I work in digital. As such, I tend to justify an every increasing social media addiction on the grounds I need to play with new social sites and digital bits of kit in order to “understand” the audience. This isn’t a lie, you understand, just creative justification. 🙂
Recently, I’ve been playing with foursquare having resisted for some time*.
Things I’ve learned:
1. I have no life: seriously I just go to work, Pret, work, and come home again.
2. A surprising number of people seem to have their homes logged. Is this wise…? I think not. Anyone want to buy some computers…? 😉
3. My phone has less no sense of direction, frequently it believes I’m up to as much as half a mile from where I am actually standing or, as I prefer to think of it, is in a constant state of quantum flux diligently reporting on my alternative selves locations. This would also negate point 1 and really I’m a bastion of fascination, my alternative selves are the ones who are dull.
4. Checking in is mildly addictive. Something is wrong when you frantically try to check in before the train pulls out.
5. Being Mayor does not mean you get to wear a big gold chain. Sigh.
I don’t really get it…
Joking aside, I can’t really see the upside for the consumer in this at the moment. I get the advertising application but the workflow for a user checking in is not seamlessly integrated into a related activity and the current upside from loyalty related offers is minimal.
But in the future…
This feels like an interesting idea that’s not quite baked. For example, I could see this kind of pinging out to networks working if mobile phones and credit cards continue to converge (that’s a big if) and a younger set of users (that view privacy as something archaic) come to the fore. At present though I don’t think the current hook – a game style reward system – feels pretty cynical and not really narratively interesting enough to hold a large audience. I’m not a gamer though and so perhaps not the target audience.
Any gamers want to suggest a different, more likely, future for this platform?
* Honestly, you’d be proud of me over how I hesitated and guffawed over the invasion of location stamping. It was only when I realised I tweet where I am most of the time that I had failed to dodge this landmine…
The privacy side of these sites/systems really does worry me, and in fact I think a guy wrote a script to scrape the data from foursquare (or some other similar service) and look for trends in user’s behavior. Mainly pin pointing where users live, where they work and what hours they are away from either. I.e. a system to tell you the best time to burgle either their house or their office.
A quick google reveals:
http://www.h-online.com/security/news/item/Geolocators-become-a-privacy-problem-1031970.html%20
I know this next part makes me sound very old indeed, but I sometimes wonder if the ‘youth’ today actually realise what they are doing when they put so much information on the internets. Maybe they do and they just don’t care, I don’t know.
They don’t for the most part. However, they are becoming so ubiquitous that it’s possible they will just view privacy as an archaic concept. Sleepwalking into 1984.
I didn’t expect to end up here, but somehow, here I am. Hi.
Someone did actually set up a website called PleaseRobMe (dot com) a while back to show people how careless it was to list your own house on a geo-locating service.
I personally don’t understand Foursquare. The badges aren’t compelling for me, although I do admit a little bit of delight if I am able to check-in from strange places, like halfway across the irish sea or from the middle of a roman fort in the lakes.
I saw an interesting app once that let you attach a message to your location… a ‘whisper’, which could then only be read by other people standing in that location. I can’t see how that would EVER make anyone some money, but the idea was so much more alluring to me.