Trendplanner

There’s a lot of hype around right now about the mobile service called foursquare. For those that don’t know foursquare is a location based social networking mobile application. The first element of Foursquare is a friend locator; it allows users to share and see the location of their friends that are also using the service (similar to Google Latitude), users can share their location (check in) by sending a text, or by logging into the application on a location aware handset such as the iPhone. The second element of foursquare is a city guide; it lets users rate and review places in their city, so others can use the application to help them explore their city. The third element to foursquare is a game; users are rewarded points for checking in outside of regular working hours, with more points gained when check ins are in different locations.

Foursquare is currently available in 20 cities in the US and Amsterdam, it is getting a lot of attention and lots of people are using it. Foursquare users love being able to see where their friends are, and learn more about their city, but perhaps surprisingly they are just as passionate about the third gaming element of the service. What might appear at first as a slightly trivial function that will get overlooked by the majority of users appears to be extremely popular and is likely to be the function that is driving it’s success. The success of social media services is entirely dependent on people using service and doing so regularity, Twitter and Facebook wouldn’t be much fun if no-one else was using them. What the game function of Foursquare has done is given people an incentive to make regular use of the service, it provides a competitive element, and a reliable measure of success. Foursquare points cannot actually be converted into any real currency, but the same human desire for respect and status that largely drives our desire for money (and with what it can buy) drives our desire to gain status points that money can’t buy.

Foursquare is not the only example of how ‘worthless’ points monetary speaking can drive participation. Microsoft Xbox users gain points for achievements they make across all their xbox activity, these points are then displayed as part of the players online profile. These points are essentially worthless, but it doesn’t stop users playing and buying games to earn more points, and trying to out do the people they know. Furthermore, if you look closely other less obvious examples exist. Take Facebook and Twitter, although neither explicitly has a game element both have been driven by competitive elements that have a reliable measure of success. A major drive for many Twitter users is to gain a large following, and many Facebook users are driven by the desire the have lots of ‘friends’ or upload as many pictures of themselves as possible.

Social media is largely driven by human competitiveness and desire for status, if people want to make a game out of social media make sure there is a game to be played, and as Foursquare and Xbox have taught us it doesn’t always hurt to tell them they’re playing.

Image: Roomjosh