Fun With FourSquare

foursquare-logo-iphoneI decided to have a little fun this weekend with one of San Francisco’s tech companies, FourSquare. The family decided to take a run out to In-N-Out burger in Daly City and as usual, daughter and I sat in the car while wife scoped out the place to put our order in and see if there was a table available. I had some time on my hands, so I pulled out my iPhone and started tapping away.

I pulled up FourSquare to allow me to check into In-N-Out burger. I’m not really sure why I do this. I don’t get anything for it and FourSquare gets lots of data from me and everyone else who uses it just to give me a badge-like picture for checking in at a lot of places. I at least got an Apple TV from Viggle, so today it was time to have fun with them.

As I was checking in I noticed the picture icon where you could take a picture of the place you’re checking into which gets added to the list of pictures for that particular place. I happened to notice something really fun. It was so fun that I had to make the Dr. Evil face. It gave me a choice to add a picture from my library. Oh dear, what have they done now. So I can add a picture of anything I want to the place I’m checking into. Me being the rebellious type decided to choose a picture of a taco that I had on my camera. I know. It’s not the most rebellious thing to do, but it was a start.

I could see something that was at our disposal where you could make a statement with your check in. You could get a picture of drunk fails and post that to a bar you frequent. A herd of cows would be appropriate for a check-in at Costco. Come to think of it a herd of cows would be fun to post at a gym. PETA [People for the Edible Ethical Treatment of Animals] would have a field day posting pics of slaughterhouses at meat friendly places. I posted a picture of my old roomate’s dog Bear licking her lips with a beer in front of her looking like she’s about ready to pass out to my check-in at Krispy Kreme doughnuts because when you look like that what kind of food sounds really good.

These are places that I like. Imagine what I could do if I was given bad service at a place I checked in to? Pictures are worth a thousand words and I think there are many ways that FourSquare can now beat out Yelp.

Empire Avenue: Stock Trading for Social Media

I don’t have lots of money to play around in the stock market as those who saw my broke-ass of the week feature on the brokeassstuart website. If I did, I’d put it into Apple because even when things suck, they go up. Now there’s a website for people who would like to buy stock in their social media friends and hopefully gain a profit. It’s kind of like fantasy football for the stock market lovers.

What you do is sign up and connect all your social media sites to it so they can check it out and see how much you’re worth. After I finished I had started at somewhere around $11e [e being, eaves, the name of the empire commerce currency] and noticed that people started buying shares in me. I’m hooked up in a lot of sites, not just twitter and Facebook, but instagr.am, youtube, foursquare, LinkedIn, etc so I guess that’s why it showed my value at an increase of +7.217. That’s a lot higher than some of the bigger names out there.

I’m still not sure what you can do with what you earn, but I started to buy shares in friends of mine who are on twitter and Facebook who have good increases. I’ve never had money to invest in the stock market, though I did have an great-aunt who gave me her shares in a steel company that was sold and cashed out and I got $10k with no money invested so I can’t complain there, especially since he put me through college way back when

This seems like a very interesting experiment since after I joined klout.com within a week I was asked in five different interviews what my klout score was. Who knows, in the future people will be asking what your social media stock price is at. Maybe if I’m lucky I’ll break 400 like Apple at the end of the month, but I have no idea what the highest valued social media geek is worth at the moment. I’ll need to do more research. If you join and want a good return on your investment with the e that they give you look up BBTB since that’s the abbreviation of my stock. It’s climbing quickly. Since I’ve started writing this article my stock has jumped over 10 points overnight.

 

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