Foursquare seems silly, but it could be the future of information

Can a basic fun little mobile application evolve into the next big idea in social communications and information? We might just be witnessing that with Foursquare. For those of you unfamiliar with the latest smartphone sensation, Foursquare is a location-based app that allows you to ‘check in’ to particular locations, whether they be bars, restaurants, clubs or even mobile conferences. That information is then shared with your friends and the Foursquare public at large, creating a social map of where people are and where they’ve been.

Those capabilities have launched numerous social games. Go to five different pizza joints in a week, get a ‘Pizza’ merit badge. If you spend 30 hours at the gym each week, you can proudly display the ‘gym rat’ badge. The person who goes somewhere the most is awarded the title of mayor. Businesses have started using Foursquare as a marketing tool, giving away free stuff after you’ve checked in at their locales a certain number of times, or by letting the mayor of a bar drink for free.

At first glance, Foursquare strikes me as a silly little app that fulfills the social networking prophesy of no personal detail being private, but Foursquare has begun building capabilities onto the platform that, I must admit, took me by surprise when the start-ups young CEO Dennis Crowley detailed them at the Open Mobile Summit earlier this week.

First off, Foursquare is offering more information than just volumes of people. It’s allowing customers to add location-specific information. Those could come in the form of restaurant or club reviews, but could also include the highly detailed, such as which security line at O’Hare airport is fastest and how you locate it, or even the time sensitive—Sushi Planet has run out of maguro tonight. Foursquare is extending those information nugget capabilities beyond individual customers. For instance, the History Channel is tying historical tidbits to particular sites. If you check in at Independence Hall, its role in the founding of the U.S. pops up on your screen.

Second, Foursquare has built its own application programming interface (API) which allows other developers to build apps on its platform. The results have been silly in some cases: Assisted Serendipity alerts you to when the guy-to-girl ratio at a particular bar or club tips in your favor. But in many cases, they’re highly useful: a taxi share app helps you find people in your area heading to the same destination interested in sharing a cab.

Foursquare essentially has begun mapping virtual data into real locations and taking that data from innumerable sources. You could argue Google Maps and any number of location apps have done the same thing, but unlike your typical LBS app, Foursquare’s info is general and often random, not targeted. Foursquare may be one of those companies on the vanguard of merging what technical types call ‘meatspace’ with virtual space. Every physical location becomes filled with virtual information. We just use our phones as a conduit for viewing it.

That concept certainly hasn’t escaped Crowley and the rest of the Foursquare crew. In fact, Crowley seems to be more frustrated by the fact that technological limitations prevent Foursquare from fully realizing that concept. Ultimately he doesn’t want customers to access Foursquare when they want information. He wants Foursquare to constantly mine a customer’s surroundings for info and then share what’s most interesting or relevant to the customer in real time. That, however, would require a GPS connection that’s constantly running, which would of course drain a phone’s batteries within hours.