Like this:

Ok, ok, the title of this post is a bit provocative.  I don’t view 4sq as the death of privacy at all.   The point of this post is actually just to vocalize (scribe?) a thought I recently had regarding how powerful Foursquare (or more generally the check-in game system) actually is.

I’ve told many of you who know me about my vision for social and professional life in ~5 years.  I believe that when we attend an event (e.g. a conference), we’ll pull up a list of attendees on our phone and that list will have photos, some career info about each attendee, some interest info, our closest connection to each attendee (do we know someone in common?), etc.   If background geolocation ever becomes a reality because of lower-power methods of doing geolocation (brief plug for my friend Steve Cheney’s writeup on the future of geolocation), then I believe we’ll even have augmented reality apps that point us to the people we want to meet and suggest ice breakers (“so you’re a Yankee fan, eh?”).    Much of this stuff already exists, I’ve just not seen it pulled together in the “right” way yet.

Anyway that’s professional networking in 5 years (probably sooner).  Most people are OK with that view of the future.  But what scares them is when I then say, “the same is going to be true when you walk into a bar, restaurant, club, etc.”  In other words, I fully believe when I walk into my local bar, I’m going to be able to pull up a list of all the people in it, see their photos, and find out some stuff about them, including, again, whether we know someone in common (which might be a nice icebreaker for that pretty girl in the corner!).   This view of the world is where people seem to get much more freaked out.  And I don’t blame them, I just think it’s inevitable barring draconian privacy regulation which I hope we’re smart enough not to put forth.

Back to the realization I just had recently — Foursquare is like the opt-in network for this kind of social sharing.  I’ve long thought of the whole check-in system as being a bad thing, only required because (a) iPhones can’t multi-task and (b) d geolocation is a huge power muncher so doing it in the background is energy prohibitive.    But the real power of the check-in system is that requiring a check-in is like saying “I’m ok with sharing that I’m here, including potentially to strangers here too.”  And what a convenient way to share information about ourselves that can only lead to better socialization.  I’d be happy if someone in a bar saw I was there too through Foursquare, clicked my Foursquare profile on their iPhone (or Android phone), found out a bit about me, and struck up a great conversation with me.  It would be awesome.

For me this is a perspective shift because I had always viewed manual check-in as a bad thing.  But it might be just what the privacy-doctors have ordered to get us to share more while still maintaining at least a feeling of control over what we share and whom we share it with.

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