As I'm sure you know, I've been a big fan of Foursquare, the location based game. And recently it has started to catch more interest in the Missoula Twitter community. I think that it would be a fun idea to play a game of Foursquare during Missoula's First Friday, the downtown art walk that takes place the first Friday of every month. The two ideas of what is being done is practically duplicated: going to multiple places, checking out new venues, and hopefully running into friends and other interesting people.

So here's what I propose: the person who gets the most points on Foursquare on Friday the 5th of February 2009 in Missoula, MT from 4pm - 8pm, I will give a growler of any beer from any brewery in Missoula. You can even keep the glass container. I know it's not too much, but I thought that it'd be fun for everyone who played the Foursquare First Friday game could met up at the brewery of the winner's choice the next day around 6pm-ish and all hang out, enjoy a beer, and chat. And of course, so I can give a growler of beer to the winner. To make it more interesting I was hoping more people would be willing to put up another small prize. Just mention it in the comments below.

So I just wanted to mention a few things about points on Foursquare quickly. You get 5 points for stopping at any place you've never been to, you get 5 points for adding any venue that Foursquare doesn't have yet, and you get 1 point for each place you've checked into that day. So if the 3rd place you check into is a place that you've never been and Foursquare doesn't have it, you'll get 13 points for that. So if someone wanted to have an unfair advantage on this day, then they'd just check into several places before First Friday started, then all their checkins during 4-8pm would be worth more points, therefore being unfair to the other participants. So the only way I can see it working fair is if you are participating then you can't check in at any place till 4pm. I'm open to hearing other ways around this and other opinions on what rules to have (ie only counting checkins at art galleries).

Oh, and also since you can't see a leaderboard for the general Missoula area, to be eligible you'll have to friend me on Foursquare. I'll be taking screenshots of my leaderboard at 4pm and 8pm (those are the general First Friday hours, right?) and then doing the math to see how many points were earned.

So what do you think? Does it sound interesting? Let me know in the comments below, and be sure to tick the sharing option on your comment if you want to blast your comment out to your network too. If you want to of course. Thanks for hearing me out!