Foursquare is really quite an interesting experiment. With Facebook and Twitter, as well as many other sites, there are more and more opportunities for people to present their latest ideas and movements online to share. But why?
Communicating:
I can see why people want to use Facebook (i'm an addict by the way!) to communicate. It aggregates all your friends and links them to photos and interests. It's in a way just a better organised email system with nice features such as photo share. Similarly, Xing and LinkedIN are specialised aggregators of contacts aligning common professional networks.
News:
Twitter and other apps are news broadcasters. While you can communicate using Twitter, it's very disjointed in my view. I don't use it for much more than collecting news streams and screening over the news and other interest sites.
Online Presence:
It seems Foursquare and another I have seen blippy.com are attempting to entice people to put more information about their lives online. Foursquares is presented as a game to collect info on local cafes and 'places'. People then say where they, via mobile devices, and if they frequent it more than other users then they become the mayor of the location. I see Harvard University has listed all it's campus locations on Foursquare. In essence it is becoming a clever analytical tool to see where people are going and perhaps even learning why. Like Google analytics tracks users through a site, Foursquare may attempt to track humans in real life thanks to their willingness to input the data! How that will get monetised remains to be seen - a cool game at the moment. I'd love to find out more.
Blippy attracts even more extraverted people who list what they have recently purchased. So, while there are people who don't want to have a presence online under any circumstances, there are others who want to have absolutely everything online. Personally I find it a little strange
Where next?
I see these sites taking the input information from these extroverted people and aggregating that information (their movements, their purchasing patterns and whatever next) to build profiles to then target further information when presenting to them. Maybe it may even become a turbo powered calendar2.0 (calendar3.0!) system showing what's hip and happening according to an algorithm based profile...any thing is possible!
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