Practicum #1 - Amber

For my practicum assignment I have joined the locative social networking device foursquare. I had heard a lot about this this summer when I worked in PR in New York City. While I thought it made a lot of sense for businesses to increase revenue and press, and was fun in a big city with a ton of places to check in like New York, I found it a bit creepy. Between Facebook and Twitter, everyone knows basically where you are and when you are there at all times as it is, let alone needing to provide an address? Needless to say, I was skeptical on the stalking level hitting an all-time high.

After using the application for the last few weeks, it has actually appeared to be far less "stalkerish" and sketchy then Facebook or some other social networking devices. This could be attributed to the fact that the majority of my friends do not use foursquare, or do not use it regularly, so I am not necessarily finding out about their whereabouts from the site. The site also gears itself far more to the specials that you get for checking in multiple times, and eventually becoming a mayor, as well as the "badges" one can receive for different types and number of check-ins. The competitive greed in me naturally is trying to figure out how to get them all! I find myself checking-in far more in Madison than my friends did at work over the summer, possibly because I am moving around much more. I have already received a super user badge for checking in at 30 places within the month, but it seems this is almost cheating because every time I go to my apartment (which is multiple times a day) I check-in there. I'm not the mayor of anywhere yet though, but I have gotten some of the basic badges in addition to the super user such as the newbie (checking in anywhere - an incentive to use foursquare regularly), the adventurer (checking into 10 different venues), the local (checking into the same place 3 times in a week - my apartment), and then the super user as previously mentioned. An issue I find I am having is I also forget to check in to a lot of places I am at, and either do it later on a delay (slightly cheating but I was there) or just don't even bother because it is so far after the fact. I'm trying to get better about remembering. Checking in is really simple to do on your cell phone (I have a Blackberry so there is a convenient application for it), but it is not yet in my routine. I am going home to New York City this weekend and hope for some new cool badges as well as a new found sense of foursquare-ing after a trip to a city that was a part of foursquare getting its start.