Foursquare Push Notifications, For The Ultimate In Friend Stalking
June 25, 2009 ·Filed Under Technology News
Foursquare, the location-based social networking service, is about to activate Push Notifications in the new version of its iPhone app, due shortly. I’ve been beta examining it out for the past week, and I’m happy to report that it works brilliantly. But be warned: Some of you will not like that concept.
Applications using Push have been rolling out by the past week. None so far have been bigger than the IM clients like AIM and Beejive, as instant messaging is an obvious use of Push messages. But location can work quite well too, as Foursquare is proving, but only for a undoubtful kind of location app.
Foursquare is all about explicitly “checking-in” places. That is to say, when you go somewhere, you have to boot up the app, load the site or send a text to let it know you want to check-in there. It doesn’t do it automatically, even whether you have the app open. considering of that, Push Notifications prepare sense, since they ping your followers when you check-in somewhere. And you really shouldn’t have to concern about privacy considering you are the one checking in to a place, on purpose, to let the public you know — that you personally allowed to let follow you — see where you are.
Of course, regardless of that, there will be folks who don’t like that concept. Some have been too liberal with who they allow to follow them. Others won’t like the notion of someone getting pinged every date they check in somewhere. I imagine it will be kind of like how some users at first didn’t like the Facebook News Feed considering it made the knowledge updates from your profile more obvious — even though all that info was already there for folks to see.
Others won’t like the concept of their own phone getting pinged every duration a friend checks in somewhere. But, of course, you can always turn the Push Notifications off. Right now, the service is wrestling with the view of having them set to “on” as the default when you download the new version, co-founder Dennis Crowley tells us.
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And you can toggle notifications on a per-user basis. Though in that version of the app (1.3), it’s somewhat of a pain to do considering you have to go on a user’s profile, next visit on the “Pings” tab, soon after flip the switch on “Checkin Messages.” In the future, Crowley hopes there will be an area of the app that contains a list of all your friends and you can easily go through that to toggle them on or off. Right now, you can do that on the Foursquare website on that page.
And it’s easy to turn all these notifications on or off. In the upper right side of the app there is a “Ping: On/Off” area. Clicking on that takes you to a Pings page that gives you a few options. One is to turn checkin messages off until the following daylight (great for whether you’re going to bed). Another allows you to turn them off until you turn them back on in the same menu.
Again, I understand that a lot of society won’t like that view of being able to “stalk” your friends’ whereabout. But that is where social networking is heading. Just imagine being hungry around lunchtime or being in the mood for a happy hour drink, and getting pinged with a letter showing you that a friend is doing one of those activities. These types of apps actually put the “social” — as in, real life social — in “social networking.”
Foursquare 1.3 with Push Notifications should be available soon in the App Store for free.
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