Six months ago, I signed up on the social networking/game service Foursquare. Today, I decided to give it up altogether
I’d never touched Dodgeball, Foursquare’s presumptive predecessor, but I’d heard great things from my co-workers and other digerati friends, so I hopped on the Foursquare bandwagon. I’ve been personally and professionally interested in the integration of online social networks and offline realworld activities for the better part of a decade now. At first, Foursquare held plenty of promise around that integration. Also, I love exploring where I live, and thought I might be able to discover new places (and/or new friends to roam around town with).
Pretty quickly, I discovered the site’s biggest form of gratification: its achievements system. I unlocked a couple of achievement badges, and I became the make-believe mayor of several places on my usual rounds, including the San Francisco Bay Bridge. Fantastic! Who doesn’t like achievements and being awarded badges and mayorships?
Over time, I began to notice that the achievements wound up being almost the only benefit from using the service. Any attempts I’ve been making to visit new places has had almost nothing to do with Foursquare; Foursquare just gave me a place to show off about my social resourcefulness, and ultimately that’s not why I go to new places. Instead, I’d either occasionally get a badge or a mayorship. Neither of them have any inherent value other than bragging rights, which again is not why I do much anything. Maybe I’m peculiar psychologically in this right, but if the only motivator for using a Web service is to look cooler than school, I’ve got better things to do with my time and bandwidth.
A few weeks ago, I managed to less-than-intentionally snag the mayorship of a Peet’s Coffee shop three blocks from my apartment. No big deal, nothing I was really vying for — I’d just gotten in the habit of checking in wherever I could. Then I saw an interesting tweet:
“I’m sick of this @arsenio guy bouncing my mayorship of Peet’s. I guess I know where I’m going for coffee tomorrow…”
We traded tweets, and there was no real bad blood… but there’s something about that exchange that still feels like the opposite of good social networking. I don’t want to make friends through competition, Game Nights notwithstanding.
Today I was out being social, and we happened to be driving across the Bay Bridge, and I was getting ready to check-in… almost entirely because I want to preserve my mayorship. Worse, fiddling with my phone, I realized I was in that moment being particularly antisocial. That was my final straw. The game had not fulfilled any of that initial promise for me, and I was beginning to think it was actually making my social skills a little weaker in the bargain.
It still remains a fun premise, and the power of achievements cannot be understated to anyone who cares to build web services with high stickiness or user engagement. But to my mind there’s also plenty of devilry in the details.
Hi Arsenio,
Interesting post. I’m working on a start up that’s focused on fun things to do going on now, nearby. I’d love to show you it and get your feedback. Please send me an email, greg [at] hapnin.com.
Greg
I too have quit playing FourSquare for the most part. I was one of the largest proponents of the game and really saw it as a great and awesome shift in technology and media.
Yet, it lost its appeal after a few weeks. I didn’t care about being mayor anymore. The places that I was/am mayor felt kinda cheap, and I felt each week that if I didn’t get the jump on checking in Monday then I’d be at the bottom of the roster.
I *wish* that the iPhone would enable the application (not the service) to track where I was and say, “Hey, it looks like you just walked into Starbucks, would you like to check in?” instead of me punching through menus only to find that this particular place wasn’t on FourSquare and then trying to add it and not get points for the checkin.
I also wish that bars/clubs/coffee shops had caught on quicker. Our group of friends are the nonstop mayors of the Friendly Toast (small but awesome, privately owned breakfast chain of two locations in New England) but asides from us stealing mayordom from each other the establishment itself never noticed and didn’t care.
If it had caught on that the game was a little better formalized and they were able to do outreach to establishments and get them to have specials for being mayor, or checking in even that would be awesome and I’d use it again.
I also got tired of everyone knowing where I was. I like being ‘dark’ sometimes and being a single person anonymous in a city of millions of people. It feels good and occasionally it would get old for everyone to already know that I was at the theatre earlier or whatever.
I want to play again, but it didn’t do anything for me. Plus in the long term they didn’t do any long term tracking aside from the badges.
They did a killer job in being the first service to allow easy mobile checkin and also giving people a reason for giving up their location, but for me that alone wasn’t enough and I got bored of the game quickly. No challenge aside from the balance on my debit card for lattes vs my score.
Heh – I got called antisocial by my 14 yr old daughter yesterday for checking in from our local Froyo place. “You seemed to take an awful long time NOT talking to me.”
I also thought I’d learn about new places, or be able to see where where friends were hanging out. Yelp is better for new places, and by the time I see a notification of someone getting somewhere for lunch, I’m already eating mine somewhere else
I might just join you…
D
I really appreciate that you took the time to write out what was going through your head so thoroughly.
Hmm, I could imagine making a similar game that wasn’t as anger-inducingly competitive and was more about meeting people and increasing your points and connections.
Well gotta try using weegoh.com instead
. Interesting article !!.
I agree with you. I am getting bored, frankly. Also, I’ve looked forward to becoming at least virtual friends with a couple “Mayors” I unintentionally battle over places with, and have found that process unfulfilling. Only one of several other mayors has accepted my friend request, which contains no functionality to add a note for context. Furthermore, the winning person in NYC had like 17,000 points last week, and #2 was 3000. I can’t figure out how any employed person, or someone who sleeps more than 5 minutes a night, can get that many points in one week. Fakery is lurking.
Don’t forget the people that game the system: checking into their homes/offices, checking into every BART/public transit station they travel through, or even checking into places several blocks away that they don’t actually go to.
Bravo. I was thinking so many parallel thoughts. I feel that something is missing. The “tips” system is quite flawed, and I’ve noticed that most of my friends don’t use it. There’s no encouragements to actually explore and teach others of places to explore. That is, after all, why I decided to join foursquare.
I’m now a level 1 admin, and, other than to show off and clean the data, I don’t see much purpose. If I had seen more proactive improvements to the fundamental purpose of the site, then I’d probably feel more compelled to contribute to my “admin duties.”
I suppose I’m doing no good simply replying to your blog post in agreement… it’s time for me to step it up and submit an email to Naveen and point out some of these flaws. Have you done this yet?
Thanks for the familiar feelings.
Bravo. I went through this, too, when I got a surprise message from Foursquare saying, “You’ve been unseated as the mayor of such-and-such!” Really, who cares? I haven’t checked in at all since I realized that Foursquare makes it into a competition.
Don’t even get me started on Parallel Kingdom. I nearly lost a friend to that game.
What I liked about Dodgeball was that it gave me a kind of third eye when going to a venue I hadn’t been to before. I was able to go to the Dodgeball website with my phone, see the photos of people who had checked in at that particular venue and approach them since they seemed to know more about the venue than I did and they practically invited these kinds of interactions by being users of Dogdeball.
That was in 2000, I think, and I used it until Google bought the site. They were kind enough to give everyone 2 weeks to delete their accounts before transferring everything to Google’s servers. I still have privacy concerns with these kinds of sites, but now I have no problem broadcasting my location if I’m at a public event that’s been announced somewhere else already.
Would you continue using Foursquare if it didn’t have competitive and teritorial gameplay?
This is a thoughtful explanation for leaving and I can see how your experience would leave you feeling mixed at best. Do you think if there were more real world or tangible social benefits, it would be different?
What I observe in NYC where there is more urban density (and maybe more usage but am not sure), is that mayorships bring real world rewards (free drinks, food, etc) and that 4sq helps people socialize – they’re geographically closer when they check in so it’s feasible to run into or go find friends.
In the Bay Area, and other cities, with more area and less density, I think some of the real world rewards will be the same over time ( mayor rewards) and some may end up being different / location specific (i.e. related to outdoor activities, etc). Just a thought
C
Firmly in the late adopter crowd, I just joined Foursquare today (9/19/2009) after reading Robert Scoble’s post about the service. For me, the most interesting test of the service will be Oracle OpenWorld in October; will Foursquare provide an immediacy to my networking at OpenWorld that other services do not? Time will tell.
Can totally relate to your article. I also quit foursquare recently. Another reason why I quit foursquare is because there are lots of cheating going on. I don’t mind losing my mayorship to someone who visit the place more frequently than me. I’m sick and tired of people checking into popular places just to get the mayorship when they are not there physically.