Foursquare’s check-in application for BlackBerry has been updated to let you get pop-up notifications as soon as your friends check in to a location. There’s also a fresh round of bug squashes, UI improvements, and code optimizations, all of which are welcome. Foursquare’s presence here at the BlackBerry DevCon has been significant, with a check-in challenge that eventually offers attendees a snazzy exclusive badge and a t-shirt.
For those unfamiliar, Foursquare detects your location through GPS, lets you announce where you are visiting to Facebook and Twitter with an archive of locations, and if a spot isn’t there, you can add it. Users can add tips to places (like “don’t get the shrimp”), or tack on to-dos for locations they want to visit. Metrics are in place that keep tabs on when and where you check in, which can result in special virtual badges earned for particular achievements.
Gowalla, a competing app, has done something similar to these new push notifications, and from my experiences there, pop-up windows are just irritating when you’re in the middle of doing something else. By all means, use push, but just make the notifications new items in the Messages app. At least you can filter the frequency of notifications by user and day if you have a lot of Foursquare friends. Anyway, Foursquare’s still a ton of fun, and if you’re going to send a tweet or Facebook update about a place anyway, might as well add some GPS data. Download links to the updated BlackBerry app and apps on other platforms are below.
Download for BlackBerry (Free) [App World Link]
Download for iPhone (Free) [iTunes link]
Download for Android (Free) [Market Link]
Download for webOS (Free) [Catalog Link]
[via Foursquare]