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Location based social network Foursquare celebrated 10 million registered users yesterday but how are businesses and organizations using the platform? I wrote a year ago next month about the incredible potential offered by Foursquare accounts for organizations: following a Foursquare page as a user is like opting-in to view the world through the lens of that organization's geo-annotations. It can be awesome. (My favorites? History Channel and Eater.) Are businesses getting into it? For one perspective on that question, I extracted some data from the 128 most recent Foursquare Pages that have been created. The 128 most recent Foursquare Page holders have added 728 tips in 311 cities so far. They've amassed a total of over 8,000 Foursquare followers and they came in with some social media experience as well: those organizations already had an aggregate of over 800,000 Twitter followers.

As social media manager for the University of Wisconsin-Madison (@UWMadison), I frequently try out new platforms to see if our students are using them and if they might become useful tools for my campus. For the past 18 months, I've channeled my inner mayor on Foursquare, a location-based social network.

For most people I meet, the phrase "social media" evokes post-2004 web technologies: Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, Foursquare, … (The phrase came into widespread use around this time.) But since its earliest days, the internet has been a very social place.

He likens today's Facebooking, Tweeting, Flickr-ing, FourSquaring generation to our grandparents' generation. Imagine a small town where everyone knows everyone else: comings and goings, who's having babies, who's cancer is in remission, who's family is coming to town for Thanksgiving, and who's family is not (and therefore should have an invitation extended). We want people to know where we are, what we're doing, and whether we need help. It's more than just a megalomaniacal existence, it's a need for community. A virtual community, if you will.

Brad Feld, a venture capitalist, recently had a very uncomfortable experience with social media. The final quote from his account of the experience highlights the need to experience media to understand it: "I guess it's a good thing that this just happened and caused me to think harder about the implications. One of the reasons I immerse myself in this stuff is to understand the products and services, but also to understand the impact on humans and our society. While it's easy to think intellectually about privacy, it's a whole different deal when you have to process the ideas in the context of real issues that you encounter."