WSJ introduces “add to Foursquare” button

Geolocation game Foursquare has teamed up with the Wall Street Journal in an initiative that rolled out today, appending stories about restaurants or other “cultural coverage” with a not-very-obtrusive “add to Foursquare” button.

While such a venture might initially seem to be more in line with entertainment-oriented publications (the Village Voice, for instance) Foursquare and the WSJ have played together before. (Not a very playful incident, but Foursquare is mostly about fun and drunkeness and karaoke.) And in Foursquare’s concise post about the venture on their blog, the fast-growing social-techno-geo game purveyors hint at upcoming partnerships of the same ilk:

We’re super psyched about the new “Add to foursquare” button that The Wall Street Journal is rolling out today! Now, when you’re reading a restaurant review or other cultural coverage on WSJ.com, you’ll be able to click a button to add the venue(s) mentioned in the article to your foursquare to-do list, along with a tip written by a WSJ editor and a link back to the original article.

The Wall Street Journal is our first partner to experiment with the “Add to foursquare” button, but we hope to start rolling out this feature for other partners soon. Stay tuned!

If you’re a regular user of Foursquare, this could be a very cool feature. Depending on how packed your social calendar is, a simple function for adding places of interest to your Foursquare to-do list can make finding a place to eat or grab a beer a bit easier. Venues that get reviewed stand to gain a lot, and the link at the bottom of reviews and event listings will give Foursquare lots of opportunities to get noticed by prospective new players. Foursquare has declined to elaborate on who or where the new “add to Foursquare” button will grace next, but I’d expect the link to become much more pervasive in the coming months.