Last Thursday afternoon a bit of coffee-addled inspiration caused me to share my weekly tour of Chelsea art gallery receptions (courtesy of chelseaartgalleries.com) on foursquare, the new location-based social networking game. Simply put, I made sure the galleries existed as venues on playfoursquare.com , added them where necessary, and created a To-Do list to hit each of those galleries between 6 and 8 that night.
The response was surprisingly immediate and enthusiastic–it got retweeted, I got a couple personal IMs, and some folks did the t0-dos. It was great fun. This was based on a spur-of-the-moment idea and ten minutes work. Though I didn’t have face to face meetings with any folks I didn’t know already, I could see that happening. On the other hand, I can also see where it’s sort of nice just to self-tour and follow in someone’s footsteps.
The whole thing quickly got me thinking about other tours people could create using freely available web information:
- East Village community gardens on a Saturday morning (even more impressive if you’ve been out til 3:00 the night before!) — curious? check out the Green Map (2.3 MB PDF)
- The hidden glens and waterfalls of midtown (street-through arcades ending at Paley Park) — nobody knows these sites better than the folks at the Project for Public Spaces . I also bet Walking Off the Big Apple knows these places.
- NYCwireless-created hotspots (Bowling Green, Jackson Square, Stuyvesant Cove, Madison Square Park, and Bryant Park FTW) — full disclosure, I’m also on the board of this particular group of idealists.
- Oyster crawl (Ulysses, Fish, Lobster Place, Shaffer City, and Grand Central FTW) — ok, I might need to make this map myself. A bonus stop would be the shuttered Munson House at 6 Weehawken St (1849), “probably the last wood house built in lower Manhattan”, according to the Village preservation group. Ephemeral New York has a great post with a period picture.
I partly wonder if foursquare isn’t well-positioned to be an all-purpose recommendation and check-in service (it could provide sites with a “foursquare it!” Badge). Then again, does FourSquare want that kind of traffic?
The founders outlined their own thinking of how the service would work here and here, but the platform is pretty open-ended and people are clearly following their own ideas of how it should work, whether to good effect (checking in at a taco truck) or bad (checking in at the workplace?) Maybe a wiki or discussion group will form to let the community work through issues as they come up. Right now, a support site exists at getsatisfaction but it’s not exactly a forum.
That said, if it’s as Crowley said in the Times Article: ““The whole point is to encourage people and reward them for trying new things” the site is certainly doing that–both around town and with foursquare itself.
