Millions of people click click click their way mindlessly through repetitive casual games like FarmVille every day. Such games spread like a virus, infecting Facebook news feeds and eating up big chunks of the precious little time on earth that players were blessed with before they face their inevitable, if temporarily forgotten, mortality.
Josh Williams used to develop software like that. A graphic designer by training, his website for sharing iconography grew popular enough that he turned it into a game called PackRat. Half a million people spent far too much time on the site, but bigger companies grew faster and quickly swallowed up the “zombification” category of casual games. (My categorization, not his.) Now Williams is building something different, perhaps the opposite of FarmVille …
Location sharing social network Foursquare saw traffic to its site triple in the last two months since November, according to new numbers from traffic analyst firm Hitwise today. The service has seen unprecedented media coverage lately and is no doubt sending more updates to Facebook and Twitter, prompting the growth in visits back to Foursquare that Hitwise is measuring.
Foursquare announced a fascinating deal with Canadian newspaper chain Metro late last month that would deliver local editorial content to users depending on the locations they check-in from. We called that deal a sign that the era of location-as-platform has arrived …
