Monday, January 4, 2010

FourSquare everywhere is apparently on its way

Perhaps you saw my blog post from a few hours ago, or perhaps you saw the cryptic tweets coming from FourSquare's Twitter account. For example:

@b_west Ha, you'll see the first pieces of "everywhere" start rolling out this week (actually some new code just hit iPhone today... sssh)

Now as you may know, I don't have an iPhone. But even those without iPhones can start to see what is happening. For example, I went to m.foursquare.com (the way in which I usually access FourSquare on my Windows Mobile phone) and selected "Switch Cities." Here's what I now see:



Now if I had visited this page a week ago, the default would have been "Los Angeles" and I could then switch to one of FourSquare's supported cities, such as San Francisco. But the framework is there to allow me to enter any city, apparently. So I tried typing in "Olten, Switzerland."



Note that the country name has been converted to the proper name for the country in the local language. (Well, sort of; when I typed in "Geneva, Switzerland," it became "Genève, Schweiz," an interesting mix of languages.) Regardless, it seems to be recognizing these cities. It even identified the relatively obscure town of Wangen bei Olten in Switzerland.

Now to REALLY test out the feature, I'd actually have to check in to a location in one of these towns, something that I really can't do at the moment.

Now I'm not sure whether this feature has been universally rolled out - I happen to be a Superuser Level 1 on FourSquare, and perhaps the Superusers are getting this before everyone else - but it appears to me that FourSquare has successfully tackled the challenge of easily supporting a check-in from anywhere in the world.

Now if it would only let me check in at Morphing Planetrak, then I can play FourSquare and Starfleet Commander at the same time...

[5 JANUARY: SEE KIM LACAPRIA'S INQUISITR POST. ALSO SEE MASHABLE.]
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