Who's Foursquare for anyway?

Ask any campaigner or early adaptor about Foursquare, the most popular of the current crop of applications to combine social networking with locality, and they will tell you that the time of Foursquare is nigh, or nearly anyway.

People laughed in Facebook’s face once, they clucked their tongues at Twitter and yet, somehow, both services persevered. Foursquare is essentially a mobile application that allows users to connect with friends across a “social city guide” while they earn badges and (eventually when more vendors participate) make use of coupons and other incentives. But will it really catch on?

Foursquare cheerleaders aside, there’s little consensus and much criticism. According to their own literature, “Foursquare lets users ‘check in’ to a place when they’re there, tell friends where they are and track the history of where they’ve been and who they’ve been there with.” Check in to a location frequently enough and you are awarded the singular status of being mayor of that locale. While the check-in feature has been lauded as useful innovation, particularly when used in conjunction with Facebook, even Foursquare’s CEO admitted in a recent interview that they need to go much further.

So what does this look like in practice? Unlike Twitter and Facebook, which clearly have a high adoption rate here in Dubai, Foursquare appears to be fairly underutilised. In fact, I found one early adopter, let’s call him Chad, who has the dubious honour of being the Mayor of a petrol station. Chad had only checked in to this location three times, which means that the bar for Mayorship is quite low in our fair city.

Why does that matter? Well Foursquare is meant to appeal to both the social and competitive instincts. Foursquare would have you incensed at, or at least bemused by, Chad’s dominance of the petrol station. But with so few participants, it’s difficult to care and nearly impossible to imagine that Chad’s scant three check- ins have earned him any substantial discounts on car air fresheners or the like.

Despite the relative convenience of Foursquare’s mobile app, the level of usage here is so low that there’s very little point to Foursquare in Dubai – so far. Perhaps someday, every filling station will have its own mayor. But for that to happen more people will have to start caring which, to be fair, is not unlike what happened to Twitter and Facebook. Meanwhile, Myspace has just announced massive layoffs as users leave in droves. Maybe this is the time to get in on Foursquare; while you still can.