I’ve mentioned my love-hate relationship with Foursquare before. It’s fun being the mayor of different venues around town. Heck, it even made me semi-famous.
Foursquare, I think our relationship has grown stagnant. Half the time you won’t even pick up my location, so I can’t check-in when I’m actually there. I haven’t gotten a badge in, oh, weeks.
I hate to be the gal that just moves on to the next new thing, but I downloaded the Whrrl app anyway.
When I first heard of Whrrl last year, I only 
knew it as a site to share a story in slideshow format via pictures. I didn’t realize that it also had a location based application. I had noticed people check-in on Whrrl in my Twitter stream but just figured it was similar to Foursquare.
Whrrl is similar to Foursquare in that you check-in to place you visit. You can friend people and see where they travel as well. You also earn points for your check-ins.
However, it’s much more interactive than Foursquare. Here’s how Whrrl is different:
- Tips or Recommendations In Whrrl, besides points for checking in, you also receive points for leaving recommendations (called tips in Foursquare). When someone marks your tip as Want To Do or Done you also earn points.
- Keeping Score Your points are tallied and ranked against your friends’ points. The friendly competition runs weekly and you can check how you rank on your app. In Foursquare, the points aren’t tallied and seem kind of random to me.
- Societies You can join a group known as societies, where you can follow what others with similar interests are doing. There’s groups for Starbucks, drive-thrus, libraries, and more. In addition, each location has their own Society too. For example, the Target Society or Whole Foods Market Society. Foursquare has nothing similar to this.
- Prizes. You can actually prizes for checking in with Whrrl. I checked-in at Target on Black Friday (I really needed diapers or else I’d still be in my jammies.), Whrrl gave me the option to join some sponsored societies like Philips and Sonicare. Once I did that, I could tap for a chance to win a prize. I like this feature because it seems to give the game a sort of purpose, as opposed to just telling everyone your every move.
Of course like Foursquare, on Whrrl you can set your privacy settings if you don’t want everyone to know what you’re doing. When you check-in on Foursquare or Whrrl, you can decide if you want your friends to see that particular check-in or post it on Twitter.
I’ve only been two-timing with Foursquare and Whrrl for a week. I might just let them fight over me.
Have you used Whrrl? Which one do you prefer?
Join Whrrl and I’ll meet you at the What the Pho Society?
This was originally posted on BitMoms. Join me there for more tips and info about cybersafety.