Foursquare now tells you how close you are to being Mayor

In yesterday’s post about 10 features coming to foursquare, we noted that foursquare would soon tell you how close you are to becoming Mayor. Perhaps we should have moved that into the “Very Very Near Term” category. As of today, when you check in, Foursquare alerts you if you’re close to becoming mayor.

The checkin confirmation screen now shows the number of times you’ve checked in in the past two months, along with your overall total checkins at the venue. You can compare that to the number of checkins for the mayor on the foursquare website’s venue page. Even better, if you’re within 10 checkins of becoming Mayor the app will let you know next to the mayor’s photo with a message like “You’re now 1 day away from becoming the Mayor!”

Figuring out who should be mayor of a venue has been a complicated process that has inspired sites like When Will I Be Mayor and Be The Mayor that do the calculations for you. Those sites are still useful for tracking all your venues in one place, but this new feature from foursquare will be a welcome addition.

These alerts will help to promote the sense of competition even more since you know you’re close to becoming Mayor. It will also fuel some friendly rivalries, like the one above between @starshaped and Walter Elly, who was the first to tweet about the new feature.

What do you think about this new addition?