Tim Yang’s Weblog

Yes, Foursquare is addictive and collecting badges is more addictive. And like all addictive pursuits, there are people like you and me who find shortcuts. Yes, you. You wouldn’t be looking at this post if you weren’t already a cheater or contemplating it.

Badges are collected by checking into enough locations with the relevant tags and the relevant categories.

You can cheat by creating BADGE FARMS.

Badge farms are fictitious venues that you control and add tags and categories to.

1. Create 3 venues near your home or office. Give them plausible but fake names, places that you might actually visit during the course of your day so that your Foursquare friends don’t catch on (unless you’re totally shameless). I find names of cafes work best. You basically only need a few badge farms that you can check into repeatedly.

2. Over the course of 48 hours, check into all three twice to become mayor of them.

3. Visit a Foursquare badge list and make a list of all the tags you need to claim the badges you want. Start adding all those tags to your badge farms.

4. Before you check into them next time, change the category of each farm to the one needed to claim the badge you’re aiming for.

5. Then start checking in, once a day to each of your farms. Over the course of a week, you should have all the badges.

It’s very important that your friends on Foursquare don’t catch on to your cheating. Most people take a very dim view of cheaters.

So here are the 4 rules of Foursquare Cheaters:

• Don’t check in too many times a day. If you do, check off the box that says “Tell my friends”. If you do that, then your check in won’t “pop-up” on your friends’ cellphones (but will nevertheless appear on their app as “Hiding”). It tends to annoy people when too many pop-ups occur.

• Don’t get too greedy and go for badges that your friends know you wouldn’t or couldn’t actually collect. For instance, if you’re not a fan of either Lakers or Celtics, don’t go for those badges. I haven’t. And getting BOTH of them is a dead giveaway you’re a cheater.

• Don’t turn your home or workplace location into a badge farm. Yes, I know it’s very convenient and efficient to collect badges that way. But mayors can’t delete tags yet. And leaving irrelevant tags lying around is a dead giveaway that the venue has been turned into a badge farm. Your colleagues, family and neighbours will come across the evidence sooner or later and probably wouldn’t like that.

• Dispose of your badge farms when you’re done with them. Move them to a far off location, like in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean or Antarctica. So no one will accidentally come across them. And don’t forget to rename them and resign your mayorship from your user page so no one can trace them back to you. I hide mine somewhere in the Grand Canyon where there’s no internet or cellphone reception.

This was originally intended for participants for SXSW 2010. You had to collect all 6 namecards of Foursquare employees at the event. Each of the name cards had a unique badge on it.

Then you had to go to http://foursquare.com/bizcard and click on the badges of all six. And you would get the Groupie badge.

Problem is, people found out about it and passed the list around to people who didn’t attend SXSW 2010.

People like me. ROFL.

Here is the list of the six badges you need to click on to get the free Groupie badge.

• JetSetter
• Super Mayor
• Pizzaiolo
• Local
• Player Please!
• Newbie

Most offices and universities block torrenting into two very effective methods.

First, they employ a packet sniffer to detect when bittorrent packets are being downloaded and block them.

Second, they block all the usual ports that bittorrent clients use.

These methods still allow normal file exchange, as long as torrent files aren’t being delivered and received.

That’s how Torrific.com (used to be called btaccel.com) bypasses the usual security methods.

Torrific employs a web based torrent client. You tell it which torrents to download and Torrific downloads them to their own servers first. Then when the download is completed, you can download it from Torrific as a normal file.

Simple. You can download any kind of file of any size this way… as long your connection doesn’t time out. Which mine unfortunately does often.

I work in an advertising agency with a client that demands integration with digital components. But we have digital agencies in this country that work too much in their own little silo.

Yes, they understand how to build websites but they don’t understand how to market them. Nor do they want to. Simply because they’re not designed for marketing.

Digital agencies here prefer to perform all their marketing online. They keep using the same media: blogs, Facebook, emails etc.

This doesn’t work for two reasons.

In many countries (including this one), we don’t have the necessary numbers of web users. Most of them are centred in the cities, yet the vast majority of the market is in rural areas.

Second, of the small size of online users, digital agencies always propose online campaigns that only sophisticated web users will respond to. We don’t have the necessary numbers. And this only targets a certain age group whereas clients need campaigns for larger markets or different markets.

The solution is for digital agencies in this country to first accept that a purely-online campaign is not feasible. All those case study books and websites they get inspiration from are from countries that have the numbers. They have to stop looking at them and believing they can make campaigns as successful as those.

Secondly, digital agencies need to start hiring expertise with experience in broader campaigns. People who have experience in creating supporting sales and marketing materials like brochures, leaflets, billboards, posters, and of course guerilla media. All the items needed to propagate a URL.

Digital agencies need to stop and ask themselves: “You’ve built a really nice website. But how the heck are people going to know about it?”

Digital agencies need to stop thinking that marketing a website is TCP (The Client’s Problem) and take some responsibility for it.

Digital agencies need to stop being purely digital agencies. And start being a bit more like communication agencies.