For me, Foursquare is the place where I draw a sharing line in the sand: if I don’t know you, don’t know anything about you, and have never visited the city where you live, why would we become “friends” on Foursquare? I don’t see the benefit for either of us.

That said (and I’m looking at the Foursquare crew as I say this, not Foursquare users), I’d still love to see a little more information in those friend request notifications. Forget offering a Linkedin-style text box so that people can leave the default text unchanged 90% of the time, give me useful information.

If I don’t know you but ten of my Foursquare friends are friends with you, that’s useful information; if I don’t know you but we consistently check in at the same places, that’s useful information.

There are reasons I might establish a Foursquare relationship with someone I don’t actually know, but right now it’s too hard to figure it all out. I’m not willing to dig through someone’s friend list and checkin history to get at this kind of stuff, so I go with the lowest-effort approach: the ignore button.

I suspect that I’d still use the ignore button most of the time, but I’d still love the chance to find a few of these strange and interesting little convergences.