The Foursquare potential: Why I think this could reinvent social

Businesses will be able to use information from location based social media in entirely new ways that could blow wide open people’s perceptions about privacy and security.

According to this article in Time, Foursquare is about to mix three magic ingredients together that will take Foursquare beyond being ‘more than a game’.

Those ingredients are social, location and notification, as an API. Or in other words, you can use information from people’s social networking, take information about location and allow messaging between people and places.

For example, if a friend of yours is near, you get an alert. If you are a business, you know more about your customer footfall. You can offer content, products and deals in a more social way.Think about how this could reinvent how we think of social media, and how organisations think about engaging with us as people. 

I’m really excited by this development, because it signals another step for communicators along the road of social media innovation. Soon I think we will see fewer and fewer concerns about people sharing information about where they are through their social network, because the opportunities (for Foursquare too) are too exciting to resist.

Comments

[Danny Whatmough]

Quite right. There is massive untapped potential with location as I have banged on about on numerous occasions. Will be interesting to see how this pans out...