Last month, we wrote about Foursquare’s potential from a business perspective thanks to its location data. This week, the service has started actively tapping that potential by alerting users when locations close to them are offering special deals.
As you can see in the image, a large blue alert now appears at the bottom of check-in pages on Foursquare’s iPhone app to let you know if there is a deal at a place close to the place where you currently are. With the headline “mayor offer nearby”, these deals reward mayors of particular places.
Users can become the “mayor” of a location on Foursquare by checking in at a place more than any other user over a 60 day period. For businesses, that’s obviously something that would be good to reward. And something like a free beer seems like a very small price to pay for getting people excited about coming to your place more often.
While there aren’t a lot of places offering these mayor deals yet, a number of establishments in New York and San Francisco (the cities where the service is most popular) are starting to pop up. There have also been some deals in places like LA and Denver.
In confirming that Foursquare is now actively promoting these mayor deals, co-founder Dennis Crowley also tells us that they’re working on doing some new “ad system stuff” for the app, but didn’t elaborate on that. It seems logical Foursquare will eventually partner up with local businesses to notify users of other types of deals — basically, a location-based coupon system.
Crowley also confirmed that a new version of the iPhone app, 1.4, should be out soon with a lot of new “bells and whistles.” One of those new features will be the ability to see who else is checked in at a place that you’re checked in to. That should do wonders for new friend discovery.
And Crowley sounds excited about the new Twitter geolocation API announced today. He says they’re going to try to squeeze some of it into the new build if they can. As I noted earlier, it would be a great feature if when you tweet out your Foursquare check-ins, it could also attach the location of the place so people reading your tweets don’t have to manually look it up.
You had me at BEER.
and you had me a free beer home delivery. My party started at 3PM
I know, I was drinking a beer while reading this and went “Hey! This is my kind of article!”
Great Divide’s Yeti, if you’re interested. My favorite beer. Dark and thick like motor oil. Tastes like heaven. Russian Imperial Stouts are the best!
haha I was laughing because I would totally respond that way if I were drinking a beer while I read this…
but I’m drunk enough right now that I didn’t even make the connection to myself. Ahhhh
adding features won’t work, will actually do the contrary
need to keep it simple
Are you good friends with the FourSquare guys are something?
I wish you were my good friend so you can promote my startup.
Aha, I wish you too.
Its all about who you know. If you don’t know that, just give up.
Your foursquare link on your post goes to foursquare.com instead of playfoursquare.com. FYI
Your foursquare link on your post goes to foursquare.com instead of playfoursquare.com. FYI
http://www.playfoursquare.com/ instead of http://www.foursquare.com/ ?
How can you see who’s Mayor of a place?
BTW, the link to foursquare is actually http://playfoursquare.com not foursquare.com.
Some software dev company just got a bunch of free traffic.
Yes, your article links to the wrong site. I wonder how hard it would be to become the mayor of a place, take a screenshot and use that one a weekly basis regardless of your standing at any given day. Hmm, probably shouldn’t be thinking about these thing.
This news makes me happy…. when dodgeball tried this is was great in concept (but maybe an idea before it’s time… )
Steve, to find out who is a mayor, you can go to playfoursquare.com and search via venue name, i.e. “Zeitgeist” in SF (where the mayor meetup is on Saturday http://playfour....com/venue/3215). Also if you oust a mayor it tells you when you checkin who it was
Deals on politicians – now that IS something to get excited about. What an app! App of the Year IMHO.
this feels so good.
Foursquare is walking the line very well between outright advertising and finding a way to creatively work monetization into their product. They could have very easily allowed a venue to place a generic happy hour ad/offer in their listing (and I imagine they may do just that in the future), but by making it a “mayor offering” instead they are indirectly causing a similar effect and still keeping it as part of the game. Very well done.
I’ll say “wish you be my friends, too” . And the sytstem said “duplicated information”.
It seems to be an interesting game.
Is it possible to ride a jock harder? Seriously M.G….Stop.
You have to grease the wheels sometimes before people realize they need an app.
“Tapping that potential”?? audible groan
Foursquare needs to add some rules about who can check in where. You should have to be nearby. Also, I think if a place is running a promotion, they should have to provide a code or approve your check-in.
Foursquare needs to fix the bug of people hacking the system first.
I can search for anything in San Francisco and can even switch cities to nyc and search for “shake shack” and check in there from my apartment in SF.
Once free deals, incentives and savings come in, people will figure this out and keep battling it out for mayor. those users that actually check in only when they’re at a place will never become mayor again because people are in their homes checking in every 30 minutes to rack of mayorships AKA coupons.
Foursquare should not let you search for places or if they do, restrict it to 1 block instead of nationwide search.