Foursquare To Start Polling Your Mayorship Chances

Foursquare’s support Twitter account tweeted out a curious message an hour ago, and now they have confirmed it with a blog post:

We’ve checked in on the iOS, Android apps, as well as on foursquare.com/mobile, and we don’t see any indication of this, or any number that says how far away we are from any given mayorship – but Foursquare says that it is rolling it out today – possibly the reason we’re not seeing anything is that we’re not close enough to the mayorship of the venues we’re checking into? AboutFoursquare has a screenshot of the feature on their post, though. Here’s what Foursquare said on its blog:

“We made a quick yet long-awaited tweak to our apps today. When you’re getting close to winning a Mayorship, you can now see how far away you are from taking over the Mayorship. You’ll see the count in the post check-in screen when you check into a place. Take it for a test drive tonight and see if it fires up the flames of competitiveness for you!

Just a quick reminder of how Mayorships work: To become Mayor of a place, you need to have checked in more days than anyone else over the last two months (60 days), so only one check-in per day counts. Oh, you also need to have uploaded a profile photo from your settings page (no one wants a faceless dictatorship!). And yes, we also made changes that prevent registered “Managers” and “Employees” from becoming Mayors of their own venues.

We have lots and lots in the queue, so you’ll be hearing more from us shortly!”

This is a good move by Foursquare. Many people have started to complain not only that it is nearly impossible to get mayorships in major cities now, but also many people are very surprised when they lose a mayorship, especially if they regularly check into a venue. This should not only clear up a lot of those issues, but spur people to go after mayorships (and any rewards associated with those mayorships) that are within possible reach.

Image: The committee to re-elect Mayor Cartman