The purpose of this app is to let my friends know where I am while I’m out gallavanting around, so they can join me for a drink or a meal, and learn more (through tips) about why I like the places I patronize.

The problem is, the people I’m acquainted with who are most likely to be reading my updates are not the people who are usually wondering on a Saturday night, “Where the heck is Janet? I MUST go where Janet is and hang out!” So, this may ultimately end up being one of those situations where I finally just admit I’m not the target market, and accept defeat.

Unless I can find some valuable alternate use for Foursquare – not altogether unlikely, given that I once dismissed Twitter with a “talk to the hand” flourish, only to find that later it had morphed into an incredibly valuable business and personal connectivity tool.

So here, with a hopeful eye on the future of Foursquare, are a few alternate uses for this latest bit of “I don’t get it.”

1. If you’re a professional with clients, or have friends who own businesses, you can earn brownie points by listing them as venues and then checking in. (You’re welcome, @Sambetti’s! And yes, I meant it about the onion rings.)
2. Easy way to fake a day of outside sales calls when you’re really laying on a chaise lounge at home with an umbrella drink in your hand. (Aside: Foursquare needs a plug-in that lets you schedule auto-checkins to really be useful in this situation.)
3. Useful tool for savvy burglars who can estimate, based on your latest check-in, how much time they have to ransack your house.
4. Quick way to notify loved ones that Captain Sulley has safely landed your plane (i.e., “Just checked in @Hudson River.”)
5. What, too soon?

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Alternative uses for Foursquare

It didn’t take long before I found what seems to be a tool for doing just that: it’s called Rollyo, and it allows me to create my own custom search list by entering the URL’s of up to 25 selected blogs. So, I spent a little time creating a few of my own “searchrolls,” and now I can search for occurances of my selected phrase just within the blogs I’ve specified. This tells me if anyone else locally is blogging about the topic I’m covering, and helps me quickly uncover a post I might be able to link back to.

Only two faults I’ve found so far: first, the limit of 25 URL’s. I ought to be able to enter as many URL’s as I want to in a single searchroll. And second, I can only search one of my custom searchrolls at a time. It took me four separate rolls (25 URL’s in each) to enter all my local site links, so I have to do four separate searches. That’s still better than searching the entire Internet for a link to a local blog, but I’d like to be able to check multiple searchrolls with one click.

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Blog tools: search your own blogroll with Rollyo