With Foursquare for BlackBerry, compete to be 'mayor' of your office
Foursquare, the trendy geolocation application that's taken the Apple iPhone and Google Android handsets by storm on the East Coast, has finally arrived for the BlackBerry.
Your life may never be the same.
For the uninitiated, Foursquare allows you to "check in" at neighborhood locations and let your friends know where you are.
So if you head out to that great new burger place after work with a couple of buddies, your other friends will see that you're there -- and you'll see that they might have gone to the local bar.
Scale it a bit, and you can see the potential: if you live in an urban area, you can literally see your friends move around the city. (And they can see you.)
The application is portrayed as a kind of game: the more places you check in, the more points you get. Check in enough somewhere, and you might become "mayor" of that location. (And yes, I'm currently the mayor of ZDNet HQ in New York.)
What's more, you get badges for achieving different things. Stops at 10 different locations nets you an "Adventurer" badge. A trip to the convention center at the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show gets you a "CES 2010" badge. Four nights out in a row gets you a "Bender" badge. And so on.
Until now, mobile users without Apple or Android phones had to use m.foursquare.com to check in. Now, users of 8000 and 9000 series BlackBerrys (including the Storm) have a native application that's much prettier than the text-based mobile site.
So now this:
Caroline M. @ Stumptown Coffee Roasters (29 minutes ago) Joseph K. @ CBS Interactive (38 minutes ago) Court P. @ Cbs studios (43 minutes ago) Andrew N. @ Rafiki's Halal (1 hour ago) Adam E. @ D&D Deli & Grocery Cyber Cafe (1 hour ago) Seth P. @ Cafe 57 (Hearst Tower) (2 hours ago) Alex S. @ Cafe Ole (2 hours ago) Mary P. @ Cafe Edison (2 hours ago) Andrew H. @ 'wichcraft (2 hours ago) Scott K. @ Lure Fishbar (2 hours ago)
Looks more like this:
While the BlackBerry app is official, TechCrunch notes that Windows Mobile and Palm Pre versions have been in the works by third-party developers using the Foursquare API.
Oh, and why the East Coast, by the way? Because the West Coast is Gowalla country, a rival geolocation app.