MyTown takes social networking to whole new level – beating giants like Facebook to the punch through its addictive location-based gaming approach.
Much like Foursquare, which has recently emerged as a serious challenger to Yelp, interaction isn’t limited to only personal communication, but engaging the user by having them make their neigjhborhood and environment part of the experience.
It will give you a whole new experience on exploring your own city or others, because of its central gaming elements. The user (or player) can “purchase” real places near your location, such as a Starbucks., then collect rent from people who visit your places. The experience is like playing Restaurant City on Facebook, but in real life.
As similar social gaming platforms in Asia have experienced, MyTown has zoomed from a small startup founded in 2008 to a 800,000 users platform with 3.5 to 4 million check-ins per day. The brains behind MyTown is Booyah and CEO Keith Lee says that average users spend 50 minutes per day on MyTown.
Because of Foursquare, the gaming concept of check-ins has gained traction and is gradually becoming a must-have for social networking site. Even Yelp is getting into the action, rolling out a check-in function on its iPhone application. Facebook is also currently developing this function too.
One of the reasons Facebook has lagged is that gaming has not been a core part of its business plans, instead farming it out through APIs to secondary app developers. Yelp was also founded on very different community principles, rewarding an elite, serially posting set of super-users.
By comparison, MyTown was developed by a group of veteran game designers.
As smart phone ownership and usage continue to rocket upwards, Foursquare and MyTown will only grow, either eclipsing their competitors or more likely get acquired by their more heavily funded counterparts.







