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Now that I’ve discovered the fun of services like Foursquare and Yelp with their mobile apps, I find myself checking in no matter where I am. It’s like a reflex. The exciting part (if you’re a nerd) is how primitive this is right now, and how you can be a part of something that will undoubtedly explode in the next few years!

What Is Foursquare?

If you hadn’t heard of Foursquare, it’s a GPS-based application that lets you “check in” to the network whenever you visit an establishment of any kind. It doesn’t matter if you’re sitting in traffic on the Golden Gate Bridge, or having a slice at the local hole-in-the-wall pizzeria: simply open your Foursquare app (or the website), tap “check in,” and find the name of the building you’re in on the list once it refreshes.

If it’s not there, you can add it, and it becomes a permanent inclusion. Then, “check in” to that building and get some points for doing so. Your points accumulate and give you serious e-cred (once again, if you’re a nerd) amongst the community, and you can be designated as the “mayor” of a building, location or establishment if you’ve checked in more than anyone else through time.

Beyond this, you can leave a comment. Much like using Twitter, these “Foursquare tweets” can be reviews, comments or anything else you’d like. You can view others’ comments, and they can view yours. This can either be great for business, or a real curse if your service, food or products suck. It’s a big score for humanity, since it adds another incentive (or threat) to those who do bad business anywhere.

The Foursquare Subculture

Foursquare, to a major degree, has a huge subculture that is best compared to Twitter users and their “Tweet-Ups.” Foursquare’s gimmick are “badges,” which are earned by doing various things: checking in X amount of times, being the first to check in to a place that hasn’t been noticed before, checking in to multiple locations across regions, etc. There’s even an online store where you can buy wearable pin or patch versions of the classic Foursquare badges and wear them on your backpack or jacket. Believe me, it’s big, and getting bigger by the week.

I still don’t see Foursquare as being a threat to Twitter, or even a competitor. They both serve different functions. Now that Twitter is jumping on the geo-location bandwagon, it’s possible that they might be going into a similar direction, but Foursquare has already established its roots in the local “check in and comment” market, much like the way Yelp has become the official place to rate any business. Speaking of which, Yelp already treads on Foursquare’s turf with its own “check in” feature. Oh, and there are also more “check in” competitors like GoWalla, BrightKite, Loopt, Rummble and others…hell, even Google stepped in the ring with Google Latitude. This will be an interesting battle, to say the least.

Foursquare’s Still In Its Infancy

It’s early 2010, and one thing is for sure: Foursquare is in an obvious “neanderthal” phase. More than half the time, the buildings I check in to don’t even exist in their database, and I have to add them. Other times, you’ll notice how multiple Foursquare users have inputted the name of a place (i.e., “Vince Lombardi service area,” “Vince Lombardi rest stop,” etc.) more than once, with different punctuation or wording, yet, they’ve all made it through the system. This is indeed a problem, and a sloppy one at that. For the future, Foursquare should clamp down on legitimate names of businesses or some sort of uniformity that will disallow “sloppiness.”

The service has huge implications for what’s to come. Will businesses notice and contact, hire or reward “mayors,” or run promotions for customers who check in to their stores? Most likely.

Personally, I can’t wait to see new CMSs or even Joomla or Wordpress plugins that will let us create our own “check in” feature for our own local sites.