Comments on: Why I Deleted Foursquare and Gowalla after SXSW

By: foursquare’s Hottest Geolocation: SXSW | QuarterSquare.com

foursquare’s Hottest Geolocation: SXSW | QuarterSquare.com — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 04:07:55 +0000

[...] that he sees the benefit of such a network in the context of site-spanning events; however, he’s not too convinced he wants the world knowing his whereabouts back home in LA. [Sites like Foursquare and Gowalla] were super useful at SXSW rather than texting all of [...]

By: Keith Privette

Keith Privette — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 04:09:35 +0000

Well the one thing you can do through twitter and foursquare\gowalla\brightkite checkins is call and page people from different cities. It happened to me tonight I was paged at a store while picking up ice cream….I checked in and tweeted. Greg from OK called the store had me paged, picked up phone, I knew exactly how he got the number. Little freaky at first then talked and he recommended the Neapolitan Ice Cream…..what do you think?

By: conrey

conrey — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 23:34:06 +0000

@ajleon – you mention 4SQ as a game, but is it really a game?

By: conrey

conrey — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 23:33:08 +0000

@indiequick- I know that’s the case – but I still don’t even really care what my local people are doing when they check in somewhere. And Gowalla doesn’t have this feature. The overshares weren’t the only reason I deleted.

By: @ajleon

@ajleon — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 22:31:07 +0000

Wait, so are your badges for sale now ;)

I kinda of agree with you, but kinda don’t. The greatest utility of Foursquare is indeed when a large concentration of friends are within close proximity (preferably walking distance). However, it’s still fun even when it’s not that useful. I don’t live on FSq like I do on twitter because FSq is a game, and twitter is useful, but that doesn’t mean it’s not useful at all. I’ve used FSq on trips I’ve taken & it’s been useful (as far as tips and locations people actually like). Maybe not AS useful, but still useful and kinda fun.

By: indiequick

indiequick — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 20:57:17 +0000

Can’t believe that no one has pointed this out. And I completely understand this post, but you missed one of the most valuable built in features to foursquare.

When you’re in the Phoenix network, you’re only going to get notified if someone is IN the Phoenix network. Just like, probably when you were Austin, you weren’t seeing what your San Francisco friends were doing in California.

Just saying, you don’t have to delete the service cause you think it overshares, it has the local network built in to prevent such craziness.

By: Nick Hammond

Nick Hammond — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 20:49:24 +0000

I’m on the same page with you here, I’ve really cut down my usage to almost nothing. Location based services are really only good for conferences and travel.

It’s crazy to me how fast everyone switched from being crazy about privacy to publishing it to everyone. Think back to when Facebook first released the news feed, people flipped and started the “I hate Facebook” blah blah groups.

I tried to delete my gowalla account but they didn’t have a delete button yet at the time haha.

By: conrey

conrey — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 21:03:10 +0000

Brian – I did remember that about BK and don’t care about badges/items/mayorships. I’ll admit to not having used BK in a long while but I felt like the same issues existed there (not enough value to be useful unless I use it as a twitter client). I may need to take another look.

By: Brian

Brian — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 18:27:21 +0000

I’m going to go back to Brightkite-ing pics of interesting nerd meetups and crazy food places like I have been doing (occasionally) for the last 2 years (signed up April 08). You don’t need to be on it, since I’ve told BK to push photos and notes to Twitter & Facebook.

It seems like it might be handy to have something to notify you if Internet friends enter a certain radius of you. Rather than recording the minutiae of everyone’s errand-running. Turns out that is one of several lesser-known features of BK: http://imgur.com/2n58a.png

But they don’t have the important features, like badges, items, and mayors! D-:

By: mark

mark — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 16:48:58 +0000

Or just check this out.

http://www.macrumors.com/2010/03/18/apple-files-for-patent-on-igroups-proximity-based-social-networking/