Another Sunday night is over, and so ends another race to the top of the foursquare leader board. Everyone is getting very competitive in the Visual Jazz offices about their check-ins and points balances in the latest social media craze taking social media boffins by storm.
FourSquare in a nutshell, by foursquare…
foursquare is a cross between a friend-finder, a social city-guide and a game that rewards you for doing interesting things. We aim to build things to not only help you keep up with the places your friends go, but that encourage you to discover new places and challenge you to explore your neighborhood in new ways.
When you tell foursquare where you are, that’s called “checking-in”. You can check-in from parks, bars, museums, restaurants… really anywhere. When you check-in we’ll let your friends know where they can find you and award you points and badges based on your adventurousness.
It’s a mobile service that allows you to tell everyone where you are, and for you to instantly find out where all your friends are (as long as they’re regularly ‘checking in’). It’s a pretty interesting service that rewards users with points, mayorships for regulars and badges for earning achievements (many of which are quite cryptic). It’s a well thought out system that seems robust, easy to pick up and addictive. Its value for the regular punter is up for negotiation, but (like Twitter) it’s as useful as you and your network make it.
There are a few other similar services on the scene; Gowalla seems to have a very similar featureset with the inclusion of virtual items that you can drop and pick up (it’s also better designed), Google Latitude, Buzz, Twitter and Facebook also have location aware services for mobile devices, but foursquare seems to be picking up the momentum and has the press behind it. I’m sure there’s a whole bunch more out there but it will be hard to catch up now unless Facebook makes a big thrust in this direction.
Earning and obsessing
I’ve always loved going to new obscure places, and now I love it even more, knowing that the more obscure a place, the more likely i’ll be the first to add it to the network of foursquare locations to check-in to gaining me an extra 5 + points. Extra points are awarded for adding new places, checking in to places for the first time, and seem to be accumulated faster with a multiplier bonus the more you check in.
Checking in can easily become an obsession, especially when all your friends are doing it and you’re trying out new ways to unlock badges and earn points. Points get reset every Sunday night so you’ve always got a chance to redeem yourself next week if you fall behind. You know you’ve got a problem when you turn up at your mother-in-law’s house and can’t say hello to your greeters until you’ve checked in. It can get a bit socially unacceptable to be on your mobile device every time you walk through a new door, but for those with the addiction it’s commonplace.
Brands on foursquare
St. Ali coffee shop down the road from VJ is the first brand that I have noticed using foursquare to it’s benefit. Checking in to any location in the South Melbourne area pops up a little green box in the top right hand corner of the foursquare app that says ‘Special Nearby’. Tapping this special icon lets me know of a special available only to foursquare users. Initially St. Ali were offering 6 free beers, one for you and one for 5 of your mates each at their street party a couple of weeks ago, but only upon proving that you are the mayor of St. Ali on foursquare. After the street party was done, they changed the offer to be another foursquare specific task.
At this stage, with foursquare in its infancy, it’s probably just a good way for brands to test the technological savvy of their customer base, but as the service grows I’m sure it will get very creative. Apparently it only happens when checking in to like-minded locations like other cafés – but in practice, I’m not sure that works properly, as checking in to Visual Jazz alerts me to a special at the café down the road. It looks at this stage that the promotions in foursquare are free for brands to set up from a page on the foursquare site, but again I’m pretty sure as it evolves and more brands want to be involved that there will be a cost for this type of ‘advertisement’. Perhaps they will run a google adwords typo system with bidding for locations in your area? I can’t see the system working very well if there are 10 coffee shops in a city block that all have foursquare ‘specials’.
I think this stuff is great and a really fun way for brands to connect and monitor the usage, demographic and tech savviness of their customers. I can, however, see an issue arising when people are checking in to places fraudulently, which brings me to my next point…
Honesty and location fraud
I’m assuming the foursquare framework works completely on an honour system. I use it regularly and have (shamefully) checked into a place that I was leaving because I forgot to check in while I was there – I did it for the points. But this got me thinking, can I become the mayor of the Eiffel tower having never been to France? Perhaps not, as the system is aware of my general location (even though I can change it) and it wouldn’t suggest The Eiffel Tower as a place for me to legitimately check in to, but I’m pretty sure from my desk at VJ in South Melbourne I could hypothetically become the mayor of a Café down the street (having never stepped foot in the door) and then take advantage of their offer available only to mayors (presumably designed to reward loyal customers). On the flip side, if I was walking into the café for the first time to prove my mayorship and get some freebies, then at least that is getting me in the door. There’s a world of interesting opportunities and scenarios about to be unleashed, I’m sure.
Privacy
There’s an inherent danger in publicly publishing all of your coming and goings on the internet, and although there are some privacy protections in place, I think it’s fair to say that most people that don’t fully understand the implications or configurations to use friending and privacy settings properly. This is blatantly evident from the furore of the Facebook privacy changes.
Enter Please Rob Me. This site is a bit unfair, but it’s also a good idea in principal, even if it does nothing other than teach people not to be too transparent about their public movements. My house-mate is always home even if I’m not, so don’t even try it.
Wait and see
It’s cool. foursquare is really cool. It’s not for everyone, but for me and a group of my friends it’s really great to be out in the city and know where my friends are, offering places to go to meet up and places to avoid for fear of bad crowds. It’s another platform for brands to leverage in a new and interesting way and it’s clear that foursquare have a framework for this already in place, it will be interesting to see where they take it and who’s brave enough to use it early (and creatively).
Sammi, checking-out.
