Foursquare has announced today that people can now check into events officially, which is weird because people have actually (unofficially) been checking into events for a long time. I mean just look at NYC Mayor Bloomberg’s check in to something called Marriage Equalitocalypse. Conceptually the “hack” is easy enough for a politician to do — Just creating an event masquerading as a venue. In fact, I am checked into an unofficial event right now.
So what gives Foursquare, we’ve been checking into events for a while? Well basically what was announced today is more like Foursquare partner events; Foursquare has hooked up with ESPN for sports events, MovieTicket.com for movie tickets and Songkick for concerts to populate its database with official events.
These partner events will offer users more check-in functionality like the ability to drill down into individual movies at a movie theatre and even the inclusion of realtime data like sports scores. Foursquare says that it plans on offering hundreds of thousands of “official” events at more than 50,000 venues in the next couple of months.
While right now event creation is only limited to those three partners, I’m hearing that in the longer term this will be extended to any venue owner. Foursquare PR representative Erin Gleason tells me, “We’re thinking about venues and users creating events, but we want to make sure we do it right so this functionality isn’t currently available.”
In the meantime, you can keep ghetto checking in to events by searching for your event in Nearby Places, and adding it as a place when it inevitably doesn’t show up.