I think Foursquare is great. It's a location based web service, that combines service reviews and game elements. You can use it to find out about bars, restaurants, shops and the like around you, and see what people have said about it. People can leave tips to suggest what you should do, and you can also make your own to-do lists that you can work on achieving over time. You use a mobile to checkin to a place that you're visiting. This is essentially like saying "I'm here" (and you can hook up your twitter and facebook so that you can publish this to those feeds if you want; thankfully with that option offered every time to reduce the stalkerish possibilities. The game part of the service involves unlocking badges for various "accomplishments" not unlike achievements in some console games. On Friday night I unlocked a new badge, as you can see here:
You've checked into 25 different venues!
Unlocked by Dan S. on Sat Mar 13, 2010 at 2:28 AM @ Lydia's Pub in Saskatoon.
Unfortunately I'm limited to checking in where I have wireless internet signal, so I didn't manage to check in until we were leaving Lydia's. I'm planning to invest in an iPhone not too long after I get back over to Korea (aka when I'm making money), which will let me check in EVERYWHERE! It will also be a lot more useful when I'm back over there, for discovering new and awesome places!
Personalized PDF Brochure:
The second neat thing is something I just found yesterday. I was looking at the website for the University of Southern Queensland and they informed me that I could give them a bit of information on what I was interested in, and they would quickly produce and email me a personally tailored pdf brochure. I answered five or six quick questions and they instantly provided a link to the pdf, and mailed it to me. I glanced through the six page brochure, and it does seem to be very centered on the things I asked for. This seems a great way to give people just the information that they want, and reduces the need to dig around a large site that will include a lot of things that you're not really interested in.
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