Foursquare and playing God

Lately, everywhere I go there has been more and more talk about a social environment rather than just social media. Yet people are still only focusing on the online world. The upcoming story is a glimpse into the combination of your online world into the world of real life is going to have both scary and fun consequences.

Last night I was at a local bar in my neighborhood called Half Court watching yet another epic RedSox Yankees showdown. If you were following me on foursquare you would have already known this.* The reason I write about it, is not to gloat about the glorious RedSox comeback, but to mention a quick little story that kind of opened my eyes as to how powerful location enabled services are going to become. While we were sitting in the bar, I checked in with foursquare and noticed that another fellow RedSox fan, and a stranger, had checked in. Let’s call him Steve. While watching the game progress, I looked at his profile, looked at his picture, noticed that he thought he was in Yankee territory, and was able to check out his Twitter feed.

* For those who are uninformed, Foursquare is a service that allows you to “check in” to the places you visit with your mobile phone so that people who follow you know where you go, what you do, etc. It also gives you rewards, or badges as they call it, for visiting new places, for being the person who goes somewhere the most, and gives you a score against your friends to see who is “winning.” What is really cool, and also kind of creepy, is that you can also see what people are saying about the place, and who has recently checked in.

Ten minutes later, when he sat down next to us so that he could have someone to cheer with, he was, well let’s just say flabbergasted,* when we said “Hey Steve. You are not in enemy territory,” before he had time to put his drink down. I don’t imagine it is every day that someone you never met before not only knows your name, but also your thoughts. We also could see what other people were saying about the place, what was good about it, what was bad, and a lot of other useful information. We immediately had all the information from the regulars at our finger tips, and made a new friend faster than before because of the information we knew about each other from the public feed of the social networks. In this case, the online world enhanced the real world experience.

* How often can you use flabbergasted in a sentence these days?

I think, and hope, that this enhancing of real world experiences through online services such as foursquare will lead to some new and great ways to interact with customers. I can already imagine Weight Watchers coming up with a mashup application that tells you what you can eat, and what cost x amount of points as soon as you check in to a restaurant. I can already imagine the new wave of coupons, customer building, and marketing efforts of only getting savings after you check in to the place you are going, or the behavior of visiting a place just to see what is the latest sale. And most importantly, I can already hear the screams, outrage and lawsuits about privacy. I think this is going to be fun. What can you imagine?

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