Editor’s Note: This post was originally published on Seattle 2.0, and imported to GeekWire as part of our acquisition of Seattle 2.0 and its archival content. For more background, see this post.
By Alyssa Royse
I’m @ The Bar. (Please stalk me.) I’m @ The Castle. (Please stalk me while learning I like laytex.) I’m in the Virgin Islands for a week. (Please rob my empty home.)
I didn’t like Dodgeball. I don’t like Foursquare. I really don’t like Whrrl. And I hate Facebook Places (because it’s spam sprinkler until you figure out how to turn off ALL of it’s notifiations.) I am not telling you that to be snarky, but to make good and clear that I am really biased, before I tell you why I don’t like them and why I think that building a business around the idea of voluntary and broadcast check-ins is stupid.
Then again, Foursquare recently landed $20M in VC funds from Andreesen Horowitz. Facebook not only launched Places, but did so with patents finally in place that can mess with Foursquare, Gowalla and others. There is a ton of money and brainpower being spent to develop geo-located-ego-boosting-simple-stalking platforms, and The New York Times is reporting that advertisers are in line to spend $1.8 B on advertising with geo-located check-in services. So maybe I’m the stupid one.
Why I Think Check-In Is Stupid Personally
2. It’s dangerous. Maybe I’m a little sensitive here – having been stalked by a gun-wielding acquaintance determined to hurt me, and having worked with other victims of violence – but giving people a way to track you at every turn is a bad idea. The idea of being sure that people know when your home is empty, is just stupid. (fwiw, my stalker finally caught me at home, 4rl, omg.)
Why I Think Check-In Is Stupid Business
As of August, only 4 percent of American adults who used the Internet also used location-based services, which allow people to “check in” to physical locations via their cellphones …. And only 1 percent of Internet users are on such services on any given day, an indication that those who do use the services still have not integrated them into their daily lives.
And that’s only tracking users. It doesn’t track the many of us who have blocked all of those applications from our feeds.
To be clear, it’s not like the rest of us don’t know that these services are available to us, for whatever reason, we are actively choosing not to use them. It’s too early to know if the ability to check in and get coupons (something that Gowalla is offering) or make donations to charity (via Facebook’s Places) will change it, but that seems to be the next play. And making games out them to earn bragging rights? Are people really going to give up privacy and expose both their data and their physical location to save 20% on a $3 latte? I doubt it. To be the mayor of My Local Bar?
2. Consumers are too smart for that. We know you’re after our data. Moreover, we know you’re after our data so that you can advertise to us, or sell it to people who will advertise to us. We, a nation of people who use DVRs and pay for otherwise free TV on iTunes so that we don’t have to watch advertisements, are not likely to fall for that for long.
3. None of these services are offering a benefit to consumers or advertisers that can’t already be created with existing and less expository technology. Most of us are already passively checking in everywhere we go with our GPS enabled, wifi, smart, Gee-Whiz phones. Counting on us to broadcast it to the world is a bad call.
What I Think Would Be Better, For Everyone
1. Find My Friends For Me.
-Opt-in, both ways. (Suddenly, Dodgeball looks good.) Opt-in to send info, opt-in to receive info. At least then you won’t piss people off and your numbers will be real, meaning advertisers are getting real numbers – sent data and received data. (This is akin to print publishers telling advertisers how many copies were printed, but leaving out that 50% of them went straight into landfills.)
– Allow me to make groups of people who might actually be interested in various kinds of data sharing. A group of my climbing buddies might actually be interested that I’m at Stone Gardens, my daughter’s girl-scout leader isn’t. My drinking buddies might be psyched that I’m at Poco, but my friends in AA aren’t going to find that info useful at all.
– Geo-Grouped SMS. Using the data already in my smartphone, allow me to ping my friends who live and work near my current location and say, “hey, in your hood, join me…” But leave my friends in Kentucky out of it, please.
-Geo-Grouped by occasion. Let me find the location of my soccer game on Saturday, then find a nearby bar, and ping my team (and no one else) suggesting a drink. (Bonus points for connecting this to local businesses and getting the whole team a discount on food if we buy drinks. Easy.) Or a group for a spontaneous pick-up game….
2. Get Me A Deal, Here & Now
– Groupon & Living Social both have mobile apps that allow me to log on and look for deals based on my location, without spamming my friends. Add a “get it now” function for X% off, rather than just the “big deal,” each day. You don’t need new technology, new sales, new anything else. I get a deal, you get to sell my data, your advertisers get my business, I don’t expose my whereabouts to the world and we don’t annoy everyone I know.
– Urban Spoon and others like it can and should be offering deals to their users based on where they are. And where they’ll be later.
– Mobile carriers can and should be cutting deals with local businesses that, if their consumers opt in, allow them to push deal data to users. Better yet, make it a function of my phone that works like my GPS, so I can just hit, “find me a restaurant deal” and get deals based on where I am at that moment.
– Ditto GPS makers like Garmin.
Simply put, take the technology and behavior that I am already using in huge numbers, and make that useful. (Even Twitter could generate revenue that way.) We’re already passively checking in everywhere we go, use that, but don’t make me your spam-mule.
It just doesn’t make sense for me to expose myself, my data and all of my friends (and their data and their locations) in this way. I don’t buy it. I won’t do it.
I’m not saying I’m right, (though I think I am.) But this is one of those cases in which I think that developers got all excited about what they could do with the technology and didn’t stop to think about what people would want the technology to do with them.
One of my favorite things that Guy Kawasaki says in Art Of The Start is that you should always ask a woman about your business model. His basic premise is that men have some ingrained need to kill things, like competition, and will do anything necessary to kill something big. The sheer ability to kill something big looks like a good business idea to men. Women, on the other hand, don’t. There has to be a reason to do it, it has to be useful.
