Yelp v4.0 is now available, which is intended to help make all of you already overly social iPhone users even more social with a new check-in feature.
Check-ins are a way for you to share your current location with your friends. When you arrive at your favorite restaurant, night club, bar, or what have you, you can announce it to your friends via Yelp and they will receive a push notification if enabled. If they aren’t enabled, recent friend check-ins can be accessed via the new check-ins tab or viewed via the Monocle, or as I like to call it, the augmented reality view.
Frequent check-in users will also be rewarded for their dedication to a venue with a badge. You will receive a “Regular” badge for a specific venue if you visit it, and use the check-in feature of course, twice in a 60 day span.
Check-ins are being touted as the most important part of the update, but the app also received a Facebook app-like facelift, with large icons populating the home screen, Facebook and Twitter integration for you to share your quick tips and check-ins, the ability to finally view your own profile, and the ability to find new Yelp friends by allowing the app to access your address book or Facebook contacts.
Check-ins are nice, but we can actually do something useful with check-ins by donating to charity. Look up CauseWorld, a free app where checking in gives karma points. These can then be donated to causes and result in real money being donated by Citi and Kraft. Over $500,000 in donations so far to causes such as planting a tree, donating a book, stopping child abuse, clean water, and the Red Cross Haiti effort.
I wonder if it knows if someone is doing a fake check-in. Does it use Locations to see if you’re actually anywhere near the location that you claim to be checking in with? Otherwise I could sit at home and click check-in on any number of places, making this totally meaningless.
Oh, and great.. another way to clutter up Facebook and Twitter with useless posts.