Down Goes Foursquare! Down Goes Foursquare!

I’m hopelessly addicted to Foursquare. 

For the uninitiated, Foursquare is a mobile, social media application that leverages GPS technology inherent in some mobile devices to encourage you to “check in” at various locations to tell the world what you’re doing.  It ups the ante by offering “badges,” or small tokens, for completing specific tasks (e.g. you’ll get the “Swarm” badge if you check into a place in which there are more than 50 other Foursquare users already checked in, you’ll get the “Newbie” badge for your first official check in, etc.)  Beyond badges, Foursquare also awards Mayorships for being the person that checks into a specific venue the most times.  

As a web marketer, an application like this, in which you can reward people for showing up to specific venue (like a store), adds another very valuable and very strategic promotional arrow to my quiver.  

Unfortunately, the site is a victim of its own popularity, as increased traffic has crashed it for basically the past two days.  This isn’t uncommon – both Facebook and Twitter suffered similar growing pains.  But for those of us aching to check into the Green Bay Residence Inn to protect our standing as Mayor, this outage is pretty darned unacceptable.