Stalk More People and Restaurants with New Foursquare Program
Foursquare, the social network/mobile phone program that lets complete strangers know your exact location, now has another semi-creepy algorithm for you social networking fiends. It’s called “Explore,” and basically it’s a program designed to kind of predict your mood and read your mind.
We knew this day would come when computer programs would mock and exploit us with their emotionless firewall of computations and binary judgments. Sure, they can beat the crap out of us on Jeopardy!, but no doubt it’s just because they resent us for being able to swim in water without short-circuiting and not worrying about our battery power all the time. Now they’re using their superior intelligence to read our futile organic minds, predicting our every desire, passion and hunger, of which they cannot experience themselves in their lonely, digitless, digital world. BUT ANYWAY… regardless of the inevitable computer takeover, the new Foursquare program is what us simple humans might call, kind of neato.
If you’re a regular Foursquare user, Explore will recommend places for you to visit based both on your visit history and those places visited by your network of friends. It will predict based on your visit frequency of let’s say, Thai restaurants, when you might have a hankering for some pad thai, and recommend you visit a Thai spot some of your friends have recently been to.
Rather than just telling people where you are at with Foursquare, you can now use the Explore technology as your own personal Yelp of sorts, finding restaurants, bars and coffee shops that your Foursquare BFFs have visited, including those super-in-the-know celebs, which just might appeal to you more than something you’d find on an app like Around Me, which usually just targets the nearest spots. But it can also tell you, in that creepy stalker Foursquare way, how many times your friends went to the place, making it perhaps more useful in deciding if it’s indeed the spot for you to try.
Keep in touch with Jill on Twitter @jillettinger
image: teamstickergiant
