Foursquare

Foursquare is a location based application on mobile devices that allows one to check-in their location where ever they want. It is one of the most famous location-based service and is used by over 40 million people. Foursquare is another type of social networking media that allows people to post their location and share it with their followers. Users follow people and are followed by people in the exact same way that Twitter handles their users. There are many different aspects to foursquare that make it an appealing application. People use foursquare for reasons such as connecting with people, meeting up with friends, finding good places to go to, and gaming. Foursquare uses GPS location software on the application to locate nearby venues according to the users current location to prompt the user to check-in. Users will check-in using the smart-phone application and it will immediately be public to all of the user's followers.

Foursquare was launched to the public in 2009 by co-founders Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai. They began working on the application in 2008 and it was only a year later that foursquare was created. It wasn't untill 2010 that foursquare took off and became a globally used location-based social networking software. There are 160 employees in only three locations making this application happen. The headquarters are located in New York City, there is a office in San Francisco, and a smaller office in London. It is a private company that is funded by Union Square Ventures, O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Spark Capital, and various others.

Foursquare took off and is now the most used location-based social network device and grew a large amount over the last year or so. More and more people are getting involved in the check-in culture of social media and sharing locations online, as various applications have done a lot to maintain solid privacy settings.