To everyone using Foursquare: I'm unfollowing you

Foursquare is an interesting application. It combines gaming elements with real-world interaction and location aware technology to create an augmented reality mish-mash. The concept is interesting, in the same way that the concept of Farmville is interesting, and like Farmville…

I’m unfollowing each and every one of you who allow it to update your status.

Here’s an example from @Linkbuildr

I follow you for great linkbuilding tips, not to know that you’re at Safeway. I want to know what kind of great stuff you’ve read, your comments on events in the SEO community, and your insight. I don’t want to know that you’re not at ho… wait, that gives me an idea.

http://twitter.com/#search?q=4sq.com%20vancouver

I hear there’s a crime wave in Vancouver right now. Great to see that so many people are broadcasting that they’re not at home.

Similarly an unnamed contact of ours has started updating their linkedin status with Foursquare updates. Now, whenever some one in our office checks their Linked updates it’s filled with “so and so is at Blenz; so and so is at The Yale; so and so is at The Cecil…”, the kind of thing that you probably shouldn’t be filling your Linkedin profile with.

And it’s not just Fourquare. One of my favourite websites ever, Grooveshark.com, can be tied into Twitter. I’ve already stopped following @TerryVanHorne because every 10 minutes my feed summary gets updated with something like “Listening to Baby by Justin Beiber @grooveshark”

The problem with automatic status updates is that if you’re not taking the time to post for your followers then, well, you know what your tweets are? They’re spam. You are letting a web spam me through your account. And d’you know what people do to spammers?