What is Foursquare and how do I use it?

New York mobile startup Foursquare is one of the hottest Internet companies around.

But what is it? What’s it for? How can you get started?

Foursquare is primarily for letting your friends know where you are and figuring out where they are. Secondarily, it’s for collecting points, prize “badges,” and eventually, coupons, for going about your everyday business.

And it’s becoming popular. Foursquare now has almost 275,000 users in less than a year.

As a business, it hasn’t done much in the way of revenue-generation yet, but some strategies for doing so are coming in to focus. Promotional deals for frequent customers have already started popping up on the service. Co-founder and CEO Dennis Crowley tells us that Foursquare will be experimenting with a wide-range of strategies over the coming months.

Here’s a step-by-step look at what Foursquare is and how it works on iPhone.

When you first boot up the app, you see a list of your friends, and what they’re up to

How does Foursquare know what your friends are up to?  They have “checked in” and left comments with their accounts.How does it know who your “friends” are?  You can “friend” people in Foursquare…or just import your Facebook friends.

Clicking on one of your friends will bring up her profile

Press the “Places” button at the bottom of the screen and this will bring up this list of venues near you

How does Foursquare know where you are?  It uses your phone’s GPS.The list of venues includes, first and foremost, bars, as well as restaurants, stores, and other locations.

Click the venue you’re actually in to bring up this screen; now press “Check-in here”

You set how public you want your check-in to be: Foursquare can tell your friends within the game, Twitter, or Facebook.

That’s it! You’re in. You can see who else is in the same spot, and you will be awarded points for your check-ins

You can also see who is “the mayor” of the place you’re in — that is, who has checked-in the most frequently.

Look at a venue on Google Maps, and search for nearby tweets

The ‘Tips’ tab shows you suggestions for what to do at this venue; you can also add your own

You can also keep a “to-do” list of tips you want to follow in the future.

You can earn badges based on your check-ins.

There are badges for total number of check-ins, for checking in to the same place repeatedly, for checking-in to many places in a single night, and so on.

Here’s the game aspect: you can see a leader board of all of your friends and how many points they have this week

Invite friends from Facebook or Twitter to add more people to the mix

You can see what your friends have accomplished

Foursquare can ping you when a friend checks in somewhere

On the Foursquare Web site, you can keep track of tasks you want to complete, manage your friends, and review your stats…

… in fact, you can look very, very closely at your stats. A good way to learn a little too much about your going-out habits.

Got it? Good….

Social Media and Chaos: A Love Story

Wikipedia, MySpace blah blah blah: who would have thought these platforms would work? When planning to create a new encyclopaedia, you would probably gather together a group of fine and varied minds, set up a structure (to cover everything) and a strict editorial process, then set out a timeline of, what, six years to complete the job? You certainly wouldn’t set up a website and open it up for entries to be posted by anyone and his wife.

Equally, you wouldn’t think that a social network made up, largely, of badly-designed, error-code-displaying personal home-pages would have been such a massive hit. Yet it was. Facebook was hardly much better – as the subsequent bi-annual revamps have proved – and it’s still almost impossible to find certain features (see this exasperated exchange on how to change a Fan page URL), yet 350 million users can’t be wrong. Can they?

No. In social media, popularity is everything. Users = success. Yet the point remains, the greatest social media successes have emerged from a kind of vaguely structured chaos. Twitter is another case in point. Try to describe Twitter to a complete novice and you realise what a mess it is! So, who sees what? And it’s all public? And how do people find you? Back when I was a Product Manager, I once described Twitter was a “broken Groups feature”. I was right – but it’s still a runaway success.

Now that social media is maturing, we’re seeing the social fabric of our interactions stretched. Foursquare, the location-based game, encourages people to share their exact location throughout the day. Thinking back to when people feared to publish their name on the Internet, this is a dramatic shift (and one that’s not without it’s problems, check out www.pleaserobme.com). Similarly, the new chat-to-a-complete-stranger game, ChatRoulette, defies the standard logic of everyday interaction. Try it out. You get to chat with a complete stranger (who you can also see), no strings attached. When you’re bored you don’t have to make excuses: just click “next” and you have a completely new stranger to chat to. If only real life were like that!

But wait, this IS real life. Although, to some extent, social media is seen as a very specific industry that doesn’t have much to do with “proper” business (I was recently pardoned for speaking my mind in a business meeting because I’m a social media “free spirit” ;), I think all businesses can learn from these examples. Each of these social media services has broken new ground in terms of communication: between friends, relatives, colleagues and even complete strangers. Businesses facing failing returns from advertising and internal communication problems during rapid growth would do well to ask why social media works so well.

There are no straight lines in nature – and humans are natural beasts. Why restrict us within strict corporate communication channels and boundaries? We’re far more effective (and creative) within an unstructured environment. As recent developments in social media show, if you’re looking for an innovative communication channel, chaos isn’t an option – it’s a pre-requisite.