According to this article from AOL’s TechCrunch, the increasingly-popular Foursquare has reached 5 million users.
I’m among that 5 million, as are a few of my friends. I’m not particularly loyal, however, to any of these similar services. I have a Foursquare account, a Gowalla account, and of course a Facebook account. With the addition of Facebook Places it makes it very hard for me to keep up with the others.
If I’m even going to keep up with such a service (I always forget to check in places until I’ve left them) it will have to be only one service. I had a Palm Pre for a while and used the Gowalla and Foursquare apps interchangeably—whichever one was working at the time (invariably one of them would not be working correctly). I blame a lot of that on Sprint, however, which is (in my area, at least) absolutely horrible.
Now I am using an HTC Incredible on the Verizon Wireless network and I’ve never been happier. However, I am still torn between Foursquare and the new Facebook Places (it didn’t exist when I had Sprint). Places lacks the “game” nature that Foursquare has going for it and also the horde of venues—but then again Foursquare didn’t launch with every corner store in its database either.
That being said, Foursquare lacks many of my friends. I only have two friends from everyday life who actually use Foursquare—my other friends on there are internet acquaintances. Obviously, my Facebook account contains more of my “real” friends, which makes using Places seem more rewarding. Sure, I don’t unlock accomplishments and badges for my activities but I do have the feeling that it matters more on Places—more of my friends are going to see and possibly comment on the activity.
On Foursquare it feels as if no one really notices—I’m only making a log of my activity for myself. Foursquare, however, feels more fun: collecting points, being rewarded for discovering new places, and earning random badges I didn’t even know existed.
The jury is still out for me. It would be nice if one would collect the check-ins from the other and live on-top of it that way—with the Places API it’s more likely for Foursquare to pull in Places’ data, plus Facebook is not going to give up their stake in the geo-portion of their service.
In the meantime I suppose I’ll just continue as I have been.
Afterthought: Gowalla’s website interface trumps all.