Foursquare Loses Me

After hearing awhile ago that one of my favourite mobile apps, Foursquare, would me splitting into two I was not eager for the changes.  I'm not normally one who hates all changes to their favourite apps. (Every time Facebook makes any change I can anticipate the tiresome complaints from the regular suspects.)

I was an early adopter and continual user of Foursquare and blogged a lot about them. For those not familiar with Foursquare - or who checked it out when it launched and then forgot about it - Foursquare is a leader in location-based services and geosocial networking.  Since its launch, people could virtually indicate their presence at a physically location through the service. Users could also add associated public reviews or share status updates for one's friends.  The app made it easy to see where your friends were and to find nearby places and business of interest.

Earlier this month, Foursquare announced they would be splitting these services into two apps. A new app, Swarm, would be launched for geosocial networking and the Foursquare app would maintain social recommendation features.

I acknowledge that many of the gaming and title features that initially drove usage through novelty - the mayorships of places and humourous badges based on check-ins - were no longer compelling. There were occasional real-world benefits - in my years of using Foursquare I got a free gelato and a 10% discount on concessions from my local cinema. Ben Heyman addresses Foursquare and other app's challenges with pointless gamification, Foursquare Committed Suicide, Signaling the End of the Gamification Fad.

But it wasn't all about that. And, I still believe Foursquare had unique value

It's great as a place diary. I enjoying recording and sharing with my friends any interesting places I was at or any interesting commentary I had. Not everything merits publishing on Facebook or Twitter.

I also liked the ability to explore the world around me. It's great to find out if there are businesses near to me that my friends or other users like. But I enjoy the social and unofficial histories of normal and special places that Foursquare offered. Foursquare also had lists that enabled social, place-based curation that was also great. Granted, the app Findery is doing this better, but they have only recently launched an app (iPhone only) and it has not hit a critical mass that gives it vitality or stickiness.

I liked how Foursquare had all these features in one place. I loved how it was an app where the central feature is place. This allows a different view of the world than other apps entail. It grounds us to our place, while opening up our world to our social network.

I understood why Foursquare needed to change to keep their massive number of users, however. Matthew Panzarino wrote an excellent article on this for TechCrunch, Foursquare’s Swarm And The Rise Of The Invisible App. He argues that as smartphone media have become more mature we have transitioned from replicated prior technology to multi-purpose apps that offerred a plethora of features (such as Foursquare). In the era of people ever-increasing number of apps and ever-dwindling free time, we are now seeing a new era of apps,

These ‘invisible apps’ are less about the way they look or how many features they cram in and more about maximizing their usefulness to you without monopolizing your attention.... A confluence of factors have made these kinds of context-aware apps possible at this point in time. Increasing power efficiency in physical memory and device processors has led to better battery life

 Today, I tried out the new app Swarm and a sneak-peak of the new Foursquare (the old interface is being grandfathered out).

Swarm is definitely easy-to-use and seems great at what it does - geosocial networking. Swarm has features Foursquare didn't have, such as social coordination tools (helps you plan a semi-spontaneous events with your circle), auto check-in options, and better friend geo-tracking displays. The ability to set Swarm to check you into places automatically is key to its utility as Wired has identified. There are also some "sticker" features that I seem like glorified emoticons. But the place check-in is central to the app, as it was with Foursquare. One can check into a place manually in the same way as one did before on Foursquare. Once checked into a place Swarm is linking to Foursquare for friends' and other users' reviews.

Swarm is cool, but aimed at the party crowd (which I am not one any more - okay I never was).  There are (or rather were) many apps that did this. Perhaps, Foursquare's large number or users and slick interface will help it succeed where others have failed.

Downloading Swarm is super quick and easy. Foursquare is automatically porting user's data to Swarm. It makes transferring to the new app easy.  So from that standpoint the split is handled well, but some people might not like their data ported to another app without their permission (or knowledge).

The old Foursquare app will become essentially just a social and proximity recommendation app for businesses and sites pretty much just like Yelp or Yellow Pages' app. With the geosocial networking features largely removed from Foursquare, it seems like the only reason to use it would be when one wants to get a recommendation for a nearby business or site with one's friends reviews getting special status. Foursquare long ago buried their lists features to the point that it is impossible to find other users lists.

So now Foursquare becomes a passive tool for searching for proximal info. I get that local search and advertising is a potentially lucrative market for much-needed revenue for the company. It's definitely a useful feature, which I will no doubt use occasionally. But unless I'm travelling, I don't visit very many new areas. And when I do go somewhere new and special, I am not going to use two apps. Foursquare used to be the app that made place a single, pivotal focus. By splitting its focus, it adds up to less than the sum of its original parts.

Locative Media and Geosocial Networking - Overview Presentation

Yesterday, I presented on Locative Media and Geosocial Networking for one of Canada's major mobile carriers.

It is a broad overview, but offers the various components of this emerging area.

To read my speaker notes, click the options button on presentation toolbar.

 (If the presentation doesn't load in this window, view the presentation on Google Docs.)

Geosocial Networking: Check Out What's Happening With Check-ins

This week, I had the opportunity to guest lecture for a great class on social networking at the University of Toronto. I spoke about how new technologies were facilitating geosocial networking, that is people connecting and sharing place-based experiences via their mobile device.

I've been studying this for over two years and I'm an avid user of the ultimate geosocial app, foursquare. So I was excited to speak on this topic.

I'll give a brief summary of the main themes I addressed in my presentation.

Introduction
I wanted to begin the presentation by having the class get a Swarm badge (earned for a mass check-ins at a location) from foursquare. But problems with the tech highlight that this field is not mature and profound user issues remain. For one, the lecture hall was in a basement of UofT and my network connectivity was the pits.  When I finally could connect to foursquare, the app would not accurately find my location (it pulled up locations within an approximate 20 block radius).  So I had to do a manual search for the building, but foursquare could not find it by the common, short version of the name of Alumni Hall. I had to exit the building to find out the proper name of the building and then enter it in full, i.e. Muzzo Family Alumni Hall.  Finally, once I was able to check-in (15 minutes later) I asked the class of over 50 people how many of them had foursquare and only a handful did. Surprisingly, few of the class appeared to be using any geosocial apps. Considering that according to Pew only 4% of US people were using foursquare or other similar geosocial apps, the low uptake shouldn't be that surprising except that young people have the highest rate of adoption of such mobile and social tech.

Courtesy of Agent-X Comics ( http://www.agent-x.com.au)

Terminology
I've previously blogged about the core concepts and terms that enable geosocial and location-based apps, so I won't go over them in detail. But here are the need-to-know terms:

• Location-based services (LBS) - mobile apps that target content and interfaces based on a user's location
• Geolocation - identification of a user's physical location using positioning tech, such as GPS or cell signal triangulation, user self-selection, or a combination of these
• Geocoding - digital content with referenced geographic location appended to it
• Geotagging - user-based metadata appended to digital content, often in the form of folksonomies

Geosocial Media 

Most of the forms of digital content that people create and connect over on the Web, known as social objects, are also used for geosocial networking. The most common geosocial media are:

• Reviews, tips, & ratings (e.g. of restaurants, shops, attractions)
• User profiles
• Photographs & videos
• Games
• Status updates & comments
• Participatory maps

Major Players in the Field

Lately, every digital media company is offering geolocative and geosocial functionalities to their services. I've been keeping track of some of the most popular and innovative apps on this blog through my ongoing List of Location-based services.  But here are the major ones:

• foursquare (the most used of "pure" LBSs) 
• Twitter (although this aspect is seldom used)
• Flickr (possibly the largest source of geocoded data due to automatic setting)
• Loopt
• Google Latitude

Screenshot of foursquare, showing user tips of nearby businesses.

Social Coordination

From my research, I've found that one of main usages of LBS are for social coordination, that is the ability to find and meet-up with friends or others.  Social coordination takes the following forms:

• Friends - these apps make it easy to see your friends whereabouts through map-based interfaces, status updates, and place-based check-ins and have impromptu or serendipitous encounters 
• Strangers - some apps facilitate strangers connecting over proximity and shared interests or dating status
• Emergency situations - geolocative apps have been used in disaster situations to coordinate rescue, aid, and news- gathering.  Also, a new app from Toronto, Guardly, makes it very easy for people to alert family, close contacts, and police in personal emergency situations
• Politics - LBS has been used to coordinate protests (e.g. Occupy and G20) and poll monitoring

Social Cohesion

I call this outcome of geosocial media place-based bonding.  Mass check-ins and sharing of place information and tips helps friends and strangers connect. This can be related to an en masse event, such as I observed for Toronto's Pride Festival and Canada Day celebrations, or singular experiences of readings others stories and experiences with a place that they have shared via LBS.

Identity Projection

I also have a subtitle for this, it's "Why no one checks into Burger King or Walmart".  During my research I found that, for the most part, people weren't check-in and sharing the places they are most apt to predominantly frequent, yet they eagerly shared trendy restaurants, clubs, travel destinations, or other seemingly impressive locales. As with other media, people deliberately use the tech to project their desired image of themselves.

Giving Voice

The academic subtitle for this would be "circumventing the hegemony" but no one other than journal reviewers wants to see this. Geosocial media are more than just user-generated content, they provide an effective voice to people with various positive outcomes:

• Consumer justice and protection - people's reviews and ratings of places are accessed via LBS are easy to access when and where needed
• Making visible hidden histories - people can annotate their own cities (I use the example here of how the power-that-be in Toronto decided to erect a prominent shrine to Winston Churchill at our City Hall, complete with a huge statue and ample plaques, despite the fact that Churchill had no significant connection to the city or even Canada. What the City has decided not to share is our own history, such as our first mayor and democratic revolutionary William Lyon Mackenzie, that the first China Town was razed to put up our new City Hall, or that it's the location of numerous weddings (including a stranger's that I was spontaneously asked to witness). All this can now be readily shared and virtually attached to the place - despite what is sanctioned by officials.
• Protests - place has been used to extend the visibility and power of protests, such as during Occupy, G2) protests and the famous Tiananmen Square anniversary protests via foursquare that resulting in China banning it.

 G20 protesters checked in here in solidarity of detainees.

This location was mysteriously removed from foursquare's database shortly afterwards.

Privacy & Surveillance

I think too much is made of this issue, as most of the apps are getting better with their privacy settings and users need to take the time to read privacy policy and set their options appropriately. However, this was raised in the class and amongst my research participants as a major barrier to greater adoption.  Yet, at the same time it is the ability of this tech to facilitate friend tracking, a.k.a. participatory surveillance, that help makes it so popular.

Courtesy of Agent-X Comics ( http://www.agent-x.com.au)

Advertising 

Most of the geosocial networking and LBS apps are commercial. So they have to make money somehow, even though most users don't often consider this. Advertising and marketing are the only current viable models.  It's great when businesses get it right, such as a local gelato place that recognized via Fourquare that I was a frequent customer and gave me a free gelato. It's less great when I got an ad for a "deal nearby" for a plus-sized women's clothing store. 

Explorations 

These apps are helping us discover new things about our friends and new information about the place we encounter. This is both possible positive and negative outcomes. People appreciate the advice of others and it is a great way to make and decisions about the world. Yet, in an amazing essay by Mitchell Schwarzer, A Sense of Place: A World of Augmented Reality , having our world always curated for us by others may prevent us forming our own thoughts and experiences. I experienced this moments before my lecture as I checked-in to a nearby independent cafe. I thought it seemed great (it had a huge Klimt mural after all), but when I read the reviews I noticed that people had pointed out legitimate problems with the cafe that I had overlooked. I was enjoying myself there until the communal experience changed it for the worse.

Hybrid Space

One of the continual outcomes of this new technology and our geosocial networking is the changing nature of place.  Place is no longer a backdrop to our media usage and everyday activities. Place is now merging with technology and us to create new hybrid spaces.  Dana Cuff calls these new types of places, cyburgs. The resulting changes to our relationships will be fascinating to watch and experience.

For more information and applications on this topic, check out my Delicious Stack on Geosocial Networking.

User-Generated Map & Meaning Making via foursquare

I recently presented at the conference Boundaries, Frontiers & Gatekeepers on some of my Foursquare research.

I've embedded this as a Slideshare presentation. It doesn't offer an elegant way to display the speaker notes so I had to include them as comments (if anyone knows a better way, please let me know). To view my notes, you'll need to click to Slideshare's website.

My research on location-based services, georeferencing, and mobile applications is still in the very early stages, but this presentation gives a sense of the area of my exploration.

User-Generated Map and Meaning Making via Foursquare from Glen Farrelly

Geo-Terminology

The topic of location-aware mobile applications are certainly a growing area. Whether an application used more for fun and reviews such as Foursquare or to find nearby businesses such as the Yellow Pages app, I believe this type of technology will become increasingly ubiquitous and embedded in an increasing number of applications and online services.

My research has been examine how these applications function and are constructed. I've encountered a lot of jargon and key terms to the area that I find it useful to clear up. So I spent some time on Wikipedia (an invaluable source).

So here are a few terms that comprise or are a form of a mobile location-aware application. All definitions are for the most part from Wikipedia, unless otherwise noted. My comments are in curly parentheses {}.

Device Level

- Context awareness - "computers can both sense, and react based on their environment" {e.g. time of day, light level, noise level, location hence "location awareness}

- Geolocation - "identification of the real-world geographic location of an object, such as a cell phone or an Internet-connected computer terminal. Geolocation may refer to the practice of assessing the location, or to the actual assessed location"

Application Level

- Location-based service (LBS) - "information or entertainment service, accessible with mobile devices through the mobile network and utilizing the ability to make use of the geographical position of the mobile device"

- Locative media - "media of communication functionally bound to a location. Locative media are digital media applied to real places and thus triggering real social interactions.... Many locative media projects have a social, critical or personal (memory) background"

- Local search - " specialized Internet search engines that allow users to submit geographically constrained searches against a structured database of local business listings. Typical local search queries include not only information about 'what' the site visitor is searching for (such as keywords, a business category, or the name of a consumer product) but also 'where' information, such as a street address, city name, postal code, or geographic coordinates"

- Geotargeting - "delivering different content {e.g. advertising} to that visitor based on his or her location"

- Augmented reality (AR) - "live direct or indirect view of a physical, real-world environment whose elements are augmented by computer-generated sensory input, such as sound or graphics" {and increasingly text-based data are being considered AR too}

User Level

- Geosocial networking - "social networking in which geographic services and capabilities such as geocoding and geotagging are used to enable additional social dynamics" {e.g. Foursquare}

- Geographic information retrieval (GIR) - "augmentation of information retrieval with geographic metadata. Information retrieval generally views documents as a collection or `bag' of words. In contrast Geographic Information Retrieval requires a small amount of semantic data to be present (namely a location or geographic feature associated with a document)"

- Geographic relevance - "relevance denotes how well a retrieved document or set of documents meets the information need of the user" {in geographic terms, relevance most often would relate to proximity of the document/object to the user, but other forms would be temporal proximity (travel time) and the visibility of desired resource}

- Geofence - "virtual perimeter for a real-world geographic area. A geo-fence could be dynamically generated - as in a radius around a store or point location.... When the location-aware device of a location-based service (LBS) user enters or exits a geo-fence, the device receives a generated notification" {this could be used to block users from accessing user-generated or non-sanctioned georeferenced information about that location/business}

- Geomessaging - not in Wikipedia but here's my take - user messages (either delivered via email, SMS, or application-based) to friends or themselves georeferenced to a specific space that can only be received when at that designated space

Data Level

- Hyperlocal - "Oriented around a well defined, community scale area with primary focus being directed towards the concerns of its residents.... Hyperlocal content, often referred to as hyperlocal news, is characterized by three major elements. First, it refers to entities and events that are located within a well defined, community scale area. Secondly, it is intended primarily for consumption by residents of that area. Thirdly, it is created by a resident of the location"

- Georeferencing - "establishing {an object or document} location in terms of map projections or coordinate systems"

- Geospatial metadata - "metadata that is applicable to objects that have an explicit or implicit geographic extent, in other words, are associated with some position on the surface of the globe"

- Geocoding - "finding associated geographic coordinates (often expressed as latitude and longitude) from other geographic data, such as street addresses, or zip codes (postal codes)"

- Geotagging - "adding geographical identification metadata to various media" {implies user-generated tags & folksonomies, per Flickr}

- Geoparsing - "assigning geographic identifiers (e.g., codes or geographic coordinates expressed as latitude-longitude) to textual words and phrases that occur in unstructured content, such as "twenty miles north east of Jalalabad".... Two primary uses of the geographic coordinates derived from unstructured content are to plot portions of the content on maps and to search the content using a map as a filter. Geoparsing goes beyond geocoding. Geocoding analyzes unambiguous structured location references, such as postal addresses and rigorously formatted numerical coordinates. Geoparsing handles ambiguous references in unstructured discourse"

- ISO 19115 - "standards for Geospatial metadata. ISO 19115 defines how to describe geographical information and associated services, including contents, spatial-temporal purchases, data quality, access and rights to use."

- GeoRSS - Wikipedia's definition was lacking, so I went to the GeoRSS website for this: "As RSS and Atom become more prevalent as a way to publish and share information, it becomes increasingly important that location is described in an interoperable manner so that applications can request, aggregate, share and map geographically tagged feeds."

- Keyhole Markup Language (KML) - "XML schema for expressing geographic annotation and visualization within Internet-based, two-dimensional maps and three-dimensional Earth browsers"

System Level

- Geographic information system (GIS) - "any system that captures, stores, analyzes, manages, and presents data that are linked to location(s)"

- Global positioning system (GPS) - "space-based global navigation satellite system that provides reliable location and time information in all weather and at all times and anywhere on or near the Earth when and where there is an unobstructed line of sight to four or more GPS satellites"

- Local positioning system - "Unlike GPS or other global navigation satellite systems, which are positioning systems with a global coverage, local positioning systems don't use technology that has global coverage; they use local technology or technology that has local coverage. Examples of this local technology include cellular base stations, Wi-Fi access points, and broadcast towers"

- Gazetteer - "geographical dictionary or directory, an important reference for information about places and place names, used in conjunction with a map or a full atlas"

- Geo-block - Wikipedia doesn't have this term, but Michael Geist covers the topic well in his article Geo-Blocking Sites a Business Rather Than Legal Issue. Essentially, as it applies to the Internet, a geo-block identifies a user's IP address and restricts access to content if the user is not in a pre-approved zone. In contrast, geo-authentication can allow a user entry into an online system or site based on their IP location.

- Location-based advertising {similar to proximity marketing} - "advertising that uses location-tracking technology in mobile networks to target consumers with location-specific advertising on their mobile devices.

Finally two good parting concepts:

- Space vs. place - "Geographic space is the space that encircles the planet, through which biological life moves. It is differentiated from 'outer space" and 'inner space' (inside the mind). One definition of place, proposed by Tuan, is that a place comes into existence when humans give meaning to a part of the larger, undifferentiated space. Any time a location is identified or given a name, it is separated from the undefined space that surrounds it. Some places, however, have been given stronger meanings, names or definitions by society than others. These are the places that are said to have a strong 'Sense of Place'"

Geospatial Web or Geoweb - "merging of geographical (location-based) information with the abstract information that currently dominates the Internet. This would create an environment where one could search for things based on location instead of by keyword only – e.g. 'What is Here?...The geoweb also promises to make geographical information much more ubiquitous, opening geoinformation up to the mass market."