I hate foursquare. Not because of what the app can do, but because of what the app DOES do.
It shits in Twitter timelines. With every checkin. Possibly the most annoying thing ever.
The magic, for me, of Twitter is how eloquently the people I follow on Twitter are. They “get” the saying “brevity is the soul of wit.” Short, descriptive clips of something interesting. And often, the folks I follow are bloggers who post interesting URL’s when they blog.
foursquare now decides to shit a useless URL into Twitter streams far and wide every time someone checks in. Honestly, I care not. If I wanted to know where someone was, I’d ask.
But here’s the kicker. 90% of the folks I follow on Twitter:
a) I’ve never met
b) Live far away from me
c) Do interesting things in life and have interesting things to say
d) Provide what I’ve often called Smart Content
Smart Content isn’t telling the world where you are. It’s meaningful information. Behind a Twitter URL can be a blog post, and interesting site, a cool picture, and generally something meaningful. foursquare provides a link to a site that tells me how many folks visited a certain corner/bus stop/business etc. I just don’t care AND it’s ruining the way I use Twitter.
Tech is what any of us make of it.
So today I unfollowed everyone who uses foursquare. Logging into Twitter to see pages of URLs that lead me to useless information is not only a waste of time, it’s a waste of my bandwidth.
Nothing personal. I really don’t have any ill feelings towards any of the users. But until the app removes the clutter from what should be a simple and eloquent way of communicating, i.e. Twitter, I ain’t gonna follow you if you use foursquare.