Foursquare is Calling You a Douchebag

As Foursquare continues to grow in popularity, its set of badges is growing, and including some interesting items. For example, if you're a male and are checking in at high-end clothing stores quite often, you'll unlock the Douchebag Badge. Wait, what? Did Foursquare just call you a douchebag? Yes. Yes, it did.

This strikes me as highly unwise for a service that wants to grow beyond the current in-crowd of social media. I'll take it step further than the Techcrunch article below: Foursquare is now flirting with an audience that will not immediately see the point of Foursquare's very existence, so it's stupid for Foursquare to throw out insulting badges... I can't imagine a user sticking with the service when his Foursquare account sends "I just unlocked the Douchebag badge" to their Facebook and Twitter feeds. Then again, maybe that's just the incentive Foursquarers need to stop spamming the rest of us with these annoying updates.

Of course, venues with which Foursquare users are checking in won't take too kindly to being associated with such badges.

I'm still unsure why anyone uses Foursquare: it's not truly social, since nobody seems to read-- or care about-- anyone else's progress. With that in mind, why add features that piss off the only people who care about their badges?