I used to be a regular at a bar near my apartment, "Garret Ripley's". I'd go there almost every day. Even when alone, I'd go to read or write over a couple of pints of Boddington's. The owners and staff knew me by name, and I knew them; someone would start pouring my Boddy's the minute I walked in the door. Cute servers would chat with me between rounds like we were old friends. It felt special. And that feeling of being special, as much as the Boddington's, kept me coming back.
This week,
Facebook launched its "Places" feature, in line with social networking technologies like
FourSquare and
Gowalla. You, with your GPS-enabled mobile phone, can "check in" to the places you vsit, broadcasting your city-crawling lifestyle to your friends. You're also rewarded for "accomplishments" both wide (you've visited the most places in your neighborhood) and deep (you're the most regular of the regulars at your favorite pub). Now, feeling special is easier than ever: these services will express admiration of your worldliness, and show appreciation of your repeat business -- all while providing businesses with valuable customer intelligence as outlined in the fine print of their privacy policies.
Commentators on the State Of Society have the same critique of these technologies as they had for blogging, Facebook and Twitter: they feed our narcissism, they substitute stunted forms of interaction for real human interaction, they publicize things better kept private, they create a barrier to "authentic" experience... There's truth in all those notions, but that doesn't interest me much. These aren't technologies that are aimed at solving particular problems, they're technologies that are looking for a use. And while the initial applications are sometimes bizarre, it's interesting to see the uses people do find for them, and how that causes the technology to evolve.
FourSquare and Gowalla users can leave their friends messages, retrievable only when their friends check into the location it was left. The messages can be useful, like "try the corn bisque -- it's dynamite", or just fun Kilroy-was-here markers, like finding a friend's initials carved into your school desk. As the things you can leave for your friends to find become more sophisticated and multi-media, entire parallel dimensions of reality will be created, accessible through your mobile devices, where the public, physical world is only one part of what you can discover. All the old haunts are new again. It's easy to imagine "Dungeons & Dragons" types of games, played in a virtual overlay on the physical world. "London Below", the hidden world existing sideways to the real London from Neil Gaiman's book
Neverwhere, seems prophetic.
Of course, if you're technically savvy, there's no reason to even leave your house to explore this virtual world. I have a friend who writes applications against the FourSquare API such that he has generated phantom digital proxies of himself who spend all day wandering plausible routes (plausible, to prevent FourSquare from noticing it isn't a real person, and blocking it) and checking into places around town. He describes it as the "game underneath the game" of FourSquare.
Digital realities and phantoms who wander a world similar to our own, but invisible without the proper gear and permission. The craziest science fiction is coming true in our lifetime.
Do you check into places using social media? If so, what do you enjoy about it? How would you like to see this develop? If not, what's your biggest turn-off about it? What changes would get you to use a location check-in system?
