Foursquare adds Montreal and Toronto

Following the success of the launch in Vancouver last month, Foursquare has added 2 more Canadian cities Montreal and Toronto. They also added 13 more US cities but this blog post is not about that. A quick search on Twitter shows a slew of challenges from Torontonians saying that they are going to out-Foursquare Vancouver. Here’s an example.

There has always been a rivalry between Vancouver and Toronto, and in the past few years it has heated up. They accuse us of being lazy and smoking pot all the time, but if you actually look at how many Vancouverites are checking in at restaurants, galleries and cafes, (and hockey arenas) on Foursquare, you would soon figure out that we are actually a cultured bunch.

Maybe Toronto is jealous that we got the Olympics and they didn’t or that their hockey team has not won a game so far this season (0-5-1 as of this blog post). I think the fact that Foursquare arrived in Vancouver before Toronto, really set them off.

Vancouver has had its challenges with Foursquare, in particular with duplicate listings. This has recently been solved by the superusers and was partially due to the fact that the Vancouver data set was 100% crowdsourced. The Toronto and Montreal launches of Foursquare are not being crowdsourced as data partners have stepped up which will also pave the way for more Canadian cities in the near future. Vancouver Foursquare users have also been bad with checking in at their apartment or at the office during business ours. Each time somebody checks in at Radar DDB in Vancouver, I cringe.

Toronto has an advantage over Vancouver in that they have a bigger population. They also have to highest per capita usage of social media in Canada (read that somewhere) so I think that Foursquare is going to become extremely popular. Maybe thats why the folks at Foursquare gave Vancouver a head start.

Here’s a few logos for Foursquare Toronto and Foursquare Montreal that my buddy Ron at Barnstorm did up. Feel free to use them and any link backs are appreciated.