Foursquared Out

I can probably blame (thank) David for this.

I am now no longer using Foursquare and no longer checking in to places. Though depressingly at the time of writing I am still the Mayor of Morrisons!

After having a podcast discussion with David about it (over on the e-Learning Stuff Blog) I did question why I was using Foursquare, what I was getting out of it, and potential benefits to me. I also wondered what educational benefits there were with learners using such a service within college.

To be honest apart from the satisfaction in “earning” badges I didn’t really see much benefit from using Foursquare. Very few of my “local” friends were using it, so even if did check-in to my local Costa, as none of my friends were using it, I wouldn’t know they were there…. well I guess I could just look round!

At the end of the day, for me it was a game, that wasn’t really that entertaining and when the GPS failed to lock on was quite frustrating. After chatting with David, I started to use it less and then just stopped. Not missed it at all.

There is probably something to be said to learners checking into college and seeing if their friends are there, or their co-collaborators and meeting up, but not sure if Foursquare is the best tool for that. At least with something like Places on Facebook there is chat built in too.

So are you still on Foursquare and if so what are you doing with it, or getting out of it?


How long….

Last night I needed to download a 364MB update file.

I was totally surprised that according to Safari that it was going to take nearly ten hours!

I knew it wasn’t my end as my connection was working fine. I even checked by downloading the 666MB iOS 4.3.5 update from Apple, and though it was nearly twice the size it only took three minutes from the iTunes servers.

Putting it down to the remote server, I left it to download overnight. Reminded me of the time when I was less fortunate and didn’t have the speed of fibre.

Came down the next morning to find that the download had failed to download properly.

So I set it go again, expecting that it would take a fair few hours again…

Nope did it in a couple of minutes!

Putting it down to the remote server having issues last night.