have to opt in to the overshare to stay relevant? And more importantly, am I okay with that?

I’m going to checkin to my head and I’ll get back to you on that. Stay tuned…