The Guardian has posted an interesting article online about the geo-location app FourSquare.

Journalist Leo Hickman reveals how easy it is to uncover the intimate details of a complete stranger’s life…

Louise is a complete stranger. Until 10 minutes ago when I discovered she was located within a mile of me, I didn’t even know of her existence. But equipped only with a smartphone and an increasingly popular social networking application called Foursquare, I have located her to within just a few square metres, accessed her Twitter account and conducted multiple cross-referenced Google searches using the personal details I have already managed to accrue about her from her online presence. In the short time it has taken me to walk to this pub in central London, I probably know more about her than if I’d spent an hour talking to her face-to-face. She doesn’t know it yet, but Louise is about to meet her new digital stalker.

Foursquare is the latest social networking tool to generate online buzz. The story has become very familiar in recent years: a bright young thing develops an internet app that connects people and allows them instantly to communicate with each other; within months, a million or more people around the planet are using it; investors queue up expressing an interest and speculation begins about how much Google, Yahoo!, Apple or Microsoft is willing to throw down to snap it up. (To date, the speculative figure in the media has reached $100m.)

Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and Bebo have all come before it, but Foursquare promises something new. After a decade of false dawns for the industry, it leads the way in a wave of new “geolocative” social networking tools. Unofficially, at least, 2010 has been labelled by many within the technology world as the “year of location”.

In addition to offering the communal connectivity of Twitter and Facebook, Foursquare also uses your smartphone’s global positioning system (GPS) to broadcast your precise location to your “friends” and, should you so wish, to the wider world. Users are encouraged to “check in” on their phone whenever they arrive at a point of interest – a shop, a cafe, a museum, a nightclub, an office – so that fellow users know where they are.

A great way supposedly to see if any of your friends are around and about. Glance down at your phone and – as I did with Louise – see the names of all the other users around you within a mile or so and, crucially, exactly where they are and which fellow users they are with. (I was drawn to Louise because she was in a cluster of Foursquare users – albeit still rare, even somewhere such as London – and she was the user allowing a stranger such as myself access to the most personal information – photograph, full name, Twitter feed etc.)

Visit somewhere a lot and you can even vie with other users to become its virtual “mayor”. If you feel so inclined, you can also leave a tip or review in the digital ether – “hey, order the bacon burger, it’s great!” – so others following can benefit from your experience.

Access the rest of the article online at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/jul/23/foursquare