It’s 1 a.m. Do you know where your Foursquare friends are?
Every night, hundreds if not thousands of Twin Cities diners, concertgoers, sports fans and club kids are using smart phones to punch in their whereabouts on such social media networks as Foursquare and Twitter. These night owls are using their iPhones and Evos as a different way to see and be seen.
Not only have these mobile networks changed the way people go out, but they’re changing the way bars, restaurants and music venues market to consumers, with digital come-ons that include food and drink specials, instant coupons and VIP perks.
Use of mobile devices for such nightlife networking is big, and getting bigger. Twitter, which lets users send short messages called “tweets” to their lists of followers, has 100 million users. Foursquare is a location-based service that has a smaller but rapidly expanding user base of 1.5 million. With its geo-coding capability, Foursquare instantly records “checked-in” users as being at a particular location. Without making a phone call, people can track down their friends for a meet-up — or maybe avoid them entirely.
For fans of these networks, a night without smart phones is unimaginable. Detractors find the whole thing pointless, even narcissistic — does the world really need to know your every move?
On a recent Friday night, Kareem Ahmed, 23, stepped into First Avenue, the downtown Minneapolis rock club, and immediately whipped out his iPhone. He was there to see the electro-rock band Solid Gold. On his phone, Ahmed checked in on the club’s Foursquare page and sent out tweets announcing his arrival.
Ahmed has more than 3,000 followers on Twitter. Some he knows, others he does not. But they read his tweets and he follows their digital musings, too.
“Twitter is the main source of information for anything I do,” he said…
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