Foursquare and Twitter: Do You Really Enjoy Foursquare Tweets?

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Are you a Foursquare user yet?  If not, you should be.  If you believe in the power of Windmill Networking and being able to physically meet contacts in your LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter networks, Foursquare helps facilitate this in real-time at a physical location.  iPhone, Android and Blackberry users should be especially keen on joining and utilizing the real-time-real-location social networking platform because of the phone applications that exists for these popular smartphone platforms.

Foursquare is a simple way to “check in” to a location and to broadcast to the world that you are there.  Other users can then see that you checked in in real-time and decide whether or not they want to visit you while you are at that location.  Of course, there are other ways of using Foursquare, like telling your friends about the latest and coolest location that you found.  But the idea behind a geo-location service like Foursquare is to find (other people) and be found (by other people) in real-time at an actual physical location.

Foursquare has spread virally since it’s inception because they made it easy for you to 1) login with your Facebook connections and 2) connect your Facebook and/or Twitter accounts to broadcast to the world every time you check in to a new location.  This is the root of the potential problem: do you really want to fill your Tweets and Facebook Wall up with broadcasts of where you’re at all the time?

Twitter has progressed a great deal in the past several months.  If you are on Twitter and have found use for it, you already understand that not everyone on Twitter is talking about what they had for breakfast today.  If you are seriously tweeting and trying to make friendships as well as sharing information, chances are you avoid mentioning tweets that no one is interested in to begin with.  Remember, Twitter is about having meaningful communication and sharing relevant information…unless you are a foodie or really DO want to know what someone had for breakfast, you probably don’t mention these things in your tweets.

If you buy into my argument this far, you can see why I personally don’t enjoy Foursquare tweets.  Think about it: just as nobody cared about what you ate for breakfast, I don’t think that people on Twitter care that you are “checking in” to your local Trader Joe’s.  If I am out and want to find someone to hook up with for a cup of coffee and conversation, I’ll check to see where my friends are at on my iPhone through the dedicated Foursquare application.

I don’t want my tweets flooded with real-time location updates from my Foursquare friends.  And I’m not the only one.  Just doing a Google search for “block foursquare twitter” will yield a lot of results, including this tweet from someone who echoes my sentiments:

The funny thing is I feel like I am in the minority on this one.  One of my good friends who I met on Twitter yet have been unable to physically meet in person, Perri Gorman (also known on Twitter as “@BeTheButterfly“), recently wrote a great blog post on Foursquare.  At the end of the post she asked a few power users, including myself, as to how we felt about these “location tweets.”  Of the seven people who commented, I was the only one who disliked them.  In fact, and you can quote me, I said,

“They should be banned. I promised my Twitter followers I would never tweet a Foursquare location and they should call me on it if I ever do!”

So there you have it.  Now that I’ve completed my rant, what do YOU think about these tweets on Twitter?  For or against?  Am I missing something here?   Please do let me and all of my readers know!

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