I’ve seen a lot of tweets in my twitterstream from apps like Foursquare and Gowalla. These are location-aware apps for the iPhone (Gowalla) and Android (both) that lets you announce to your followers where you are at any given time.
I have to ask: What the heck is the point?
A better question: What’s in it for me?
An even better question: What’s in it for my followers?
Before I continue I’ll admit that I’ve used Foursquare. Twice. But because Foursquare hasn’t added the city I live in – Greensboro, NC – I had to add a place manually, which is extremely awkward to do while using their website in a mobile browser.
And I had to use a mobile web browser because Foursquare has only released its app for the iPhone and Android. Doesn’t do me any good (or about 75% of smart phone owners, for that matter) if they don’t offer an app for any of the other smart phones. (Insert rant that the internet should be platform-agnostic here.)
Back to my last question: What’s in it for my followers? Nothing.
Just as it does me no good to know that one of my followees has become the “mayor of Dunkin Donuts” in NYC, or to read that another of my followees is at a hotel in Los Angeles, it did my followers no good to know that I visited Lowe’s on South Elm Eugene St in Greensboro a couple of weeks ago.
It might be fun to grab a Mayor’s badge in Foursquare, but there’s nothing in it for me when you (and vice-versa) get that badge. At the very most I could engage in a friendly competition with a local friend and followee, but that’s about it. I can’t even do that with followees outside my immediate geographic region.
Honestly, I get more value out of a “I had eggs for breakfast” tweet than these location-aware messages.
