Untappd: A Foursquare For Beer Drinking

The social check-in space continues to grow in the footsteps of Foursquare, and now there’s a check in service just for beer: Untappd.

Untappd enables beer drinkers to share beers, beer-drinking establishments and feedback about beers with friends and other beer enthusiasts.

Unlike Foursquare you don’t check in at a location (although you can add the location you’re drinking the beer at,) instead you check-in with the beer you are drinking.

Like Foursquare (and a pile of other sites lately we’d note) you can and do win badges for various check ins.

The service is fairly new, so it does offer a few drawbacks. The most obvious one so far is that there’s not a lot of people using it: I could only find six Twitter friends who had tried it, and two Facebook friends. In what could be a fatal flaw going forward, Untappd doesn’t offer any mobile apps for the service; yes, you can log into a smart looking mobile website, but the key to success of services such as Foursquare and Miso has been easy to access and use applications.

As someone who likes beer, I like the idea of Untappd, but I worry that the social check-in space is already becoming very crowded and there’s only so many applications people can and will use. That said, beer drinkers are a dedicated lot, and there might just be enough diehards out there to make Untappd a well brewed success.

You can check out Untappd at Untappd.com.