At SXSW 2007, the cool new thing that got everyone talking was Twitter, and we know how that ended up. This year's cool new thing was foursquare, a location sharing social networking app with gaming elements, and many people wondered when it might come to New Zealand.
 
Well, it's not here yet. But recently, local dev legend Ben Nolan dropped us a line to let us know about Twitterplaces, an open-source variant on the foursquare theme that he's been working on.
 
(When we last mentioned Ben he'd just put together one of the first ever Facebook applications. This was of course many months before we all got collectively tired of being pirates and throwing cows at each other; thankfully, Ben's application contained neither.)
 

Ben writes:
 

Basically, you go to a bar (malthouse?), load twitterplaces.com on your iphone / cellphone, 'check-in' at that location. You then:
- Get points to rank yourself on the Wellington leaderboard (for vanity)
- Get shown which of your friends are nearby (for yarns)
- Get a list of other people checked in where you are (hookups!)
I'm really excited about twitterplaces - and I need an experimental group of interested, intelligent, eloquent and social persons who are often drinking late into the evening - and making friends....
So - gentle reader, could I ask you personally to try it out at http://www.twitterplaces.com/ ?

 
Well, with flattery like that, how could we resist? And how could you resist? All you need is a Twitter login to get started...