Why I won’t be checking in to FourSquare
Nobody can escape the flood of Foursquare notifications on Facebook and Twitter from their friends as neophyte users of Foursquare broadcast their every movement, yet to realize that their friends don’t really care that much that they’ve checked into their bus stop, or whatever.
Those who know me know I like Twitter. And the reason I like it so much is that you self-select your network: You can combine those parts of your real social connections, with online connections made with other people / identities (even brands if you’re so inclined) on the basis of those identities. If you find someone interesting / funny / though-provoking, you can follow them. If not, you don’t. The Twitter user should be a curator of people, carefully selecting those to follow to build a enriching and worthwhile social graph, while blocking the dull, the inane, the self-promoters and the spammers.
The other reason I like Twitter is the obvious and pretty much unassailable boundary between the private and the public. All interaction is obviously public (except for DM’s) and this obvious demarcation makes it easy for us to reason about how our actions on Twitter affect our real-world lives. Compare this to Facebook with its dizzying array of privacy options, and insiduous moves to make information public (or more public than it was) by default. Short of making DM’s public, Twitter couldn’t compromise its users data even if it wanted to.
Compare this to Foursquare. Instead of curating a social graph by identity, a Foursquare user implicitly builds a social graph based on place. And so what? Do I really care what the people who happen to frequent the same coffee shop as me, or the same laundromat have to say? I can’t say that I do. In a world where multiple services compete for my online attention (usually at the expense of the attention I give to meat-space), each new social network must justify the time given to it. I cannot see that time spent on Foursquare is time spent profitably.
Then there’s the issue of privacy. The broadcasting of location has massive implications for our real lives - instead of (screen)names behind IP addresses, possibly anywhere in the world, who control how much of our real identity we reveal online, we become immediately localised to a few square meters. PleaseRobMe was the first to leverage Foursquare data to highlight these privacy issues, and as an internet, we have made only baby steps in understanding the full implications of these new technologies. These privacy concerns all sit against a background of venture capital: at some point, Foursquare is expected to turn a profit, and, like Facebook, may be tempted/pushed into revealing their users data to advertisers or to each other in new and unanticipated ways.
Danah Boyd made the point in her SXSW keynote that while teenagers view privacy in social networks through the filter of “what can I gain?” - popularity, fame, etc - adults will view social networks through a different filter: “what can I lose”. Will posting a status update cost me my job, or my privacy, or lead to a violent ex-husband tracking me down? On both those questions, Foursquare offers hazy answers: not much to gain, and a lot to lose.
So I won’t be “checking in” any time soon.
