Boring is Death. Tap City here we come...

Something means never having to say you're sorry. I forget what. But, I do know that smartphones mean never having to be bored. We will surf, read, play, watch, listen, check in, tweet, update, call, text, learn -- and play. Everything will be turned into a game.

Embrace it. Like the makers of Tap City:

Though the first-generation (location-based) services encourage you to connect with friends, you often still end up interacting with the service as an individual, little affected by others' actions, says Dave Bisceglia, cofounder and CEO of The Tap Lab.

 "We wanted compelling narrative and real multiplayer competition," Bisceglia says. In particular, he says, they wanted to avoid the question that often plagues Foursquare: "What's the point?"

Bisceglia and Shao moved away from location-based marketing and plunged into designing a "pure" game. TapCity's users are assigned an "epic mission" when they start the game: to build a fantasy empire overlaid on real-world locations. Players can buy game-world versions of the real-world locations they visit; that gives them control over these places in the game and lets them build virtual fortified buildings on the TapCity map.

By using virtual weapons—such as slingshots and wrecking balls for attack, or guard dogs and force fields for defense—they can try to take over others' locations or defend their own. Shao and Bisceglia intend this to be an intensely social game, in which players recruit friends to join them on incursions into new territory, or to protect locations that are under attack. 

Another company, called Hurricane Party, grounds its location-based service much more in the real world. However, its CEO and cofounder, René Pinnell, also complains that "social media is so antisocial these days," and says he wants to facilitate real social interactions between friends. Hurricane Party is an iPhone app to help friends get together spontaneously, and it aims for that goal more directly than Foursquare, which can produce get-togethers as a by-product of checking in.