I’m so excited to announce that we are working with Foursquare, the mobile social-networking site, to put out a special “transit champion” badge for Metro Vancouver!

It’s going to be great fun if you’re using Foursquare and riding transit during this busy Olympic period – make sure you check in and earn your badge on the go!

If you’ve never heard of Foursquare before, it’s a really neat social networking site that makes a game out of exploring your neighbourhood, and it’s got about 350,000 registered users worldwide right now.

You sign in on your mobile device, share your location with friends, and share handy tips or reasons to explore other things nearby. But you also earn points for checking in to locations around the region, and the person checking into a location the most becomes “Mayor” of that location, at least until someone else checks in more!

Plus, you can unlock a “badge” for checking into certain types of places – several visits to the gym gets you a “Gym Rat” badge, for example.

In our case, 10 checkins to a TransLink train station (SkyTrain and West Coast Express!) or a major bus exchange gets you the Transit Champion badge! (Tip: you have to be friends with TransLink on Foursquare to see the badge on your mobile device.)

Anyway, Foursquare has been superamazing in helping us put this together, and it’s really great to have a badge for you all to enjoy. We’re so excited to keep on exploring ways to connect with our users through Foursquare! Thanks again to Tristan Walker at Foursquare and the awesome web team at SFBART for helping us connect!

And you can feel free to e-mail in your tips and recommendations to be added to locations through the TransLink page on Foursquare! Or add them yourself too, Foursquare users :)