Hack the MIX Hackathon

I admit it. I use foursquare. I'm not entirely sure why, but I do. I also use Map My Ride for my daily bicycle commute in order to log the miles as training and such. Both applications are mainly used on my mobile handset. I rarely open them up on a computer, ipad or laptop or other some such device. This is the way the world is headed.

One feature of both those applications, among many others I'm sure, is that they issue badges or awards according to your level of accomplishment. Visit 15 cafes in a on month period, and you "unlock" the Fourth Level of Caffeine-ation " badge, or whatever they call it on Foursqure.  If you hit your personal record or log the fastest time on a particular mountain climb, you earn the King of the Mountain badge, or a PR record badge, from Map My Ride.

Right now, the MIX hacks are all measured in terms of how many likes or comments they receive. It's hard to judge the quality of the hack visually, or even instantaneously.  If the MIX created a similar badge system, based on a) applicability, and b) around a particular area of enterprise or usefulness, or c) some other such criteria (perhaps even measured around the breakdown used for the moonshots), and those badges were awarded using some kind of algorythm, or even more coveted could be a user generated badge (the one that most of users find applicable, for example), then it would be easier to identify which hack might be more or less useful.  Right now, you have to dig through each hack; and there are many good ones. What we need is a more simplified way to sort visually through the long list of hacks.