I’ve been using Foursquare since their iPhone app first came out. The promise of Foursquare has yet to be fulfilled (for me), mainly because the demographic is so specific. You’ve got to have a smart phone (which used to be more of an issue than it is today). You and your friends have to care enough to bother checking in. And it helps to be located nearby. All this conspires to make Foursquare well suited for urban environs like NYC or San Francisco, or tech-saavy events like SXSW. Orange County is still a little too sleepy to realize the full potential of Foursquare.
That may be changing.
The most recent update to Foursquare incorporated a leaderboard. You could always compete on Foursquare with your friends for badges or mayorship of the local Starbucks, but the leaderboard brings a whole new level of competition to the “game” of Foursquare.
I upgraded to the new version as soon as it came out — I’m religious about upgrading. But I didn’t really pay much attention to the new features. The most obvious new feature was the “Specials Nearby” which now shows the number and a list of all specials within a few miles of your current location.
When I checked in, I also noticed it showed my current rank, but I still didn’t pay much attention to that. Then I noticed some unusual check-in behavior. Pete McGowan — one of my friends at PlainJoe Studios — was checking in all over the place. He even checked in from the 15 freeway! Weird, right?
Then I stumbled upon the reason. Clicking on the leaderboard from your profile shows your rank next to all of your Foursquare friends. The gauntlet had been thrown down, and it seemed that — at least for some people — they were determined to sit at the top of that leaderboard.
My girlfriend will tell you I check in a lot. She marvels at my consistency, but really it’s just a matter of habit now. I figured I’d rank pretty high, which I do, but when you look at my total check-in points, it’s a fraction of those of my friend Pete.
It’s possible that some people are abusing their check-in powers just to game the system. But it’s also clear that Foursquare has taken the game aspect of their popular app to a whole new level.
Are you on Foursquare? You can find or follow me here.
I noticed the Leaderboard but didn’t give it much thought. I really don’t care one way or another about the game aspect of Foursquare — I don’t intentionally try to accumulate “points” or score higher than anyone else. I use it solely to track (1) my time at the gym, and (2) what restaurants I’ve eaten at.
That said, it was interesting to use during SXSW to see where a few of my Milwaukee friends were at the time, especially if they happened to be in the same session I was and I hadn’t seen them enter. That’s about all I use it for, so this Leaderboard doesn’t really concern me whatsoever, but I agree — the people who obsessively check in everywhere possible just to game the system and boost their ranking are a bit on the annoying side.
Yeah, sounds like there’s not the critical mass of users in Milwaukee, either. I wonder if Foursquare and the apps like it will so permeate our society that eventually we all run it without thinking (or even without having to checking, as possible now with Google Latitude). What would we do with that data?
I read recently that credit card companies can predict when a married couple is going to divorce two years ahead of time simply by looking at their spending patterns. They have access to a wealth of data points. Imagine if we had access to that same intelligence and analysis? How might that change our behavior on a macro level?
This is one of the reasons apps like Foursquare intrigue me. They give me an easy way to collect data about myself — a sort of semi-automatic digital diary of my life. What any of us do with that information may be the transformative crux of our next evolutionary step — as individuals and as a society.