If you insist on using FourSquare, stop spamming my timeline!

The worst thing about the current generation of social media rubbish is that you have to check-in.

Check-ins are the bane of my flipping life.

When I’m in San Francisco I can’t sit down with a friend without them jumping sky high in shock 3 seconds into the meal because they’ve forgotten to check-in.

You’d have thought that Silicon Valley’s finest would have figured out a way to do this automatically. Or bought BuddyCloud — whose founders long ago realised that it was far more useful to do this in the background. On Symbian. Because it could actually do that.

If you’ve got a Fisher Price iPhone that can’t (or couldn’t) do anything in the background without wetting its pants and screaming, then there was no choice — this is predominantly why you have to click a button in a kind of Pavlovian zombie blank-stare manner.

So we’ve legions of absolute chumps checking in and then subjecting the rest of us to their mindless banality on various social media channels.

I do the odd check-in on Facebook. I’ve been playing with it on Path.

I definitely don’t do it on Twitter to the thousands of people (and bots) who follow.

Exposing folk to your check-in spam on Twitter is really, really bad form. By all means use FourSquare. Please just uncheck the ‘tweet this’ option.

I’ve been doing my best to manually unfollow the people who keep on insisting on doing it. But I tell you now, I would love to see a web app that queries my Twitter followers for anyone who’s done a FourSquare check-in during the last month and unfollows them. Does anyone know if anything like this exists?