Foursquare in Chicago

I've been playing around with Foursquare for the past couple of weeks and so far I'm the mayor at my office and gym, and I'm in the running for mayor at my school. Yeah!

Running through my Foursquare history, here's what I've done so far. I joined two weekends ago and started checking in as I ran some errands around town. I stopped off at the Borders on North Ave and Halsted and noticed that there's no mayor there. Hmm, I study there from time to time... maybe I'll try to take the mayor crown there.

I added my work location to Foursquare, and started checking in every day. I'm now the mayor at work! Considering that no one else in my office uses Foursquare it wasn't that hard to do. I also started checking in at places around work as I went out to lunch, but not every place was listed in the system. Oh well.

I added my training center (Vision Quest) to the map. Vision Quest is actually doing a pretty good job with social media and the web. They have a Facebook page and a Twitter account (@vqcoaching) but no Foursquare presence yet. Started checking in there and quickly became the mayor of VQ. Sweet!

I also started checking in at school but so far I'm not the mayor there yet. Jane U. has that crown now, but I've politely let her know that I may challenge her for mayorship of Kellogg.

So far Foursquare has been pretty fun, but I don't feel like it's done anything useful for me yet. Deals are starting to show up on my map, but I don't think the Foursquare 'buzz' has caught on in Chicago just yet, despite this weekend's article in the Chicago Tribune. I did score a free shot at the Hunt Club over the weekend thanks to Foursquare, but that's about the only real application of the system I've seen in the area.

Another problem for me is that none of my friends are on Foursquare yet, and I really only know of one or two other people on the service. Having my friends use Foursquare would make the game a lot more enjoyable for me, as I'd have people I could challenge for points and mayor positions all over the city. Right now most of my friends have never even heard of Foursquare and look at me funny when I "check in" at certain places. They get the concept of the game, but don't quite understand why I'm using it or what purpose it serves.

Geolocation services like Foursquare haven't quite gone mainstream yet, but according to many analysts the mobile market will soon begin trending this way. There's a lot of potential in these context-aware services, with applications ranging from mobile entertainment and social networking to targeted advertisement and localized recommendations. Like any hot new service du jour, success will ultimately be dictated by the size of its user base. Foursquare is generating a lot of buzz lately and is building up its user base, but will it be able to hold off bigger players like Twitter and Facebook, who have started to move into the geolocation space themselves?

I know if Facebook rolled out its own geolocation service tomorrow, I would start using it instead of Foursquare. Why? Well, all of my friends would already be on the service so the experience would be a lot more social and enjoyable for me. Also, with Facebook's massive installed user base we'd see more applications built on top of the platform and more "offers" available for users on the map.

We'll see how long it takes for geolocation to go mainstream. Hopefully all this media attention for Foursquare will lead to new users signing up for the service, especially in the Chicagoland area. It's a little lonely playing Foursquare all by myself. :(