Foursquare spawns anti-social networking app Avoidr

If you’re tired of the hype surrounding Foursquare and sick of all the check-ins and mayor-crowning updates crowding your Twitter feed and Facebook page (or both), a new app might amuse you.

Based on Foursquare, Avoidr turns the same concept around and uses it for “anti-social networking.” With the tagline “keep your friends close and your enemies at that bar down the street,” Avoidr basically does what it says on the tin: it uses Foursquare to let you know where not to go to see a certain crowd. Creator Jesper Andersen says the app isn’t a dig at Foursquare per se, more a natural extension of the kind of passive agressive behavior social networking promotes overall:

On a somewhat less serious level, Andersen sees Avoidr as an intermediate stop on the way to defriending someone — it’s a kind of defriending-in-training. “I’m not against Foursquare,” he says. “It’s more that social networks should take into account that friendships ebb and flow.”

The idea seems to have legs, because about 20,000 people are using Avoidr currently, but the NYT expects that number to rise:

More than 20,000 people have signed up so far, Mr. Andersen said, though the number of anti-social networkers is likely to grow if users come to see this kind of service as an intermediate step toward unfriending someone completely on a social network like Foursquare, Twitter or Facebook. Which itself is a kind of intermediate step to unfriending that person in real life. Because relationships are complicated and friends drift apart slowly.

You can scan your Foursquare friends list, and mark the less-desirables with one of the epithets above. When you do, Avoidr marks that person as “dead to me.” While it may be bitchy, the service seems slightly more benign than Please Rob Me, also based on Foursquare. Have you used Avoidr? Has it kept your nights out douchebag-free?