Social discovery service, Foursquare, has launched a special feature for its Android app that supports NFC (near field communication). NFC is available for the app's Venue, Lists and Me pages.

On Android, NFC support has been rebranded and is called “Android Beam”. The touch-to-share functionality lets NFC-enabled Android phones share information between each other, including contacts, web pages, and videos.

Any Android developer can also use the NFC APIs provided by the mobile operating system to add specialised NFC actions to their own apps.

With the Foursquare update, Android 4.0 users with NFC phones can now share their lists and the venues they’ve visited with a friend just by tapping phones. Users can now tap phones to initiate friend requests or tap their phone against an NFC tag or poster to check in.

The functionality is currently limited to phones that have both an NFC chip built in and run Android 4.0.

Holger Luedorf, VP of mobile and international at Foursquare, says: “The good news is the technology is already there. Going forward, some of the other platforms will be NFC-enabled.

“The user experience is great. You just hold your phone against the tap [point]. The checkin screen automatically pops up with the right venue. You’re basically shaving very valuable seconds off the checkin process."

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