Check it out (or is that in?): Foursquare #anz23mthings

This is a bit of a catch-up post for Thing 4 from last week 🙂

So… Thing 4 for #anz23mthings was “Checking in and maps.”
Like many others, I hadn’t really used foursquare before for various reasons:

• I don’t really go to many exciting places
• I only have WiFi and not all places have WiFi
• Privacy reasons
• Why would I want to???

But the point of #anz23mthings is to give new things a go, and familiarize myself with them so I dutifully downloaded the mobile Foursquare app and gave it a go.

It was actually quite fun!

I had a bit of a unusual week last week (had to go down to Wellington/Lower Hutt for a Academic Board meeting for the Open Polytechnic – I’m a student representative so go down about once a month), so I got some interesting places to check in – like the airport, and the Open Polytechnic. It was quite fun locating the free WiFi at the airport and checking myself in and out, and I earned a couple of badges/milestones which was fun 🙂

I also became mayor of two places 🙂

My workplace

The Batcave

Privacy

For the rest of the week, I just checked in at work and at home. I know, I was a bit worried about checking in at home with privacy concerns, but I found this helpful article from foursquare which explained how you could do it and still maintain your privacy of the home address. Hopefully it has worked!!! So when you click on my log-ins into “Batcave”, you should only be able to see that it is a private address, and the map should show the general location (Hamilton). Something like this:

 

Or:

So did I enjoy it?

Yes, because I’m quite competitive; I liked earning the different badges and becoming mayor of two places. I don’t like the way it can spam people on Twitter though, so I tried to be aware of that and use it sparingly.

Is it something I will keep on using?

Probably not, as I don’t see a huge amount of use for it and I don’t want everyone to see where I am all the time. It was fun to experiment with, but I would rather devote my energy and time to other networks (like Twitter).

So checking out of foursquare now – will most likely delete my account, but it was a fun experiment!