Can I trade badges for girl scout cookies?

During the course of the month, my Four Square profile has seen four new badges. The Super User badge, for 30 check ins in a month, the Local Badge for checking in to Online Guru 3x in the week, the Bender Badge for checking in 4+ Nights in a row, and the Explorer Badge for checking into 25 Venues.

I also established a few new majorships, which I guess shows my dedication to these businesses or perhaps how routine my life may be. So not a big surprise I’m the major of Oggi’s Pizza, Pure Salon & Spa, Chipotle, Taco Bell, and Luna Grill all withing 5-10 minutes from home, and several right across the street.

A buddy of mine also pointed out the dangers for location based social networking. Spreading your Four Square updates through Twitter can give any potential robber the knowledge that your not home. Please Rob Me takes results from the Twitter feed looking for Four Square’s tags. The website was designed to enlighten Four Square users to what they are sending out on the web. Over the course of a minute over 100 Four Square updates were sent out.

I guess the next valuable question is, where is the value in all of this Four Square madness. For me, there wasn’t much except for the tips I found based on your location. In-N-Out and Chipotle list secret menu items, while others offer parking advice. Once again, perhaps if more friends were on Four Square I might opt to use it more frequently.

That being said I’m going to pick Four Square as the current front runner for location based social networking. They are doing a better job then BrightKite, Loopt, Yelp, or Gowalla. With the rumor Facebook is going to join the club, this might be the catalyst that gets local social networking to the masses.

Can I trade badges for girl scout cookies?

To be fair I will say I was an active user of BrightKite until I got bored with that as well. I will say I like Bright Kite’s ability to upload images from your locations. But the applications are pretty close to the same for me. They update my twitter account and allows internet stalkers to keep tabs on me. I think the problem is none of my friends utilize these local social media services. Even the internet gurus out there haven’t really embraced local social media.

So I’m going to (or should say have been) trying to check in to every place I’ve visited during the month of February. This far I’ve received 1 new friend, a new mayorship and a badge. But I’m going to embrace the application. It will be checked more frequently then my facebook page. At the end of the month, I’ll take inventory of what I’ve accomplished and whether it was worth it or not.