I've been using
Foursquare for a couple months now. I thought I was having fun getting points for my checkins and collecting badges. (Primarily competing with my brother-in-law and others in my social network.)
I say I "thought" I was having fun because it was really a burden for me to check in at each place that I went. Don't get me wrong, it's fairly easy to use Foursquare and
Gowalla but I would frequently forget. There also have been many instances where there were network problems where I couldn't find my location at all.
So I acknowledged to myself yesterday that these services are stupid because I don't get anything at all out of using the service. In addition, I really don't need people knowing where I am at all hours of the day. What's the point?
The main reason I started using the service is because I thought it would give me some ideas of new places to go that I might not know about. This never turned out to be the case. I was just collecting badges because....it's cool?
What do you think? If you're using services like Foursquare or Gowalla, why and what's the benefit?
