Wide Rule

The geolocation social networking site Foursquare recently opened their service to “Everywhere.”  This allowed myself and my compatriots in Knoxville, TN to the “where am I” social networking – thus far we’ve only had “what am I doing” available.

The local geekery has already started building locations.  I am a self proclaimed video game hermit, and even I’ve added three separate locations to foursquare.

Today, @tma became the mayor of Pellissippi State Community College.  I pointed out that he shouldn’t be the mayor of where he is employed – I believe that foursquare should be a “I’m a patron here” instead of a “I am here” tool.  I know that @tma is at PSCC because he has to be there.  This led to our first question:

Conundrum 1: Who gets to check in?

Which of these questions are we answering with foursquare:

1. Where am I?
2. Where am I patronizing?

If it is simply number 1, then I think the mayor system is flawed.  To be a mayor in foursquare you have to visit a location more often than other people.  If you are, say, a manager who works at “the bar,” then I certainly hope you are the mayor of the bar.  If there is someone who is at the bar more often than an employee, they may want to question their life goals.

Additionally, I don’t normally want to see the tips from the employees.  I liken this to asking a server how something on the menu is – half the time your server has no idea how it tastes, they’re just going to say that they heard it was great.  There is no bad food if you’re trying to sell it.

If the question not just where am I, but where am I patronizing, it works with both the mayor and the tip system.  The mayor is someone who often visits the establishment, but is not required to visit.  The tips are now from people who actually have tried the food and want you to have (or avoid) a similar experience.

Separating it to just patrons, it will make the mayor a marketing campaign.  Want people to fight for mayor?  Offer a 10% discount to the current mayor.  It’s not a huge difference, but it’s enough to harbor friendly competition between geeks.

(This would all be a moot point if foursquare allowed you to list yourself as an employee.  This would flag you in the tips as employed there and also take you out of the running for mayor).

Conundrum 2: How should large, multi-building locations be displayed in geolocation social networking?

The fact that @tma works at a smaller community college opened another question – how should PSCC be split?  It only has one street address, but if the entire student body is vying for mayor of just PSCC, the competition is won by the guy taking 25 hours of classes a semester.

A few different ways we considered splitting the campus:

• Building
  • This is easily separated. The library, the performing arts center, etc.
• Organization Unit
  • Math Department in two buildings? Should it be one place?
• Campus Region
  • “Where are you?”
  • “I’m in the northwest quadrant of campus!”
  • “What?”
• One Big Campus
  • “I’m the mayor of PSCC!”
  • “That’s because you sleep here.”

I think the biggest problem of separating by anything but building (or even separating at all) is that you have to have a system organized enough that it’s easy to use.  If there is one global PSCC and then other options for the buildings, are you sure that users will click on anything but the first option? How will these different places display in a search?

As always, I have no answers, just a lot of questions

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Tags: Foursquare, geolocation, social networking

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 12th, 2010 at 12:38 pm and is filed under Foursquare. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.