The privacy implications of this make my head hurt. Do Foursquare’s social benefits really outweigh the fact that random businesses are going to begin spamming me on Twitter with (almost certainly crappy) offers to frequent their businesses again? I’m going to go back and read the TOS over on 4sq again. The whole appeal of taht service, at least to me, is that my approved list of friends knows where I am, NOT the owners of the establishments that I frequent.
It will be interesting to see if this is the first big misstep of Foursquare. The service has received almost universal praise from both users and the media to this point. Sure, businesses will love this new development (and the data is certainly worth a pretty penny), but will users revolt? And, just as importantly, how will the media treat this?
(NOTE: Apparently users will be able to opt-out of this. I didn’t read all the way to the very last sentence of the piece the first time around. My bad.)
I’ve said it once, and I’ll say it again.
Any restaurant that uses opentable has all this information and more, aggregated, annotated etc. (You were a bad tipper? Note in the system! Bought a nice bottle of wine? Noted.)
This gives access to similar data for much lower-scale restaurants and pubs, ok in my book.
