A short while back Foursquare announced their much anticipated application for BlackBerry. Foursquare is not necessarily new to social media scene, but their support for BlackBerry is. When a social media gets to BlackBerry, it seems to storm the internet. Personally, I have never cared much for social media unless I can efficiently use it from my devices.

There isn’t a lot to Foursquare. When you visit a place, simply open the Foursquare application, select “Check-in”, and find the venue you are at. That’s what I love about it, simplicity. The main, or “Friends” page, of the application will show you all of your friends’ most recent check-ins and shouts.

The main mentality behind Foursquare is to meet new people that frequent the same places you do, see where your friends are and where they go, and to compete between friends and other Foursquare users for badges and mayorship of different venues. The person that checks-in to the same venue the most will become the mayor of that place. You earn points and badges the more places you check-in to different places and the more you frequent a specific destination. You also get bonus points for making multiple stops per day. Foursquare can definitely make a little fun out of running your most mundane errands, and you can see who else has to visit the very same post office on their way home from work.

Sometimes the places you visit have not yet made it onto Foursquare’s list of venues. If you run into this, you can add a venue straight from the application itself. It’s a very quick and easy process. You will often run into this problem at local businesses; most chains are easily found by Foursquare’s database. At the top of the application is a tab for “More”. This is where you can report bugs, view the Foursquare leaderboards, and adjust your notification settings. The neat thing about this application is that from any page on your BlackBerry, when a friend checks-in around you, a pop-up will appear.

Foursquare is similar to Twitter and Facebook with updates called “shouts”. You can shout straight from the app without actually checking-in to any place. It’s basically just a status update that you can share with your friends on Foursquare, Twitter, and Facebook.  It is also similar to Yelp!. With Yelp!, you can check-in to different places and leave recommendations for other people to try when they check-in to that same place. With Foursquare, you can make a To-Do list for other users of Foursquare to try and complete, and you can leave tips for them as well. (A To-Do entry would be something similar to, “Try the Caesar Salad here, it’s great!”, and a tip would be more along the lines of, “Avoid the restrooms at ____, they’re nasty.”)

Overall, Foursquare is a very easy application to use. It makes checking-in very easy, which encourages me to use it. Some find it pointless, others find it fun. Either way, the Foursquare team did a very good job to produce a visually pleasing, easy-to-use, and functional application to support their social media. They made a very good move to add Twitter and Facebook integration. Two thumbs up to the Foursquare app for BlackBerry from me!