the MARTINI SHAKER

For being an early technology adopter, there’s one thing I’ve been dragging my heels on, and that’s the notion of using location-based social networks.

I was having a discussion over a couple of beers with some of my Barkley brethren at the Will Rogers World Airport lounge regarding social media tools, and the subject of foursquare came up. The question posed to me was, “Why would anyone want to use it?”

My answer was simple. I couldn’t think of one good, compelling reason why one should add this to their already long list of social tools that we all hit refresh on like Pavlov’s dog. In fact, I could think of a couple of good reasons why one wouldn’t want to use it.

On the top of the list was cross-stream pollution. I don’t know about you, but I get pretty annoyed at the constant stream of foursquare updates that show up on some of my friends’ Twitter streams. If I wanted to know where you were on foursquare, I’d check foursquare. Turn that shit off.

Second, it’s just one more distraction that keeps you from being truly social with the people around you. I have enough other things to make me look like a socially-retarded VAX programmer. Thanks.

But. I am an early adopter. I am an expert on social media within my agency. I am a gratuitous user of italics. Figuring that I couldn’t let something pass by just because I didn’t see the immediate benefit¹, I decided to give the two leading location-based networks a shot this week.

I set up accounts on Gowalla and foursquare. I loaded their respective apps onto my iPhone and got to checking in.

I actually started using Gowalla first, just because it felt newer, even though the two services were launched at roughly the same time. The visual polish of Gowalla just feels better than the prototypical feel that foursquare has. Gowalla was also much easier to use, I felt. As I had assumed, most of the locations I’ve been in the Kansas City Northland did not exist in either service’s database, so I was responsible for adding them.

Whereas foursquare uses GPS to come up with a list of nearby locations for you to check in, adding a location requires that you enter the address of the location you’re trying to check in to. Again, I don’t know about you, but I don’t really know the address of 90% of the places I go. I just know where they are and how to get there.

Gowalla used your GPS coordinates to make the new location. One step. Simple.

The same felt true for checking in to places that already existed in the database. Even though both applications require three button clicks for the check-in process, Gowalla felt faster and easier to find what you were looking for, due in no small part to the beautifully designed icons that describe each location. The tips/to-do feature of foursquare feels a little more robust than Gowalla. I’d like an option to shut off the tips though. I don’t really want to see the tips all the time and I didn’t see anything in the account preferences that would allow me to do that.

The point of the two services are similar but not close enough to be the same. Gowalla is more of a scavenger hunt where you are collecting stamps on your passport for visiting places, pins for achieving certain tasks and objects that you virtually find when you check in. Foursquare is more like, well, foursquare. You’re trying to unseat people from being “mayor” of the locations you visit. There are the badges, much like Gowalla’s pins, but overall the mayor thing coupled with a scoreboard makes foursquare much more competitive.

At this point, it’s pretty obvious that I prefer Gowalla, but when it comes to actual friends using it, that’s where the advantage goes to foursquare. There are a lot more of my friends using foursquare, most likely due to the fact that Gowalla is only available on iPhone for the time being. Most of my friends use Blackberry or Palm devices², so foursquare is simply their only choice for now³.

As for my experience with the medium, my first observation as to why it doesn’t make much sense as to why I would use it lies in looking at my check-in history. Both histories just reflect what a boring, repetitive life I lead. I check in at work, my wife’s work and home. I am also the mayor of Souperman on foursquare. It’s going to be hard for anyone to unseat me since I’m so lazy that I eat lunch there 4 days a week.

I felt dumb checking in at Wal-Mart. It’s a rare occasion that we go there⁴, and when we went there last night for an unprecedented second time in a week, I didn’t check in because I didn’t want my friends to know that I was there again⁵. Overall, location-based social networks really aren’t built for people like me. They’re built for my younger, single, more attractive friends⁶.

During my trial period of the two services, I was very careful to address my first point above by turning all cross-stream notifications off by default. I’m not going to foist one of my top Twitter/Facebook annoyances onto my friends. That would be hypocritical now, wouldn’t it? And I would absolutely LOVE IT if my friends would do the same⁷. At the very least turn off check-in posting. Want to keep the mayor/badge notifications on? Fine. I almost did that myself. But, I wanted to keep completely under the radar except to those people on the sites I was using.

As for my second point above, I didn’t find that it necessarily distracted me from being social with those around me, but I did find myself more often than not stealing away to a remote corner or restroom to check in because I felt like there was some sort of sad stigma to the check-in process. How it’s different than whipping out a phone for a quick tweet or Facebook update is beyond me, but in my mind it just is. Not sure why.

All this leads to the big question: Will I continue to use either or both of these services? I’m not quite sure yet. My first inclination is to say that I’d be more likely to continue to use Gowalla because of its overall UX superiority over foursquare, but I’ll be on an island unto myself for a long time I’m afraid. I’ll most likely keep using both just enough to figure out what these things mean to the future of this gallimaufry we call social media.

Or until I become mayor of Barkley. Which ever comes first.