Twitter asks users to answer the question: What are you doing?
But for many urbanites in their 20s and 30s, two other questions are just as important: Where are you, and can I come join you?
For them, a fast-growing social networking service called Foursquare is becoming the tool of choice. A combination of friend-finder, city guide and competitive bar game, Foursquare lets users “check in” with a cell phone at a bar, restaurant or art gallery. That alerts their friends to their current location so they can drop by and say hello.
“It’s planned serendipity,” said Emily Woolf, 24, a strategic planner living in Brooklyn who checks in on Foursquare when she wants to grab coffee or a drink with friends. “At this point, I don’t even bother texting or calling my friends. I just check Foursquare to see if they’re nearby and go meet them.”
Just 7 months old and with about 60,000 users so far, Foursquare is still getting off the ground — especially when compared with supersize services like Facebook and Twitter, which have millions of members. But that underground status is part of Foursquare’s appeal, its fans say. It is not yet cluttered with celebrities, nosy mothers-in-law or annoying co-workers.
“On Twitter, there are more than 3,000 people that follow me, and Facebook is more of a business community now,” said Annie Heckenberger, 36, who works at an advertising agency in Philadelphia. “Foursquare is more of the people that I actually hang out with and want to socialize with.”
It is akin to knowing about a hip new club before everyone else, said Deborah Schultz, an analyst with the Altimeter Group who specializes in trends in social media.
“There will always be people who love new technology and want to test it out, kick the tires,” she said. “Once those services become too big and the bridge-and-tunnel crowd shows up, they can lose some of that initial interest.”
One factor that might help Foursquare retain its intimate feel is that most of its members are picky about who can see the real-time footprints that they are leaving across the cities in which they live.
Foursquare emerged from the ashes of an earlier mobile service called Dodgeball, which was introduced in 2004 by Dennis Crowley and a classmate from New York University and was sold to Google in 2005.
After Google killed the service, which relied heavily on text messages, Crowley revived the concept. He and his business partner, Naveen Selvadurai, introduced Foursquare in March during South by Southwest, an annual technology and music conference that draws media types, Internet entrepreneurs and technology fans.
Other companies, like BrightKite, Loopt and Google Latitude, are also offering services aimed at helping friends find each other on the go. But Foursquare has attracted more attention than the others, in part because it incorporates elements of gaming and social competition.
The system awards points and virtual badges to players depending on how often they go out and which places they visit. Users who frequent a particular place enough times are crowned “mayor” of that particular location.
“People are very territorial about their mayorships,” Crowley said. “It’s almost like bragging rights.”
Heckenberger says she once even leapt out of bed to reclaim the title at her local watering hole, the Swift Half Pub, where another player had briefly wrested away the honor.
