Sunday, April 17, 2011

The Dirty Underbelly of Foursquare (Session 7)


Part 1: Official Rules

The SNS I am examining: Foursquare


Foursquare is a geo-social network that is accessed through a smartphone. A user dashboard is also found on the web. The link above lists the "house rules" for foursquare. This page is not accessible via the iPhone app though a savvy user could point their mobile web browser towards it. Personally I find this to be a bit problematic as nearly 100% of the time users access the SNS it is done via the smartphone app.

The house rules go through all of the DOs and DON'Ts of Foursquare. The DOs are helpful for people seeking questions about the basic use of the site like finding friends, checking in and leaving tips. The DON'Ts are basically a quick summery of the policies. In summery the five DON'Ts are:

          1)   Don’t check in when you’re not at a place

I imagine that many people break this rule but it would be difficult to find any data to really know for sure. The location in Honolulu with the most check-ins is the airport (HNL). The user who holds the mayorship (most check-ins) has checked in 47 times. This seems high for an airport so my guess is that this user works at the airport or is checking-in without actually being there. However, either way there is no real value gained by being the mayor of the airport so it might be an accurate check-in count according to Foursquare rules. Needless to say, this would be an extremely difficult rule for the Foursquare team to monitor and enforce.

          2)   Don’t create venues that do not exist

It is much easier to find data concerning this DON’T as all venues on Foursquare are searchable. The rules state specifically not to post locations such as “stuck in traffic” yet in Honolulu alone there are 34 different locations that violate this rule.



 I also found a place in downtown where you can check into outer space. (Disclamer: Outer Space does exist but not on earth. This might also be a real venue I just don't know about).



          3)   Don’t check into someone else’s home if you’re not there

This rule goes on to say, “Home venues are sensitive and it can creep people out to see non-friends checking in.” On Foursquare home venues are encouraged but to help with privacy they do not show up through a location-based search. Instead guests would need to search for home venues by title. I agree with this rule but am unsure how foursquare is enforcing/monitoring it. There are few (if any) options to report/block a user who are checking into people’s homes.  

          4)   Don’t leave tips with inappropriate language or negativity directed at another user.

[Warning: Explicit Language Below]

This is straightforward. Yet, what constitutes “inappropriate language” is always debatable.



I'm not really sure what to make of this tip:




          5)   Don’t spam via tips.

It always bothers me when I see tips suggesting people to try a different venue for a better product. I always assume these are written by the competition. (I see this more on Yelp then on Foursquare). After doing some quick searches on Foursquare I was unable to find tips that looked like spam. Venues will sometimes add their own tips in an effort to promote their product. I am not a fan of this either but there are no rules against it.



Part 2: Interpersonal Conflict

Interpersonal conflict is difficult to find on Foursquare. There is very little “chatting” that happens on this SNS. I also was unable to find any evidence of any official actions or warnings happening.

Below are a couple of tips left on Foursquare that lie outside of the way this SNS’s intended use.


And my all time favorite (More funny to me then anything else):



Part 3: Taking Action

One of the things that attracted me to Foursquare was that the features can be used in several different ways. Gazan [2009] states, “In a Web 2.0 environment, there are often multiple communities operating simultaneously within the same site, at different levels.” With this being the case on Foursquare, I imagine it would be difficult to manage all levels equally. If the purpose of using the site is to keep a digital record of places a user has been then the content in the tips might be of little importance. If, on the other hand, the user wants to know more about a venue then tips that contain little or no “chat” would be useful. However, if users want to communicate with other users than more “chat” in the tips would be what they are looking for. Regulating this so all the different levels work and benefit each other would be difficult. Gazan [2009] goes on to make the point that users continually reshape the communities and that the designers cannot plan how the reshaping happens but that they can be ready when it happens. It seems for this to be effective designers would need to keep a close eye on how features are being used on the SNS.

As a user of Foursquare my biggest complaint is that sometimes I cannot find a venue or a venue is being called something other then what I know it by. A more rare problem is that sometimes a venue is listed more then once. Both of these issues are solved through member-generated input. Using this method has its pluses and minuses. As Cosley et al. states concerning member maintained communities, “Some people will do a poor job, while others may deliberately sabotage the community.” Members can always create unlisted venues but this would require an active member to actually go in and do it on the SNS.

Kollock and Smith state, “The temptation is to enjoy a public good without contributing to its production, but if all reach this decision, the good is never created and all suffer.” This is an interesting statement when looking at it through the lens of Foursquare. Very little activity happens on Foursquare as opposed to the larger SNSs. There is also very little interaction between users outside of following social patterns. Looking back at the check-ins at HNL, there are a total of 24,123 by 11,356 different users. This venue has 89 tips. Some users have left multiple tips but the list cannot be organized by user so it’s difficult to know exactly how many are repeat tippers. With all this being said only 1 in every 128 users are leaving tips. This is less then 1% of the users communicating in ways other then simply checking in. To put this another way, less then 1% of the Foursquare community is contributing while the over +99% is benefiting. (A more in depth analysis would need to be done to get more accurate numbers).

This leaves a lot of room for unintended use to take control. The “Patriotic Nigras” example by Dibbell is interesting in the sense that these websites seem very vulnerable when interactive use is so low. It would be easy for rouge users to punk the system and when this happens the very large number of casual users will become annoyed and loose trust in the system.

If I were a systems administrator for Foursquare I would want to make sure there was a system set up for users to edit venue information by making it open source. Users then could clean up things like multiple venues or wrong venue names. As of right now all a user can do is flag a venue [See screen shot below].



 It would also be a good to add a “flag this tip” feature for inappropriate tips.

Foursquare has an option for some users to be come “supersusers” (SU). There are different ranks of these SUs. Depending on their rank they can edit venue information. As of right now Foursquare is not upgrading anyone to SU.

4: 5 Unwritten Rules

          1)   Only leave tips that will be of benefit to the largest undefined consensus of people. Inside jokes or day specific information is useless and might result in user distrust.

          2)   Only check into venues during operating hours.

          3)   Do not check into a venue if you are an employee. (This is actually a difficult rule because I think employees should check in so customers can know who is working but I think it would be more useful for Foursquare to develop a feature for employees specifically. One tab for who’s here and another for who’s working).

          4)   Do not leave tips that redirect users to another venue.

          5)   Do not create multiple pages for the same venue.

Sunday, April 3, 2011

Session 6: Online Identity and Interaction


I believe that the greatest invention in all of history is broadband technology. Broadband has given us the ability to communicate with each other in ways that less then 100 years ago was considered to be only possible by the divine.

Wellman stated, “Communication will be everywhere, but because it is independent of place, it will be situated nowhere.” Outside of the business world, I believe this statement to be 100% true. When I was a child and wanted to hang out with my friends I would call their house and hope that someone would receive the call so we can make plans and meet up. If I wanted to send my grandmother a birthday card I would send it to her home. Today, instead of communication being connected to a place it is connected to the person. I no longer call someone’s home but instead just call the person using mobile phone or wireless broadband technology.

I know this is not a new understanding of communication but as I was thinking through our current forms of sending and receiving information I began wondering about how little I (we) have embraced these abilities. Every cell phone comes equipped with voice mail but voice mail is a feature that was only needed when communication was restricted to a location and not a person. Voicemail was a need when people were away from their homes. Now that we call the person and not a location voicemail has become obsolete. What do we say in a voicemail that does not already get communicated through caller ID? Today, I am more likely to leave a voicemail with someone if I don’t want to receive a call back. A voicemail that says, “Just seeing what you are up to tonight give me a call back,” conveys no more information then a simple missed call notification.

Probably the most useless aspect of a voicemail is that it is a recorded audio message that allows for very little interaction. Take the above message example: In the amount of time it took me to call someone and leave that message I could have created either a Facebook message or a rarely used Google Wave and informed friends of plans including a list of who has committed to meeting up for the evening, real time location sharing of everyone’s current position, reviews and links to some possible destinations and a live feed of suggestions of activities.

Donath’s article speaks at length about social grooming and how that can be used to communicate with friends within the same network. Liu took this idea further and studied the personal impact and benefit of social grooming on MySpace. A huge dilemma within anthropological studies of online communities and SNSs concerns the true identity of one’s online self. When I was a freshman in college I found myself reflecting on my life and questioning if I influenced my environment or if my environment influenced me. Put another way, why do I find one form of art appealing while others remain uninteresting. The question concerns how much control we have over our subconscious. However, with our digital selves we are in 100% control over how we present this aspect of our lives.

When it comes to digital grooming and the disclosing of personal preferences we can choose to be as honest or as eccentric as we want to reveal. If my musical taste revolves around local independent bands but found myself really enjoying the latest Katy Perry single do I chose to disclose this information online and if I do or do not how does that impact the authenticity of my digital representation.

The authenticity of one’s digital self can impact recommender systems in both positive and negative ways. Liu stated, “The limitations of these large-scale computational and statistical methods include the loss of some transparency —not always being able to understand how a generalization was reached or how it can be mapped back onto specific examples; and the loss of some precision—not being able to model all the technical factors and data interactions that explain a conclusion.” For Liu on MySpace and now more on Facebook we digitally groom our profiles to portray us in a specific way. For these websites we chose to make public the experiences we want to share while hiding others we do not want people to know about. For a SNS like Facebook where most of our friends are people we know from offline experiences this is not that big of a deal. Yet for websites that incorporate a recommender system, such as Netflix, this becomes a much bigger issue. Once a film has been viewed it is connected to your profile and that information will need to be processed in some way for Netflix to make an accurate suggestion. Netflix employs a star ranking system so the user can communicate somewhat with the recommender algorithm.

Still there are some films that have troubled the Netflix recommender. Techdirt refers to this as the Napoleon Dynamite problem. Mike Masnick of techdirt states, “No one seems quite sure what leads to such a strong polar reaction, and no algorithm can yet figure out how people will react to such films, which is where all of the various algorithms seem to run into a dead end.” He goes on to note that placing too strong of an emphasis on algorithms and not enough on social filtering could have cause this issue.    

So when it comes to choosing the next movie to watch we can either trust the recommender systems to properly evaluate our digital profiles (do we have control of our environment?) or we can match our preferences up with our friends with similar taste (does our environment control us?)

Both Foursquare and Whrrl, both geosocial smartphone apps, just announced a recommender system that will help give suggestions based on past experiences and location. For these websites the digital grooming of ones profile is much more important if we care to receive accurate results. But at the same time there seems to be more quality in simply being able to compare Foursquare experiences within tightly knit social circles. Would we be more likely to try a restaurant if a friend tells us to or if our smartphones do? With smartphone apps like Blacktop entire vacations can be presented in a single screenshot including notes on all the various places visited. 



Would this be more useful then checking out a tour book from the library?

Or if I have a friend moving to Hawaii they can simply browse my Foursquare page and know all the best places to eat, get their hair cut and the best secret beaches to swim at. Now a general landscape of the city is much more easily accessible thanks to these geosocial tools.

So do people join Foursquare to play the geosocial game and to accrue mayorships (the social capitol of Foursquare) or is it more to leave a digital log of where they have been and to potentially meet up with friends? While the majority fall under the first category the second is actually where the benefit of these tools lie. Yet the problem with Foursqaure, or any geotagging SNS, is that it is only about where you have been and not so much about where you are going.

The future of proximity communication, and the beauty of wireless broadband technology, lies in real-time location sharing. The best smartphone apps I have found to accomplish this is Geoloqi and Google Latitude. While neither of these are SNSs in the traditional sense they can be quickly incorporated into any form of messaging including SMS, e-mail, Facebook and Twitter. With these apps you no longer need to tell people how far away you are but instead just simply send them a link to your map and they can track you the whole way. These tools can also help friends meet up at in large open spaces even if they did not know they were there together. For instance if two people were to check into Ala Moana Beach Park around the same time with Google Latitude the map will show them in close proximity of each other and would allow them to meet up.

RAINY DAY SCENARIO: FOURSQUARE

The other day a friend of mine posted on Foursquare that he was in downtown Seattle for the afternoon and that he wanted to meet up with someone (anyone) for lunch. To help generate more contact with the Foursquare check-in he pushed it onto his Facebook wall.

This seems to be a common practice in Foursquare and might work if someone who was already downtown happened to see the Foursquare check-in. However, the limitation of Foursquare here is that the user can only check into one place at a time or continually check into places as he moved around the downtown area.

How this could have been resolved: Had he used a real-time location app like geoloqi he could have set it to update every 5 minutes allowing him to be seen by anyone who copied the link from his Facebook wall. By using this feature a friend who might be in the same building without otherwise knowing could then message him and possibly meet up for lunch.

SUNNY DAY SCENARIO: GEOLOQI

Anyone who has attempted to ride a bicycle around the busy streets of Honolulu will know how unpredictable and dangerous a bike ride can be. Personally I have found that the best times to ride my bike is at night however finding others to join me at these hours is difficult. So if I am headed to meet up with someone I will send them a link to my current position using Geoloqi. As I am on my way to the destination they can check my current location either on a computer or a phone and know exactly how far away I am. Also if they notice that I have stopped moving they can see where I am at on the map. If I happen to be someplace that serves Manapua, for example, they can send me a geonote to put in an extra order. If I happen to be stopped in an unusual place then they can call to make sure I’m alright. If I happened to not answer the call they would still know my exact location.  



SUNNY DAY SCENARIO: FOURSQUARE

By using the explore feature on Foursquare I can see all the popular places right at this moment. This feature could be useful if I wanted to go to a popular restaurant but didn’t know which one. Most popular places will also have many useful tips letting the user know if it would be worthwhile to eat at this place. I can also limit the app so I only see where my friends have checked in. This can be useful if I am out and am looking for a place to grab a quick meal but do not really know what all my options are.