2009-11-05
Foursquare vs Informatics
This week, Foursquare (“Check in. Find your friends. Unlock your city.”) launched in another fifteen European cities, following London last month. Unfortunately, even in that short time, I’ve stopped playing.
As I mentioned in my post on noticings, Foursquare (and the vaguely related game/service, Gowalla) are “focussed on right there, right then”. They’re about chasing the red dot, which I’m terrible at. Last Friday I went to two pubs and a restaurant, which for me is a raging night out these days, but because I was actually enjoying myself, I completely forgot to check in to any of them.
Personally, I want Foursquare to be another component of my outboard brain, remembering where I’ve been and when, so I don’t have to. Unfortunately, that’s not what it’s for. The website exposes a “feed” but there’s no detail to it. The API can return a history, but it defaults to 20 items and has no paging, so I suspect after a year I’d be out of luck. More importantly, I can’t even do a check-in to somewhere I’ve been but am not at: not only is there no way to edit the time of a check-in, but people regard this as cheating and there are planned to be measures to stop it.
The combination of those two, along with the fact that people (rightly) argue against checking in to everything¹, have led me to basically drop off Foursquare entirely. Admittedly, this is a bit like saying “This horse is terrible at being a housepet!” but nonetheless, when someone comes up with a nice way of recording where I am that I can backfill, yet which ties together with a social context² to perhaps encourage serendipity, I’ll be right there.
¹ I’d like to have a record of my Tube journeys, for example, which I could do with FourTap, but really I’d want details of the entire trip, not just the start and end points (and I wouldn’t want to post those to Foursquare, as I’m by definition passing through). The same goes to some extent for buses.
² This is why I probably won’t use Daytum for something like this. That, and the lack of a useful pre-filled (even if flawed) database of places.
