I’ve been doing a lot of datalogging lately. My interest in paths and journeys is increasing once again, and I’m presenting a paper at ISEA 2010 in the summer about GPS datalogging and landscapes. So in order to understand logging and places a bit further, I finally started using FourSquare. I’ve had it installed as an app on my iPhone for a while now but haven’t had much of a reason to use it. On Friday evening, I went to the Tate for their monthly late night as it was game related (I will blog about this later), and as I met friends beforehand I decided to log the places I’d been. I started off with my train station and collected a Newbie Badge. The excitement soon wore off when I logged in my next destination and didn’t achieve anything. When I logged my coffee stop at the Yellow Cafe in Selfridges, things became a bit more exciting again as I was informed that I could get a free coffee in Debenhams (Oxford St) on a Friday. This happened after I’d sat down and had ordered my (soon to be paid for) coffee in a separate coffee shop. Now I know for the future that if I stand outside places, I will be informed of offers near my location. That really brings me to the point of this blog-post. I’m not 100% sure of the purpose of FourSquare for me at the moment. I understand how it’s supposed to be a ‘game’ with ‘real-world achievements’, but my initial experiences of it feel like a chore. When I’m out and about I don’t want to have to stop and think about logging in. On the other hand, I don’t want my every movement tracked and logged so I wouldn’t want the app to do this on-demand for me either. I can see that it can be used as a marketing tool, and as a way of letting your friends and others know where you’ve been and the experiences you’ve had there, but I feel there are other applications that do that for me already. I can look up where I am on google maps and it will show me pictures and places around me. I can browse the internet, or use twitters location function to find out what’s on around me as well as other news. I am slightly confused as to what more FourSquare can offer me. Maybe it’s because I’m not into achievements. I don’t care much about unlocking achievements or trophies on my Xbox360 or PS3. When I do unlock any, the box distracts me slightly rather than makes me feel like I’ve accomplished something. The game’s I’m playing already have some sort of rules, I already know whether I’m progressing or not.

I guess the point of this post is to comment on my uses of FourSquare so far. I know I can’t comment on it in full as I’ve used it for approximately an afternoon, and even then I forgot about it and the logs didn’t become a true representation of every place I’d been that day. I forgot to log Victoria bus station, the other tube stations I went through, and the pub I went to after the Tate. Maybe it’s just another service to remember to use, like a pictorial logging of my daily life, rather than commenting on it through the text-based descriptions of Twitter. Maybe I will never be into achievements enough to worry about it. Maybe I will learn that it does something so amazing that I will integrate it into my everyday life. Watch this space…