It seems that location-based social-game affair FourSquare has seen something of a popularity boost in the last two months, with traffic to the service tripling, cementing its position.

For those who haven’t had a chance to give it a go yet, FourSquare is a relative simple game that allows users to accrue points based on their location. Users can “check in” at a particular location flagged as being nearby based on their current location, as pulled from their phone. Players are awarded points based on their various check-ins, with badges being awarded for specific criteria.

According to the Telegraph, FourSquare’s traffic in the US has increased by fully 50% since the beginning of December, and up a massive 200% since November, so clearly there’s some fairly massive buzz being generated around the service. It seems likely that some of this growth has come from piggybacking on the popularity of other social networking services like Twitter.

With many users choosing to publish the locations at which they check-in to their Twitter accounts, which has naturally precipitated an absolute raft of people asking what the deal is. It’s a fairly solid model, and one that seems to have led to an awful lot of traffic for FourSquare, so it’s hard to fault it… even if it is a bit of a bother to see Twitter’s stream clogged up with geo-location tweets.

Still, it’s not all wine and roses. FourSquare has come under fire this week for its Douchebag badge, which users can unlock by checking-in at establishments (in)famous for housing… a particular type of clientele. Indeed, the Douchebag badge, once unlocked, informs the user that they should “pop that collar.”