Will Foursquare be the new Twitter?

An application that allows friends to track one another's movements when they're out and about could be the next big thing in social networking In 2001 Dennis Crowley, a young interactive telecoms graduate from New York University, found himself turning over a particular problem in his head. Crowley and a lot of his friends had been involved in various internet start-ups which, after the dotcom bubble burst, had gone pop. The problem was this: the friends were mostly living in East Greenwich Village, and they were around most days, but they never got together as much as they liked. Some days someone would be going to a baseball game, or someone would be going to a bar, or to the park, but there was no easy way of co-ordinating this social life among the group (this was back in the mists of networking time: Facebook hadn't been invented; even Friendster hadn't been invented). Crowley found himself applying his idling mind to the question of whether there might be a way of letting your friends know where you were, without making 20 phone calls; of taking the chance out of chance meetings. A decade later, after various part-evolved efforts to come up with a solution to this problem, Crowley seems to have found one that works. He is the co-founder of Foursquare, an internet site and iPhone application that allows you not only to advertise to friends (or friends of friends, or friends of friends of friends) exactly where you are in the world, but also incentivises the processes of going out, and meeting up. Foursquare has extended way beyond Crowley's mates; it is becoming a bookmarked fixture among circles of friends in cities across the States and the world. The application is approaching its millionth user; inevitably, in the way of these things, blogs and investors are buzzing about it — and rival "location, location, location" services, such as Gowalla — as this year's Twitter: the next geeky obsession to become a mainstream media compulsion. Crowley explained some of the potential to me last week on the phone. "We want Foursquare to be a lot about encouraging adventure," he said. "To give you a reason to do things and go places that you might not always think to do." He was, when he was developing his idea with his business partner Naveen Selvadurai, particularly interested in a couple of phenomena: the first was the psychology of Nike+, the sensor that allows you to collect data about your jogging and store it and analyse it on your iPod. "After I started using it," he says, "I was struck by the idea that if you forgot to turn the sensor on one day, then the run itself seemed to have no point. It was the sort of game-playing, data-collecting habit of the run that encouraged you to do it." He became fascinated by the idea of virtual rewards. "A lot of our group," he says, "had grown up with Super Mario and they wondered about the possibility of turning life into a game. Getting rewards for adventures just like Mario did on screen." Foursquare incorporates all of these ideas into its format. Using GPS location in your mobile phone it encourages you to "check in" to any location – bar, café, shop, event, park bench – and not only to share that fact with your friends but to win virtual badges and points for your activity. There is a competitive element to this.

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Will Foursquare be the new Twitter?