It's not bad enough that I am on Facebook and Twitter, I have been sucked into foursquare.com where I can check in online and let everyone in the world know where I am. There is no real reason to do this other than that you earn points and virtual badges along the way. If you check in enough times at a place you can earn the right to become the Mayor of that location.
I am now the mayor of, Edmonds Station, the train station I use every morning. Oh there is another guy who calls it Edmonds Train Station who thinks he is the mayor, but I am using the correct name of the station and therefor deserve to be the true mayor of Edmonds Station.
This is one of the major flaws I see in Foursquare (other than that it exists at all). Since users define the place they are checking into a single place can show up several times on maps of what is around you based on your GPS coordinates under different names. Thus multiple people can simultaneously be the mayor of the same place.
How pitiful have I become? I am salivating like Pavlov's dog at the opportunity to become virtual mayor of a place by virtue of me "checking in" on Foursquare every day and being tracked by GPS on my Blackberry. What's even more pitiful is that Foursquare is supposed to be like Facebook and Twitter in that you network with friends who have joined so they can track your whereabouts. And I don't have a single friend on Foursquare because I am too embarrassed to ask my Facebook friends join for fear of what they'll think of me for being part of yet another stupid social network site.
On the plus side my Foursquare check ins and shout outs are fed automatically into Twitter so that all of the spam sites following me on Twitter can know where I am at any given moment.
Is this a great time we live in or what? What possibly can they come up with next to waste time?
2 comments:
Ya know, I was accused of being paranoid when I told people about the potential of abuse (SPAM) when all this data converged into a single source.
If the paranoia fits, wear it.
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