Could foursquare empower people to break commercial advantage?
A while ago I chewed over the problem of making it easy for members of the public to leave useful contextualised information for others in spite of opposing commercial incentives. Whether their developers intended it or not, foursquare could be the solution.
I had been incensed by a cashpoint in Birmingham’s International Convention Centre. It charged £2.50, which at the time was almost a pound more than other charging cash machines. Yet I knew full well that there was a free cash machine just a few minutes’ walk away. I felt the ICC was taking brazen advantage of people’s ignorance and I wanted somehow to leave a note there giving directions to the free machine; but more than that I wanted a systematic way for anyone to do the same.
There were problems with this:
- how to find quickly the information you want to share;
- how to generate that information if it doesn’t already exist (eg, nearest free cashpoint on a map);
- how to impart that information quickly and accessibly;
- how to leave that information to hand without:
- causing criminal damage;
- requiring extra tools (eg Post-It Notes);
- risking it being removed straight away.
We came up with a solution involving tagged Audioboos & an abstract symbol left nearby, but this had drawbacks:
- as it uses Audioboo an iPhone is required;
- it relies on the chosen tag being unique;
- it relies on digital tools & prior understanding of the system (eg the user must have gps & have enabled browser to broadcast their location);
- (in theory) it detects when someone requests tips for a given location, but doesn’t map the required information;
- it doesn’t solve the problems of finding the information in the first place.
But now we have foursquare. And foursquare works on more mobile devices than just the iPhone.
With foursquare we can add information about a place from the comfort of our living room (I just added a tip about the Brindleyplace cashpoint to the ICC entry) and people can see that in context. For example, if someone is in the ICC their mobile device will tell them there are tips for their location and they can see mine alerting them to the existence of a free cashpoint. Brilliant.
I get the impression that this wasn’t quite the intention of foursquare’s ‘tips’ feature, but I can see that if enough people use it businesses will have to sit up and take notice: they may have to start trying harder to fleece people than simply relying on ignorance.
vCard
Email
Audioboo
Delicious
Flickr
Google
Last.FM
LinkedIn
Tumblr
Twitter
While it might be a temporary solution and thus better than nothing, ultimately we want to move beyond proprietary services for urban annotation or any other type of content.
It’s really just a content + metadata + search problem.
Your content about a place could be a blog post, tweet, Facebook status update, photo, Boo, or whatever.
The metadata needs to record the location and have the semantic that the content is about the place, not simply recorded/posted in the place.
After that it’s just a case of having appropriate search tools that will pull up all the content tagged at that location. Twitter’s new geolocation API is a step forward and works with Foursquare and other location-based services.
An alternative approach that doesn’t rely on accurately determining the user’s location is to give every thing a unique ID (possibly a URI), make that ID readable visually and/or with a barcode/RFID and allow people to use that ID as metadata for content.
eg. this post is about http://things.demo/brindleyplace-atm
Adrian Short
Adrian, I agree completely. But I do think we should be encouraging the use of these tools to leave this sort of information, rather than waiting for a better solution.
Michael
PS: I didn’t mean to suggest you were saying that we should wait for a better solution!
Michael