Four Reasons You Should Join Foursquare

“What is Foursquare?“

Foursquare is a website and mobile app which allows out to “check in” to any location in the world. Shops, parks, homes, streets, restaurants, cinemas, you name it. Once you are checked in your friends (only people you have approved) will be able to see where you are.

Four reasons you should join:

1) It’s useful

The best way to use Foursquare is by installing the app on your smart phone. Once you’ve done this you can “check in” anywhere you are near to. Say I checked in to Southampton City Centre, and some friends of mine checked in a few hundreds metres down the road having coffee in Starbucks, my phone would immediately alert me that my friends were close.

Obviously some of you would be miffed if I came and interrupted your chin wag in Starbucks. But if it was a friend who lived out of town that I hadn’t seen in ages, Foursquare would aid our beautiful collision! The moral of this story is: Be very careful who you add as a “friend” on Foursquare.

2) You get free stuff

Our church meets in a cinema. Because we hire the premises, we have to buy our own coffee at the end of the service. Adrian Plass once described coffee as “the light at the end of the tunnel of any Christian meeting”. I’m pleased to say this isn’t the case at Life Church! Nevertheless I was pleased to discover that because I checked in to the cinema for the first time, I was entitled to a free tea or coffee.

There are hundreds of other examples. You can get 20% off Bella Italia if you’re the “mayor”. You can become “mayor” of a location by visiting it more than anyone else on Foursquare.

3) It’s the world’s biggest game

As well as being useful and resulting in freebies, Foursquare is also a massive game. You compete against your friends to get the most points and win Mayorships. It sounds ridiculous, but once you get into it, it’s a lot of fun!

4) The more the merrier

The more people on Foursquare that you know, the more it makes sense. Especially in relation to points one and three. If you still think it sounds crazy, then think of it like Twitter…no one gets it, but everyone loves it! It’s the same with Foursquare.

It’s social, it’s fun and yes it’s useful at times. But deep down we all know it’s just another form of procrastination. So go ahead and sign up. I promise you it’s good fun, and you never know, maybe when you discover a local freebie you’ll thank me for this blog.

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