Foursquare Finally Notifies you of Activity Besides Checkins, but Only on Android
By: Hillel Fuld
I am a huge fan of Foursquare. I think everyone recognizes today that gamification is a force to be reckoned with and becoming Mayor of a location turns out to be quite an incentive to today’s youth (as well as to many adults). If you would have asked me a few years ago, whether I would use an app to “check in” to a location just so I can become Mayor (like I did at inneractive this week, ahem ahem) and blast that accomplishment to my friends and network, I would have laughed and said “Absolutely not”.
However, not a day goes by that I do not check in on Foursquare and at Appboy, we even brought the checkin concept to mobile apps. Sign up here. Apparently I am not alone and Foursquare recently announced that it has reached the impressive milestone of ten million users (see the below infographic).
Now that I made you scroll all the way down here, let me get to the point of this article. As I mentioned, I am a fan of Foursquare, but ever since I have been on the service, I always wondered why reading a comment someone left on a checkin of mine was such a complicated task. There was no central notification hub in which I could see all my recent notifications and I never understood why that was. Truth is, I thought I must be missing something, apparently I wasn’t.
Foursquare just released an update to its Android app to enable a notification bar that includes the following types of notifications:
- A friend comments on one of your check-ins
- There are new comments or photos on a check-in you’ve commented on
- Your friend does one of the Tips you’ve left
- You and a friend both have the same place on your To-Do List
- A place you’re at starts swarming
- One of your Facebook friends joins foursquare; and
- You’re ousted as Mayor
Seems like good notifications has become the backbone of any good web and mobile service nowadays with iOS5 focusing strongly on a new notification system, Google+ working hard to provide an awesome notification system, and Android receiving press about the way the OS handles notifications. Now Foursquare can join the notifications party with their own system that from the looks of it, will bring the service to a whole new level.
Interestingly enough, the new update is rolling out to Android users before iPhone users, which is a first in Foursquare’s history. Of course, the Web’s leading Apple fanboy MG Siegler has what to say about that.
To read more about the new Foursquare notifications system, click here.
