Partying on Foursquare Day (and don’t forget to check in)

This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.

NEW YORK -- Friday is the first annual Foursquare Day, declared by, um, some folks from the Tampa Bay area in Florida, and officially endorsed by the hot location-based social network.

The Foursquare mobile service is 13 months old, so this isn’t a celebration of its first birthday. No, it’s more peculiar and nerdier than that. It’s 4/16, or four and four squared. See, the math geeks got it!

The group responsible for dreaming up a holiday that rivals the gym-class-averseness of Pi Day (March 14, which, as it turns out, is closer to Foursquare’s birthday than Foursquare Day) is led by Nate Bonilla-Warford. The Florida optometrist talked his friends into helping him organize the celebration, according to a statement on the Foursquare Day website.

Bonilla-Warford’s site logs more than 150 parties set to take place Friday spanning cities around the world. A page for Foursquare Day is currently listed in the featured and trending events sections of Hot Potato, a Brooklyn service similar to Foursquare.

The 4sqday site lists the Viper Room in West Hollywood as hosting a two-hour event called Los Angeles Foursquare Day Swarm starting at 7:30 p.m. No mention of the party on the Viper Room’s website, which shows a local band called the Whiskey Circus taking the stage at 8 p.m. The Viper Room wasn’t immediately available for comment. Hope you like alternative-rock music, geeks! A Dodger Game Swarm is also set to take place at the baseball stadium.

The team behind Foursquare was happy to attach its name to parties dedicated to the young New York company. The Web start-up is also joining the fun with a party of its own at the Hotel on Rivington, about a mile from Foursquare’s headquarters in Manhattan. Party-goers will receive a Foursquare Day badge -- the virtual coolness currency on the social network.

‘Being nerds ourselves we couldn’t resist the math nerdiness of it,’ reads a company statement on the Foursquare blog. ‘Seriously, what’s happening to Foursquare now is kind of amazing, and we’re completely humbled by how supportive our user community is.’

‘And yes, we realize that this is absolutely crazy,’ the blog post adds.

-- Mark Milian
twitter.com/markmilian