Foursquare: How Much Checking In Is Too Much?

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I jumped on the Foursquare bandwagon relatively early. I was at a bar in the Lower East Side sharing in some revelry (and one too many Arrogant Bastards) when my friend Nando said, “Hey, Bebe,” (his nickname for me), “Are you on Foursquare yet?” Ever one to be a part of the latest social media venture, I quickly found myself with a new way to let the world (at least the world involving my menagerie of drinking pals and technologically-forward friends) know exactly where I was from the moment I “checked in.”

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As with most of the other start-ups I had blindly agreed to become a member of (Friendster, Myspace, Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter), I didn’t initially “get” Foursquare: Why, on earth, would my seven Foursquare friends need to see that I was at Bar X when I was undoubtedly already with THEM at Bar X? It’s a little like arriving at a house party with your friend Veronica and then turning to poor, unsuspecting Veronica and saying “Oh. Hey! You’re here!” Obviously that’s how all of these new social media apps start. I can just imagine Mark Zuckerberg turning to his early Facebook cohorts and saying, “Dude! You just updated that you were hanging with me at Brass Monkey…you only have two friends on here, and one of them is ME!” (Of course, early Facebook predated the iPhone and Blackberry and thus there was not yet the invention of such an “app,” but let’s go with it…). This is, of course, how all of these things start.

Read the full post at Mediaite.


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