Česká verze zde:
There are around 37 000 foursquare accounts in the Czech Republic, 12 000 out of them are active ones. link Foursquare is a geolocational social network. That means its users are sharing their current location. They make so called check-in there. It can be a bus station, a restaurant, an office, a school, a museum, a park...some hardcore users create check in point at their homes. The user with the most check-ins at a certain place during last 60 days becomes a virtual mayor of that place. Users can have friends. It works more or less on the same basis as on facebook. People have to approve the friendship. Later on friends can compete with each other, for example who´s got more points, badges, who checks more times at a certain place and so on.
Following lines describe the entertaining features on facebbok. It´s wiritten by Pavel Bláha as a part of his master thesis “Potencial of geolocation social networks” it´s available here (in Czech)
Foursquare keeps its users active by usage of various gamification features, that causes release of dopamin into the human nerve system. Thus, the person can feel nice, joyful and some kind of satisfaction (Himler, 2012).
Check-in
It´s a report of location of the user on the place where s/he is situated via mobile phone or tablet with GPS and data tarif. Some companies label their places of business with special stickers, that announce a special reward for foursquare users so called Special
Points
Every single check-in is rewarded by certain amount of points, which is summed up into the table. Points are gained once per 24 hours and their amount depends on the venue and the amount of previous visits.
Badges
Virtual badges are the strong motivation element for foursquare users. Currently it´s possible to gain 279 badges, but this number is constantly changing due to end of marketing campaigns and the start of the new ones.
It contains also functions: Evaluation and review. It´s pretty cool especially when you are in a new city you can see what´s around and see which restaurant is worth trying.
Some companies offer so called: ‘Specials’ That is special advantage for foursquare users it can be 10% discount or dessert for free if you order coffee in coffee house.
But fails just happen. It is in the case of the Baťa Co. It´s a Czech shoe company. They offer a special physical (- not virtual) badge for the first check-in at the Baťa shop at Wenceslav Square in Prague. I went for it. I did my check in and saw the message: “You did your first check in here . Contact a shop assistant and pick up your gift” So I went to her, showed her my mobile phone and she said: “I don´t know what this is. It´s some bullshit. But you are not the first one who came with this. It will be some error.” #isee
I really do like this tool. It´s a nice game. Collecting virtual badges is like collecting ‘Pokemons’ aka ”Gotta catch ´em all”. It documents every day of your life in depth. Once I was telling my friend that I visited some Coffee houses in Olomouc. He comes from that city, so he was interested which ones. I couldn't recall the names so I went to foursquare looked at my check ins in Olomouc and I got the names in a few seconds. And you can stay informed what your friends are doing even though they may stay in a totally different country.
Once I checked at the Main Station in Prague and there was an announcment: ‘Your first check-in with your friend XY.’ I didn´t have any clue, that he is at the same spot as me. Then it´s pretty easy to get in touch and ask: ‘Hey are you here? Do you have any free time? Could we possibly travel home together?.....’
4square can also save you. My friend in Germany faced a very unpleasant situation. She went for a trip by bus, they took a break at some McDonalds on the highway and she forgot her purse there. What to do now? There are plenty of McDonalds there. Suddenly one of the friends said:’It´s o.k I checked it in.’ There was the address and it wasn’t a problem to find the phone number. Happy end after all.
Moreover, if you and your friends have foursquare you don´t need to send sms or call ‘Where are you?’ - ‘I don´t know which pub we´ll go to. Just look where I´ll check in.’ - ‘I´m going by underground, just watch which station I´ll get off and you can estimate when I get to you .‘ - ‘Watch foursquare. When I check at home, you´ll know I arrived safely.’
Currently, the app is without ads, the company is not earning much, but it´s supposed to be changed very soon. I guess the application possesses a lot of attractive information about users. It could be used, I imagine, that a person would check in a new city and therefore the person often checks in coffee houses, s/he would get some ads for houses located nearby.
Here you can see a short video about a daily life with foursquare.
As I like to show the things from different points of view, I asked my friend Honza to contribute his opinion. He works in the internet security field and in the following lines he is explaining, why he would never ever sign up for foursquare:
I don't want foursquare for the same reason I don't want any account of any social network. I don't want to share what i'm thinking, doing or where I am with the entire population of the world. You can raise an objection, that on the majority of social networks you set up the privacy level. Nevertheless, once a person sends out any information s/he stops being in charge of this data.
The conjecture, that if we allow only certain people seeing our data and nobody else gets access to that data, is totally wrong; for example the current affair around the project PRISM. But there are plenty of examples. Blogs of the internet security companies inform about data thefts relatively regularly.
Why do I consider foursquare dangerous? Apart from the fact, that every information we send about ourselves to our potential opponent (there is no better name) can easily make our “profile”, which s/he can use for her/his benefit. Foursquare specifics is that the potential opponent gains information about the location of the person in real time. This knowledge may be used in many ways for example to rob the house when no one is at home or to stalk.
Internet users also don't often realize that once we place any data online, we may not be able to delete them for good. That concerns not only foursquare but all the other social networks or anything else we put online. Internet is full of automatic programs, which enable indexation into the databases, search engines or copying data for web archives . These processes are running every single second. Sometimes it may not be possible to delete certain data from social networks because there might be a copy of all we aware of. The problem of social networks is that data are in charge of private subject and if the company claims:”Your account was deleted”, we can't really verify that. Moreover, majority of social networks do not even hide that after deleting the account certain data are being kept ‘for technical reasons.’ Maybe it´s just my exaggerated professional paranoia but my trust in these subjects does not reach the level above which I would voluntarily share my thoughts, activities or current location online.
Now as a reward for managing to read so much a text, you can play a very nice ad.
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