Five Rules of Foursquare

I'm not gonna lie, I love foursquare. I've been waiting for an online networking site whose network was based on geography and location rather than solely social connections.

For those of you who live in a cave, foursquare is a mobile app that allows the user to "check in" at "venues", anywhere from liquor stores to baseball games, airports to restaurants.

As great as it is, there is plenty of room for the app to be abused. After searching for the official bros icing bros rules and foursquare rules to no avail, I thought I'd put together a few of my own rules of foursquare etiquette.

Rule 1 : No checking in at work - enough said.
Rule 2 : No more than two check-ins per day at any location - foursquare will let you do this, but I think its cheesy.
Rule 3 : When choosing a venue from a list of duplicates ALWAYS go with the one with the most accurate and complete information.
Rule 4 : No Facebook foursquare spamming - Foursquare has great facebook integration but users need to exercise caution if they are updating their facebook status every time they check-in. My rule - if you really want to TELL people where you are, update facebook but if you don't have a real reason, stick to your foursquare network.
Rule 5 : No retroactive check-ins - If you forgot, you missed your chance.

Do you have any other rules suggestions? What do your foursquare friends do that annoys you?

Twitter Wars vs. Facebook and Myspace

After rereading my thoughts on the recent cultural explosion known as twitter, I thought it would be prudent to look at real numbers on the subject of social networking competitions. Who's REALLY your social daddy?

I used google trends (you might remember we used to call it zeitgeist) to see how the toddler twitter is truly fairing against big brother facebook and ugly uncle myspace. And yes of course using google trends is fool proof, providing real, tried and true scientific results. If you don't believe me - Google it! If you don't believe in sarcasm...then you should look it up on wikipedia.



As you can see (actually you can't, really, so you'll need to click on the graph above to get a clear image), twitter barely ammounts to a blip on the screen when compared to facebook. Before you go getting your panties in a bunch and burry twitter remember that facebook is a giant multi-billion dollar institution which makes comparisons using it as the basis difficult for all but things like "Obama" or maybe "Limbaugh".

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, but Ryan, you just said Twitter is a cultural phenomenon, how can it only be a blip on the screen? While the search results for Twitter have only skyrocketed compared to themselves and remain a blip against facebook, the number of news stories about Twitter eclipsed that of facebook for a brief period of time during April 2009.

Why did this happen?

Freakin' Ashton Kutcher! Part of the draw of twitter for many is the fact that you can feel "at one" with the celebrity community. You can tweet "@aplusk wow its great what you are doing for world malaria day" and you can feel like you are friends with someone famous and, after all, thats all American society wants these days: to be a celebrity or a youtube sensation.

I guess the irony in this whole thing is that it was that very same obsession with celebrity that made twitter is what it is today. Twitter is the Paris Hilton of Social Networking: It is famous for being famous.

What's Paris doing these days anyway?

And feel free to follow me on twitter @rybupsp If you're interesting I'll even follow you back.