Dennis Crowley

socialgreat.com

New York City's digerati and mobile geeks have been augmenting their goings-about-town with Foursquare, the iPhone app released earlier this year that creator Dennis Crowley recently described to NYFi's John Fischer as "Twitter for your social life."

Now, as The Business Insider reports, Google's Jon Steinberg has taken it a step further with his new Web site, SocialGreat, which uses Foursquare's programming interface to "anonymously track (and map) the most popular NYC venues."

But wait, back up! Tell us again what this Foursquare stuff is all about?

Here's how Mr. Fischer described it in his recent profile of Mr. Crowley:

To try to explain Foursquare concisely is to pack a lot of description into few words. The program essentially turns a user’s social life into a video game using their cell phone’s GPS chip. Users “check in” when they visit a bar, restaurant, gym, supermarket, or pretty much any destination they might encounter in a city, and earn points for doing so. Visit a location more than anyone else playing and you become its “mayor,” a contested title that is lost just as easily as it is awarded. Different activities also unlock themed “badges,” virtual distinctions like “Local: You’ve been at the same place 3x in one week!” or “Photogenic: You found three places with a photobooth!” Were that not enough, the app also notifies your friends of your whereabouts, and lets users add comments and tips to places they visit. Anything from “nice views at dusk” at a park, to “I threw up here last night” at a bar.

So now you can see how SocialGreat is building on that:

Crowley, by Boris Veldhuijzen
van Zanten via flickr.

Dennis Crowley is betting that you want your phone to tell you what to do in New York.
 
This is actually a bet that the 33-year-old programmer has been making since 2001, when he became Internet-famous for building a Web site called Dodgeball. The service, which let its members text their whereabouts to friends at any given time, was a basically a social-media network before there were many. It was initially conceived as a “way to coordinate drinking plans,” and was quickly adopted in certain New York media and tech circles. Remarkably, it survived the bursting of the tech bubble and was acquired by Google in 2005.

But, unable to figure out a use for it, Google shut it down earlier this year.
 
Crowley still believes that people want to augment their social lives with technology.  “After I left Dodgeball in 2007,” Crowley said over a beer at a loud, dark-paneled bar called the Scratcher, near his Cooper Square office, “I worked for a company called Area Code, designing interactive games using real-world spaces. Like a game of Monopoly played by thousands of people all using their GPS locations to make moves.”

A year later, Crowley and partner Naveen Selvadurai started Foursquare, an app launched a little more than three months ago to considerable fanfare from outlets like The New York Times and Wired (along with an early mention by the New York Observer).  Part of the reason it drew so much attention is because if it works, Foursquare could revolutionize the way New Yorkers get information about restaurants, bars, weekend plans, stores, lunch specials, landmarks, scenic views, and the like. Or, depending on what happens in the coming months, it might just turn out to be a very cleverly designed game.