Foursquare available everywhere “within weeks”

If you’re desperate to play red-hot location-based game Foursquare but can’t, we’ve got good news.

Until now Foursquare has been only been playable in select (mainly US) cities. After launching in London last week and 15 more US and Canadian cities two days ago we’ve now caught wind that Foursquare is just “weeks away” from being playable all over the world.

Writing yesterday on the start-up’s GetSatisfaction customer support forum, co-founder Dennis Crowley responded in to people asking when their city will be covered, “Just FYI we’re a few weeks away from doing *everywhere*”.

How will this be done? At present, the Foursquare team defines cities and pre-populates them with location data. While it has previously been reported that the start-up is soon to allow users to add their own cities, Crowley doesn’t seem too keen on allowing crowdsourcing to be the game’s main source of data.

Writing again on GetSatisfaction he notes “We find that with aggressive crowdsourcing the data can get a little muddy (dups, etc).” Dups (duplicate data where multiple users add the same location) lead to a diluted game experience so it’s understandable that Crowley would want to avoid them.

The 💜 of EU tech

The latest rumblings from the EU tech scene, a story from our wise ol' founder Boris, and some questionable AI art. It's free, every week, in your inbox. Sign up now!

We can expect then, that crowdsourcing new cities won’t be a free-for-all. Foursquare currently promotes particularly keen players to ‘Superuser’ status, allowing them to edit data. How Superusers could be enlisted in brand new cities is unknown.

However they do it, the good news is that Foursquare for everyone is just around the corner. Meanwhile, a lucky few more cities are expected to be added in at least one more wave of additions before that.

If you really can’t wait to try it there’s always Gowalla, the iPhone-only location-based game that has really taken off in some parts of the world as-yet not served by Foursquare.