One feature of Web 2.1 appears to be the proliferation of services like Foursquare (Yelp stole the functionality, as did Facebook), which, as I’m sure you all know by now, is a website where you can check in at your (physical) location. This has two facets: first, you let everyone know where you are, and second, you occasionally get bonuses (either virtual or real) for doing sufficiently cool things or identifying yourself sufficiently closely with an establishment. The funny thing is that the website wouldn’t function at all without both of these things, because the second serves as a smokescreen for the first.
Basically, there are two types of people who use Foursquare (which will be my go-to instance for the remainder of this). There are people who use it to actually garner the rewards (coupon-clipper types; KCC, I am looking at you), and there are people who use it to describe their lives to others, which, at the risk of seeming uncharitable, kind of falls into the peacock-y “look how cool I am” category. But the reason the second one works is because of the first one: it’s because you can always claim that you were doing it for practical reasons, because, hey, what’s the downside here? (Let’s leave aside for a moment the moderate creepiness of people knowing where you are; if you’re playing offense*, that’s probably not a major concern.) Hey, I had to check in at this concert hall when I was seeing this incredibly cool band; they have 10% off for the 100 people who go there most frequently. Hey, I had to check in at this hole-in-the-wall taqueria, free chips. And so on.
* – This is the offense/defense life dichotomy that I think is pretty telling in various ways. I can’t remember if I’ve written extensively about this here or not, but anyway, getting off-topic.
I’m not sure if this was intentional or not (business-model wise), honestly, but the bootstrapping of all of this is very impressive. At the beginning, people used it because of the free stuff; you had to spend social capital to get the free stuff, because people would look askance at your preening check-ins (not being familiar with the concept). But, of course, this works out quite well for the site: free advertising, something that spurs conversations, something that gets more people to use the site. And at some point there’s a tipping point, where it becomes acceptable to do things like this, and now it’s just the opposite: people really do read your check-ins mostly at face value. “Oh, hey, I know what this is, this is just for the free stuff — but hey, this person is super cool, they went to a Passion Pit concert!*”
* – You should go to a Passion Pit concert; they are a great band!
And now you’re in a situation where using Foursquare is actually good: it’s a socially acceptable way to prove to people that you’re cool*, and the free stuff becomes secondary. I’d guess that 90% of users don’t really care about the free stuff anymore, but the whole thing doesn’t work without the free stuff even for those users: you take away their plausible deniability. It’s really an incredibly well-executed plan, intentionally or not; the whole thing just fits together so neatly into, well, almost a dating site.
* – This is a little harsh; you could certainly claim with a straight face that it’s used to tell people about yourself, not specifically to try to impress.
