I’m the Mayor of My House: Examining Why People Use foursquare - a Social-Driven Location Sharing Application Janne Lindqvist, Justin Cranshaw, Jason Wiese, Jason Hong, and John Zimmerman Carnegie Mellon University 5000 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA fjanne.lindqvist,jcransh,jwwiese,jasonh,[email protected] ABSTRACT particular, as of December 2010, foursquare claims to have There have been many location sharing systems developed over 5 million members [1]. This critical mass of users pro- over the past two decades, and only recently have they started vides researchers with an excellent opportunity to investigate to be adopted by consumers. In this paper, we present the how people really use these systems and how people have results of three studies focusing on the foursquare check-in appropriated them to meet their own needs. system. We conducted interviews and two surveys to un- derstand, both qualitatively and quantitatively, how and why While foursquare has features that distinguish it from other people use location sharing applications, as well as how they services, it is not yet clear which factors contribute to its manage their privacy. We also document surprising uses of popularity. For example, foursquare positions itself simulta- foursquare, and discuss implications for design of mobile neously as a mobile game, a way of exploring cities, a way social services. of telling friends where you are, and a way of tracking where friends have been and who they have been co-located with Author Keywords [1]. Both its popularity and that of other location services foursquare, mobile computing, social computing, check-in, raise many questions: What value drives people’s use of privacy, location based service, uses and gratifications these systems? How have users appropriated these systems, inventing new purposes for them to serve? Understanding these and related questions can offer valuable insights into ACM Classification Keywords real-world usage and can reveal design opportunities for new H.5.m Information Interfaces and Presentation (e.g., HCI): services and new applications. Miscellaneous Past work [5, 11, 22, 25, 30, 31] has found that privacy is General Terms a barrier to adoption of location sharing services. Current Human Factors, Design systems also face this challenge; however, it seems that for a large number of people, privacy concerns have not kept them INTRODUCTION from experimenting with and adopting this emerging tech- For the past 20 years, researchers have being proposing a nology. To gain some insight into this, we also investigated wide range of location sharing systems. With the increasing the kinds of privacy concerns people have with foursquare, diffusion of GPS and Internet-enabled smartphones, many of and what strategies they take to manage their privacy. these research ideas are finally being adopted by consumers. In this paper, we present the results of three studies examin- We can broadly categorize [30] location sharing applications ing location sharing: (i) interviews (N=6) with early adopters as purpose-driven, where people explicitly request another to investigate how they use these systems and the value they person’s current location (e.g. AT&T FamilyMap, Glympse, construct through their use; (ii) a survey (N=18) qualitatively Verizon Family Locator), and social-driven, where people examining foursquare usage patterns and privacy concerns; broadcast their location to “friends” in their social networks. and (iii) a survey (N=219) quantitatively probing questions Examples of social-driven applications include, for example, about foursquare usage patterns. BrightKite, Dodgeball (discontinued), foursquare, Gowalla, and Facebook Places. While purpose-driven location sharing This paper makes two primary research contributions. First, applications have not yet achieved critical mass in any sys- we show how and why people use foursquare, both qualita- tem, the same is not true for social-driven applications. In tively and quantitatively. Minor contributions include identi- fying surprising uses of foursquare, finding out where people do or don’t check-in, showing differences between newcom- ers and longer-term users of foursquare, and the usage of Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are foursquare to meet new people. Second, we investigate what not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies privacy concerns people have and how they manage those bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or concerns. Even though we found some new issues with re- republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific spect to location privacy, we suggest that our participants are permission and/or a fee. comfortable in managing their privacy. CHI 2011, May 7–12, 2011, Vancouver, BC, Canada. Copyright 2011 ACM 978-1-4503-0267-8/11/05...$10.00. THE FOURSQUARE CHECK-IN SERVICE Ludford et al. studied people’s willingness to share their lo- Foursquare describes their service as a “mobile application cations in Sharescape [24], a place sharing system. They that makes cities easier to use and more interesting to ex- found that people didn’t want to share “private” places such plore. It is a friend-finder, a social city guide and a game as residences and workplaces. In contrast, our work shows that challenges users to experience new things, and rewards that such places are shared by a subpopulation interested in them for doing so. Foursquare lets users ’check in’ to a place the gaming aspects of foursquare. The P3-systems project when they’re there, tell friends where they are and track the studied design requirements for location-aware community history of where they’ve been and who they’ve been there systems [19]. The authors found that such systems should with” [1]. Foursquare has clients for smartphones such as support ad-hoc interactions with friends, family, colleagues, iPhone, BlackBerry, Palm, and the Android platform. and strangers; show if a public resource is being used; fa- cilitate task coordination; and help people avoid others. We Foursquare lets people connect to friends, which are equiv- saw that foursquare supports many of these features and we alent to the concept of friends on other online social net- quantitatively report how they are used in a widely deployed works. Users can check-in to locations to say that they are system. There have also been field studies of location shar- currently there. When doing a check-in, foursquare exam- ing applications. For example, Connecto [5] let users anno- ines the user’s current location and shows a list of nearby tate their locations, and the location was shared continuously places. Users can also register new places. unless users disabled sharing. A two-week study of Con- necto found that users used place naming as a way of social When a user checks in to a place, a check-in notification is storytelling. Users also protected their privacy by vaguely by default pushed to their foursquare contacts. People can defining their location. Rhub [14] also let people annotate choose to be notified of all check-ins by their contacts. At place names by reporting their location using SMS such as the time of the check-in, users can also decide if they want “@pub”. A user study of Rhub across 18 months with 150 to check-in off-the-grid, in which the check-in is recorded users found that it was used mainly for coordination but not by foursquare but not shared with contacts. These private chat. Finally, Social Serendipity studied Bluetooth device check-ins still count towards gathering points, badges or may- encounters for social matching [12]. orships (these are described below). People can also con- nect their foursquare account to other online services, such Our work in this paper is based on a classic two-part proce- as Facebook and Twitter, and have their check-ins be an- dure established in marketing research for studying uses and nounced on these services. Users who have checked-in to a gratifications [10]. We contribute to the research commu- place can also see who else has recently checked-in (“Who’s nity’s increasing understanding of how and why people use here”). Users can also allow local businesses to view check- social media (for example, [3,6, 18, 21]). These and other ins to their location. studies informed our research design, however, we note that foursquare’s usage as a mobile social network and check-in The game aspect of foursquare offers virtual and tangible re- service fundamentally differs from the usages of the above wards for check-ins. Virtual rewards come in the forms of services, and therefore we naturally found different (even points, badges, and mayorships visible in one’s public pro- non-anticipated) uses for foursquare. file. Badges are awarded for a variety of reasons, e.g. for starting to use the service, checking-in on a boat, checking- There has also been a great deal of work examining pri- in with 50 people at the same time, or checking-in at a spe- vacy issues in human-computer interaction. Iachello and cial event. Mayorships are awarded to a single individual Hong offer a survey of privacy [17]. There have been mul- for having the most check-ins in a given place in the past tiple studies regarding privacy and social media. For exam- 60 days, where only one check-in per day is counted. Some ple, privacy on the Facebook online social network has been companies offer discounts for mayors of a place, for exam- studied from many angles [13, 20, 29]. Our work is more ple, some coffee shops offer discounts on coffee.