A light study of Foursquare

Foursquare is the new “location game” in town that allows users to “check in” to venues around the world and share with friends on Twitter and Facebook.  I’ve been playing with it for a few weeks now to understand game play psychology and game strengths and weaknesses.  Here are my takings/findings:

• where you go is an expression of who you are but you do so less frequently than updating your status (not matter you trivial the content of your status might be).
• users should be able to backtrack where they were and not just where they are and be able to check-in accordingly.  I’ve already found myself forgetting to check-in (quite naturally) and then wishing that I could just go back and check-in as if I were there.  I suppose this is by design.
• I’d like to be able to check in privately (and still earn points) every so once in a while.  Gowalla recently released this as a feature – and I think it’s just that – a feature.  This is an important one for the simple reason that it doesn’t dilute the value of each foursquare posting as your friends/followers see them but still allows you to keep track of where you’ve been through foursquare.  I was at IKEA today which might be fascinating but then I was also at Taco Bell which I don’t think people give two shits about.
• the context of each location should be taken into account when checking in; if i’m at the movie theater, i should be asked follow-up questions like “what movie are you watching?”; at a redbox (assuming redbox were a location in foursquare) – what movie are you renting?, etc

Overall, it’s an elitist thing to constantly post all the fancy cool places you’ve been and I think a large part of the population do not go to fancy cool places (and when they do, they surely do not remember to check in on foursquare). 

What I do think would be more interesting is immersive game play as being invented and developed at SCVNGR.  The problem with this experience is that what you take away in terms of genericism, you make up in complexity and longtailness.  I don’t want to have 18 SCVNGR type apps for each of the venues I go to.  Perhaps that is the ultimate system – location-based games tied together Ning style.