Following up on its craft and trade update last month, the location-based check-in game for iPhone, MyTown, has just become a little more interesting. Instead of just checking-in to real-world businesses and claiming them as your own in an online game of Monopoly, you can now use your phone’s camera to scan barcodes and check in to products. Doing so unlocks exclusive virtual items, and of course earns you in-game points. The main target for this update are the producers of the products getting scanned; by getting involved with MyTown, they can offer specials and rewards through the game as incentives for players to buy their stuff. Very clever.
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen the new check-in craze spread away from simply locations. GetGlue offers a check-in app for iPhone that focuses on movies, books, music, and TV shows, and Gowalla expanded their location-based network to include events. It’ll be interesting to see if broad check-in apps that cover the widest variety of real-world interactions or highly focused apps attempting to corner particular niches (like Yelp and restaurants, for instance) will be more successful.
Interested in giving MyTown a shot? Download link for iPhone users is below.
– Download MyTown for iPhone (Free) [iTunes Link]