How do I unfriend someone in Foursquare?

Ah, ain't the amazing new world of social networking fun and interesting? I have also seen people who use Foursquare checkins as a form of word-of-mouth advertising and I think it's a pretty ingenious idea if used properly. Unfortunately, it seems more likely that it's going to be a bit spammy and annoying, particularly if you have checkins show up as alerts on your mobile device or cellphone!

There are two ways to deal with this. One is to set your relation with them such that their updates don't show up as alerts on your iPhone (or whatever), but the other way, the way you're asking about, is to just disconnect and jettison them.

Either way, you'll need to start by going to the Foursquare web site -- not using the mobile app -- to better manage your friends.

Once you're there, look for the "Friends" link:

Click on it and you'll move to the Friends area of the site. Still one more link to click on:

Once you've actually clicked on the Friends link that includes a count (and as for me, I can't believe I have 76 Foursquare friends!) you'll see a long list of the people with whom you're connected on Foursquare:

You can see in my little example here that the check box on the right side of the entry for my friend Laura Fitton isn't checked, while the one for my friend Lori Ruff is: this means that Lori's updates show up as alerts on my celphone, while Laura's do not. Why? Because Laura lives in a different city and there's essentially zero chance we'll be able to spontaneously bump into each other.

If I wanted to turn off the alerts for Lori, I could simply click the checkbox and they'd stop, but let's say that I wanted to disconnect / unfriend her entirely. To do that, click on "DELETE" and...

An "OK" click means that the relationship is severed (and I'm pretty sure that they aren't notified you've done that and can only infer it when they realize that they haven't seen any of your checkins for a while) and a "Cancel" click means you're still friends.

Hope that helps you gain control of your friend lists on Foursquare!