Foursquare is celebrating! With just over a year of being active, and somewhere close to 750,000+ users 4SQ has flipped the game when it comes to location based social networks. With deals in place with Bravo, HBO and Starbucks it can only stand to grow.

4SQDay which was started on a whim by a Tampa Bay Optometrist, yes and eye doctor who dabbles in social media grew in strength seemingly overnight via Facebook and Twitter. No doubt that when the Foursquare guys heard about all this they were stoked to say the least. With 4sqday.com you can check out whats happening today in over 50 different cities, things like swarm meetups where 50 or more people checkin to a single venue to get the illusive swarm badge, to seeing what venues are promoting deals.

All of this bodes well for the location based startup, and while gowalla and brightkite are also great services, i’m finding there is a bit more heart with foursquare users, myself included. want to watch a neat little video about 4SQ? See below.

Apparently Ben gets around.

If you’ve ever met our tech director Ben Feist, you’d know that he has a bit of a mischievous streak in him.  That’s why I wasn’t surprised when he told me that he was the foursquare mayor for all of the digital agencies in the Toronto area.

I think it’s hilarious, but I should mention that not everyone is laughing.  Apparently some people aren’t impressed that Ben is the Mayor of the TAXI Bodyshop (our office gym) since he’s never there.  Of course, he doesn’t actually have to be in the building to check in, he could just be in the vicinity.

One might ask how he did it, but I think the clear answer is that he just has way too much time on his hands.

In conclusion: remember to check into your workplaces foursquar-ers, or one day you might wake up to find this man as your mayor:

Hello, Clarice.

Unless you’ve been stuck under a rock for the past few months, you’ve likely heard about location check-in services such as Foursquare and Gowalla.  If you aren’t hardcore into these services like Drew and Christian are, then you might have found yourself asking “What’s the point?”

Obviously businesses and advertisers can appreciate what these services are trying to accomplish, but what about users?  Sure it’s useful to see where your friends go for sushi, or where they are right now, but beyond getting to be the “Mayor” of a location, there is little incentive to check-in.

MyTown differs in this respect by offering a game mechanic to the user.  You gain points from each check-in you make, and these points can be used to “buy” locations.  After you’ve bought a location, you start getting rent every time anyone else checks in at that location.  Then you can use this rent to improve your property (which increases the rent you receive from every check-in) or buy new properties.

The stats speak for themselves:

• Gowalla: 100,000+ users in one year (source1+source2)
• Foursquare: 600,00 users in 15 months (source1+source2)
• MyTown: 1.2 million users in 2 months (source)

It just goes to show how a seemingly small differentiator can make a big difference.

Way back some time a co-worker of mine left for NYC to head back to school. Upon his return he spoke of a service called dodgeball that a friend of his had been working on. a SMS based service that would let you check into different places and let your friends know where you were once checked in. I though this service sounded rad and was quite disapppointed that it was only available in select US cities. A short time later some company named Google swept up Dodgeball and then did nothing with it. Some time around SXSW last year the Dodgeballl people were free to do their own thing, Google had shut the doors on Dodgeball. Foursquare came out of the closing of DB and with the gaining momentum of GPS enabled mobile devices Foursquare was a hit at SXSW. A native iPhone app and old school sms were used to get the service going again. My hopes were high that it would come to the north, I kept begging my friend Mark to find out when it was going on.
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