Happy Foursquare Day!

April 16th is Foursquare Day: A play with words, 4th month (April) and the 16th day (which is 4 squared)

The purpose of Foursquare is to be a location-based mobile platform that makes cities easier to use and more interesting to explore. Foursquare is a location-based social networking website based on software for mobile devices. This service is available to users with GPS-enabled mobile devices, such as smartphones. 
Foursqaure users become interactive tourist guides. 

Users "check-in" at venues via a smartphone app or SMS, users share their location with friends while collecting points and virtual badges by selecting from a list of venues that the application locates nearby. Each check-in awards the user points and "badges" and the phone app offers relevant suggestions about nearby venues and their friends that might be nearby. 

Users can choose to have their check-ins posted on their accounts on Twitter, Facebook, or both. In version 1.3 of their iPhone application, foursquare enabled push-notification of friend updates, which they call "Pings". Users can create a "To Do" list for their private use and add "Tips" to venues that other users can read, which serve as suggestions for great things to do, see or eat at the location Merchants and brands leverage the foursquare platform by utilizing a wide set of tools to obtain, engage, and retain customers and audiences. 

The app allows the user to make a list of personal list of places and activities, called to-dos and has been separated from the general advice from other users section called "tips". Foursquare has also created a button that will add any location in the app to a user's to-do list, and the app will now remind the user when there are to-do items nearby. Users can create a "To Do" list for their private use and add "Tips" to venues that other users can read, which serve as suggestions for great things to do, see or eat at the location. 

If a user has checked-in to a venue on more days (meaning only one check-in per day qualifies for calculating mayorship) than anyone else in the past 60 days, the check-ins are valid under foursquare's time and distance protocols, and they have a profile photo, they will be crowned "Mayor" of that venue, until someone else earns the title by checking in more times than the previous mayor. To get the Foursquare Super Mayor Badge you will need to become the mayor of ten locations at one time.

Foursquare stats as of April 2011: 

• Users: Over 8 million worldwide, adding around 35,000 new users each day
• Check-ins per day: Over 2.5 million, with over half a billion check-ins in the last year
• Businesses: Over 250,000 using the Merchant Platform (more information at foursquare.com/business)
• Employees: Over 60 between headquarters in New York, NY, and a satellite engineering office in San Francisco, CA

Foursquare was founded by co-founders Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai who met in 2007 while working in the same office space (at different companies) in New York City. Working from Dennis' kitchen table in New York's East Village, they began building the first version of foursquare in fall 2008, and launched it at South by Southwest Interactive in Austin, Texas in March 2009.

Background: Crowley had previously founded the similar project Dodgeball as his graduate thesis project in the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) at New York University. Dodgeball was founded in 2000 by New York University students Dennis Crowley and Alex Rainert, and was acquired by Google in 2005. In April 2007, Crowley and Rainert left Google. After leaving Google, Crowley created a similar service known as Foursquare with the help of Naveen Selvadurai. What happened to Dodgeball? Google shut it down in 2009, replacing it with Google Latitude. Dodgeball user interactions were based on SMS technology, rather than an application.

(Source: Wikipedia & foursquare.com; photo credit: Foursquare Day logo, Foursquare; Foursqaure logo, Wikipedia; iphone views, hessmarketingblog.com; 4squarebadges.com; 4sq map, advertising aphasia.blogspot.com; mayor crown-couponing.about.com; four square playground game, inboundstrategy.com; sm kitchen table -hotels.com; Dodgeball logo, Wikipedia; world cup, uvtblog.com; history, cio.com; )