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Teen Unlocks Ultimate Foursquare Badge with North Pole Check-in

by Amar Toor on April 13, 2010 at 11:10 AM

Going to the North Pole at the ripe old age of 15 is a noteworthy achievement on its own. But going there and staving off frostbite long enough to check in on Foursquare -- that's historical.

OK, so it may not be enough to put teenager Parker Liautaud in the same sentence as Captain Cook or Kris Kringle, but it does make him the very first person to unlock the vaunted Last Degree badge on Foursquare. While his Eton College peers were probably spending their spring breaks cavorting around tropical locales, Liautaud was skiing his way to the North Pole -- and documenting it all on Facebook and Twitter. As Mashable points out, "insurmountable conditions" ultimately forced the extreme teen to finish his quest via helicopter, thus derailing his planned victory march on skis. But that still doesn't change the fact that he can now lay claim to arguably the ultimate "first" in location-based social networking.

Liautaud says he embarked on the expedition as a way to inspire the world's youth to "build a more sustainable future," which is all well and good. For us, though, he's simply taken location-based technology to its extreme -- and made our once-sparkling SXSW Foursquare badges suddenly seem dull. [From: Mashable]

Tags: badges, Expedition, FourSquare, mososo, north pole, NorthPole, social networking, SocialNetworking, teenagers, top, web

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