Foursquare is a location-based social networking website, software for mobile devices. This service is available to users with GPS-enabled mobile devices, such as iPhones, Android mobile phones, Symbian devices and Blackberries. Users "check-in" at venues using a mobile website, text messaging or a device-specific application by running the application and selecting from a list of venues that the application locates nearby. Each check-in awards the user points and sometimes "badges".
The service was created in 2009 by Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai. Crowley had previously founded the similar project Dodgeball as his graduate thesis project in the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) at New York University. Google bought Dodgeball in 2005 and shut it down in 2009, replacing it with Google Latitude. Foursquare is the second iteration of the same idea, that people can use mobile devices to interact with their environment. As of December 2010, the company reported it had 6...