• Does anyone care if I was in a swarm, visited Mount Rushmore or can administer CPR?
• Do we have to get jackets or sashes that we attach these digital badges to?
• Do you visit the pages of your friends to see what badges they have, or do you use some client just to see where they check in and have no clue what they earned?
• Can I get free services, coupons or discounts for having specific badges?  This isn’t mayorship, just an icon.

I begin to feel we reached a peak in the desire to achieve such things and are looking for true value in the services we are using.  Badges inherently were built for kids as a sign of learning and have now turned into a game with no winner.  Each time you get close to having all of the possible badges, new ones are announced.  The game never ends.

It becomes like a RPG that adds levels every time someone conquers all there is.  I have a badge for all of the sites giving out badges.  But it wouldn’t be appropriate.

As you can see you earn badges for each city independently.  The first being the newbie and first check in.  To promote the usage of Foursquare more, it would be nice to have a widget for badges or at least Mayorship of every location you have to place on your blog if you intend in using this over other location services.

Mayorship becomes more important for public places showing a location you may often be found as well as a promotional item.  While this breaks a lot of SocialStalking rules, Foursquare is a game and should be treated as such.

Another addition would be the ability to at least show my feed of locations as I check in on the side of my blog or page.  Currently that is only found on the profile page for yourself and friends.

I think what I am driving at as I rambled at the beginning is that while Foursquare is fun, the manual check-in (non GPS enabled) process and lack of integration with publishing to other social sites (outside of a tweet you can enable which many people hate seeing), makes using the site on a constant basis a struggle.

What I did appreciate is how badges are assigned and how you can suggest your own.  For example, visit a certain number of venues tagged with gym in a month and get the Gym Rat badge.  As a user you can also suggest badges for specific things and what the badge itself should look like.

Overall I like the idea of Foursquare and I know they are working on expanding as they even add more mobile client capabilities (BlackBerry would be nice, hint).  So I will keep an open eye on their growth.  Plus to make sure no one steals my Mayorships.