Now selling for $10 on Foap.com.

Secondhand News The online consignment shop Refashioner.com went live this week. Billed as a “curated, online eco-mmunity” for buying, selling and trading vintage clothing, users can apply to create a “closet” and upload pictures of used clothing to sell—which must be approved by the “ReFashion police.” For more info, we direct you to the site’s 10-point sustainable fashion manifesto.

Pricey pics Short on cash? Now you can sell your iPhone photos for $10 a pop. Simply download Foap’s free app, upload photos from your iPhone albums and send them to Foap’s “experts” for approval.  The only catch: Foap pockets 50 percent of your profit on each image, and users are warned that images with heavy filters from Instagram and the like won’t be approved. But still!

Communal connectivity Open Garden, a free app for Android, Mac and PC that enables one gadget to share bandwidth connectivity with nearby devices, announced a new Wi-Fi Direct feature for Android 4.1 “Jelly Bean” at Google I/O last week.

TV on the internet BuddyTV announced an update to their iOS app, which is now integrated with Facebook Open Graph--enabling users to share your ratings, favorite TV shows and movies and other app activities with Facebook friends.

Check-in Foursquare just launched their “Connected Apps” platform, which enables developers to build apps directly connected to Foursquare. Partners include The Weather Channel—now you can get the weather forecast with your first check-in to a new city—and Eat This, Not That, which tells you what dishes to order and avoid once you check-in to a particular restaurant.

Green apps Check out the winning apps from the city’s first sustainability hackathon, Reinvent Green. Try them out and vote for your favorite before July 15.

More data Chartbeat Publishing, a data analytics service for editors and publishers, just launched its Heads Up Display. Designed to give content producers immediate information on the health and user activity of their sites, the new display provides vitals to help editors understand which articles are driving site traffic, how quickly a particular story is accelerating or decelerating, and how far down on the page viewers are reading.

Now hiring We’ve heard that Bitly is looking for a Sales Research Associate, Acclivity NYC needs a UI/UX Designer and a Python Back-end Developer and News.me wants a Senior iOS Engineer.

Going to jail is no longer a good strategy

As Dennis Crowley pointed out on Twitter yesterday, foursqaure's robust API has allowed developers to create thousands of interesting apps that are running primarily and in some cases entirely off the services data.

We already told you about Fourcraft, which turned New York into a giant game of risk. Today it's Foursquaropoly (tough name), which layers the basic principles of the classic board game Monopoly on top of Big Apple check-ins.

Players are given $10,000 to start and can purchase a building if they check-in and find its not owned yet. After that, anyone who checks in pays rent to the owner. The owner must pay an upkeep on the property. Price, rent and upkeep are all determined by the popularity of the venue, with the most well trafficked check-ins, like the Empire State building.

Foursquare's API is a fascinating business play. The more users interacting with the service through consumer-facing apps, the better their data will become. And over time, that data will become valuable enough that it can be licensed out to other companies that want to use it for business.

You can find out more about the game and its creators here.

Foursquaropoly from Deanna McDonald on Vimeo.

We can't all be da mayor.

Ahhh lurkers, where would the internet be without them. While Foursquare has growing steadily, hitting the 10 million user mark today, co-founder Dennis Crowley say that to truly hit scale, Foursquare needs to find a way to offer value to users who don't check in.

Speaking at the 92nd street Y for the #140 conference this week, Crowley pointed out that Twitter, five percent of users account for 75 percent of the activity. In fact, according to research from Sysmos, 21 percent have never written a tweet and 85 percent update less than once per day.

A lot of those users, however, are on Twitter to follow their favorite celebrities or friends. Some are keeping track of a particular hashtag to keep up with news events like the #arabspring or  #weinergate.

On Foursquare, it would be a little strange (you stalker) to follow people without participating.The service is less of a platform for public figures and more of a social network for friends to keep tabs on one another.

But with the introduction of the explore feature, Foursquare is positioning itself as a city guide as well. So it would make sense for a user to join, follow a few friends who are active users that share similar tastes, and use the recommendations generated from that activity. "As with any social service, you have a core of active people doing things like sharing or checking in, and others who are more commenters or consumers," says co-founder Naveen Selvadurai. "Having all types of people in our community makes for a better experience for everyone."

Foursquare might also consider partnering with taste makers to who could be followed by users particularly interested in good coffee, bookstores or public parks. This would be something akin to the list model created by Dinevore. Users might also be able to follow brands which could offer specials, adding economic value to these infrequent check in types.

"A lot of people will look through foursquare Tips when they arrive at a place; it's a good source of suggestions and insider info, from friends, celebrities, and the foursquare community," says Selvadurai.

As Foursquare looks to close a big round of funding this summer, focusing on a way to attract and engage casual users seems like a smart priority. "We look at how people use foursquare, and try and increase the value they get out of it. That's why we created comments (tons of people were texting friends they saw checking in), and Tips (people want to share their expertise). A big part of the foursquare experience has value even if you're not checking in, because there's a ton of knowledge that is shared within the community," says Selvadurai. "In the future, we're going to find more ways to share more of that, whether it's more personalized recommendations or better social sharing tools. We're just at the start of what we hope to be able to do."

Once upon a time very active users were promoted to superuser status, but this seemed to promote a lot of cheaters, and so Foursquare turned off this feature.

With less hands to handle more problems, superusers were getting burned out. So this week Foursquare announced a new initiative to upgrade normal users to power status. Until now only users handpicked by the staff were considered for these positions. Now anyone can apply for the gig and exisiting superusers can nominate others to join their ranks.

There is an admissions process that requires aspiring superusers to share their reason for wanting the position and even a quiz that tests them on the rules. Having passed these hurdles, superusers are given the opportunity to edit a venue to ensure they can keep up with proper foursquare style.

The new superusers will have expanded powers, including the ability close venues, edit URLs and set the radius from which users can check in.

Photo from Fortune

A new study from Comscore finds that one in five smartphone users access check in services through their device. That five times the activity found by Forrester Research in a report they put together last summer.

As if venture capitalists needed further incentive to get behind services like Foursquare, the same Comscore report found that these users, "showed a high propensity for mobile media usage, including accessing retail sites and shopping guides."

Don't make us spell it out. These folks checking in are lucrative targets for advertisers and businesses who take advantage of geo-targeting. It's the business being built by folks like LocalResponse, who just rolled out a new platform with a bunch of national brands.

Part of this growth can be attributed to the widespread adoption of smartphones. Android, which leads in US market share, also led the pack in terms of check ins. Not surprisingly, and perhaps less exciting for many retailers, users who checked in a lot also displayed, "Characteristics of early adopters, including a stronger likelihood of owning a tablet device and accessing tech news."

The Comscore study doesn't have much information on the user base that is not checking. They are less likely to have a smartphone, of course, but what would be really interesting is to see if all the location based activity going on is changing attitudes around this behavior. A Microsoft study from January found 54 percent were concerned that sharing their location would lead to identity theft or loss of privacy.

That second data point seems sort of oxymoronic to Betabeat, since  the whole point of checking in is to share your location with others. But perhaps the future will include a class of users who check in for rewards or to keep a personal log, but never broadcast that information to anyone in their social circle. Check in chickens, perhaps?