studying foursquare

studying foursquaremattias rost

university of glasgow

Design, Build, Study

Design, Build, Study

Mobile social media

Two studies of foursquare

• Interview based study

Cramer, H., Rost, M., and Holmquist L. E. (2011). Performing a Check-in: Emerging Practices, Norms and ‘Conflicts’ in Location-Sharing Using Foursquare. In proceedings of MobileHCI’11, Stockholm, Sweden.

• Exploratory data analysis

Rost, M., Barkhuus, L., Cramer, H. and Brown, B. (2013) Representation and communication: Challenges in interpreting large social media datasets. In Proceedings of CSCW’13, Feb 23-27, San Antonio, Texas.

Checking in

TipsMayor

Friends

• "researchers conclude that people are hesitant to share their location and would only do so when they see a clear need to do so and usefulness to the people they would share their location with or request it.” - (Wagner et al. MobileHCI ’10)

• "researchers conclude that people are hesitant to share their location and would only do so when they see a clear need to do so and usefulness to the people they would share their location with or request it.” - (Wagner et al. MobileHCI ’10)

two alternatives

• 1) The researchers were wrong, because people share their location through foursquare with no “clear need to do so”

• or

• 2) There is a need with the foursquare check-in that is not understood

Interviews• 20 in depth interviews with foursquare users (15M,

5F. US, .se, .nl)

• 30-150 minutes

• students in their early 20s, to professionals in late 30s

• bus driver, IT consultant, event organiser working from home, students, researchers

Questions about• motivations for checking in

• with whom they shared

• which locations they would and would not share

• likes/dislikes about the service

• influence of incentives

• perceptions of other’s use of the service

The act (checking in)• Coordination

• Tell people you have arrived somewhere, or to invite people to come join you

• Impression management / story telling

• sharing lifestyle

• Choose to checking in or not check in tells a story

• Mayorships, points

• Promoting a place (c.f. Facebook like)

audience-less• Something to do

• “If your business meeting is boring for a moment then you think, oh yeah, I could check in now”

• Diary / tracking

• “I did check in to the restaurant we went for lunch. Because it was kind of cool and if I check in I can remember it”

• Sharing is rather a “by-product”

Audience

• 1-92 foursquare friends

• “actual friends”, “colleagues”, “work contacts”, “supervisors”, “partners”, “siblings”, “parents”, “people i don’t know who requested to be my friend”

• “I'm only friends with people [for whom] I know I can check in anywhere”

• “People I wouldn’t want to have a beer with I wouldn’t add on foursquare”

Considering the outside

• “I don't know what notifications they have, so I don't know whether it's going to buzz his iPhone at 2 in the morning or like, I don't know how he's got it set up, and so I was really hesitant”

Twitter & FB• More hesitant to share cross media

• Avoid “Oversharing”

• Privacy concerns – Who’s following you on Twitter?

• The “wider” audience are not interested

• Politeness

Venues• Venue creation as a means of expression

• ‘in your pants’, ’heatpocalypse’, ’drop your pants’

• “Because it is an imaginary place, as opposed to a ‘venue’, I want to express myself in terms of place, not just create a history of my consumer behavior”

!

• (friend checks in to places around the house depending on mood)

“Rules”• What is a venue?

• “what happens now is we begin to construct our own rules, because there aren't rules”

• While shared during check-in, also permanent record of named locations

• Ephemeral in-crowd jokes, becomes permanent

• Over specific: airport gates

“Route 12 in the annoying traffic jam”

• “you’ll never find that in the phone book, such a place, but you can see a lot of people check-in, because they are stuck in the same place”

!

• super user: “not a real venue”

• “to have a full database of real places, instead of fantasy”

Acceptabel check-ins• “I hate people who check into their homes. […] I

had a friend who checked in to his home all the time and he checked in at 7 PM and he’d go to the supermarket, and he checks in there, and he’d check in again at 9 PM [...] And I was just like, dude, what are you doing? I don't care that you're home, I'm not your mother.”

• [Information Entropy] Unexpected checkins informational: expected checkins non-informational

Fake check-ins• Faux pas

• Checking up on: “...just to check whether [he] was really there. Like, you’re checking in so often, that cannot be true”

• Self-motivational: “…sometimes we go to places just to check in. But not just passing by, we actually have to be there.”

Rewards

• Sharing for reward, rather than utility

• Stealing mayorships

• Badges: incentive increase specific behaviours

• Discouraged when unattainable.

Unwanted rewards

• Mayor was social signal of ownership

• “it felt like it was more my place and like, in a social sense, than it was his place. But then he claimed it in the game, and that felt wrong to me.”

Service rules

“Too many check-ins, no points”

“Must be using it wrong”

Physicality

• Considering those co-present

• “If I'm with multiple people, I usually check in earlier. If I'm with one person I usually wait until that person has gone to the bathroom or something”

• “I've been caught by my wife, ehm… doing it under the table. I pulled it out, like, like at breakfast, like what are you doing? And I'm like... she's like: ‘you're checking in to foursquare’ she's like: ‘that's not coming here. Like, it’s Sunday morning, like what are you doing?’”

• Invites “non-users” & engage fellow users

• Shared activity among users, e.g. competition who can do it first under the table

Utility or game?

• use <-> play

• user <-> player

Norms and conflicts• evolve as people learn what is a check-in, and

expect other’s to do the same

• conflicts between different style and purpose

• is a traffic jam a venue?

• is an event a venue?

• can a venue be ephemeral?

Why check in?

• by product

• check-ins for me (now for recommendations)

• rewards / game

Something to do!while considering the audience

Conclusion• ‘No clear need’ … but people ‘Do foursquare’ as a

need. We play, we laugh, we like to be entertained. foursquare full fills a need: entertainment and communication.

• Location as action, not state

• Not where people are, but what people communicate

People say, People do

Studies of behaviour

• Facebook relationship status -> relationship formation and breakup

• Status updates -> happiness, wellbeing

• Location-updates -> travel patterns and behaviours

• Location tracking -> Social events, human mobility

Representative?

• What is the data representing?

• Data cleaning… is it transforming the data into something we want it to be?

Example

• Cheng et al. “Exploring Millions of Footprints in Location Sharing Services” ICWSM’11

Communication

• Action, not status

• Communication, rather than representation of state

Our Data

• Foursquare check-ins over 8 weeks, 2010-2011

• Firehose of realtime check-ins

Venue name, category, location, gender, timestamp, timezone, badge

Analysis

• Exploratory analysis

• Filtering, Counting, Ordering

• Mysql -> Python parsing raw text files

E.g.> python topVenues newyork.txt 2010-11-15 | head 5!

Radioshack 1323!

Starbucks 53!

MoMa 50!

Eataly NYC 35!

High Line 26!

Nov 8-Dec5• 5,499,469 venues

• 7.6 check-ins to each venue (Md=2, Var=46.7)

• Long tail

• Top 20% venues, 74% of the check-ins

• 37% (1,963,091) had 1 check-in

• Americas: 24M check-ins, 2.9M venues

• Asia: 13M check-ins, 1.8M venues

• Europe: 4.4M check-ins, 770k venues

• Africa: 110k check-ins, 23k venues

!

• Top 100 venues: 55 America, 39 Asia, 6 Europe

# Check-ins Venue1 26 159 Siam Paragon (shopping mall), Bangkok2 18 140 Los Angeles International Airport (LAX), US3 17 224 MoMA Museum of modern art, NY4 16 878 John F. Kennedy International Airport (JFK)5 16 804 NBC Studio 1A Today Show, NY, US6 16 564 Madison Square Garden, NY, US7 16 404 Hartsfield Jackson Atlanta Int. Airport, US8 15 967 San Francisco International Airport, US9 15 239 Chicago O'Hare International Airport, US10 12 460 New York Penn Station, NY, US

# Check-ins Venue1 26 159 Siam Paragon (shopping mall), Bangkok2 18 140 Los Angeles International Airport (LAX), US3 17 224 MoMA Museum of modern art, NY4 16 878 John F. Kennedy International Airport (JFK)5 16 804 NBC Studio 1A Today Show, NY, US6 16 564 Madison Square Garden, NY, US7 16 404 Hartsfield Jackson Atlanta Int. Airport, US8 15 967 San Francisco International Airport, US9 15 239 Chicago O'Hare International Airport, US10 12 460 New York Penn Station, NY, US

# Check-ins Venue1 26 159 Siam Paragon (shopping mall), Bangkok2 18 140 Los Angeles International Airport (LAX), US3 17 224 MoMA Museum of modern art, NY4 16 878 John F. Kennedy International Airport (JFK)5 16 804 NBC Studio 1A Today Show, NY, US6 16 564 Madison Square Garden, NY, US7 16 404 Hartsfield Jackson Atlanta Int. Airport, US8 15 967 San Francisco International Airport, US9 15 239 Chicago O'Hare International Airport, US10 12 460 New York Penn Station, NY, US

# Check-ins Venue1 26 159 Siam Paragon (shopping mall), Bangkok2 18 140 Los Angeles International Airport (LAX), US3 17 224 MoMA Museum of modern art, NY4 16 878 John F. Kennedy International Airport (JFK)5 16 804 NBC Studio 1A Today Show, NY, US6 16 564 Madison Square Garden, NY, US7 16 404 Hartsfield Jackson Atlanta Int. Airport, US8 15 967 San Francisco International Airport, US9 15 239 Chicago O'Hare International Airport, US10 12 460 New York Penn Station, NY, US

2.5M annual visitors

7M annual visitors

Local events

• #5: public studio for recording TV shows

• #13 & #19: Macy’s thanksgiving parade

• #39 Conan blimp (Badge for checking in)

“Snowpocalypse”

• Large numbers of weather related ‘venues’ (85)

• January 25th 2011, snowfall record held since 1925

• Freezepocalypse, Slushpocalypse, … telling a story of the perceived conditions

• Illustrates a shared experience

• Snowpocalypse as a foursquare phenomenon

External factors• Radioshack

• 5 check-ins on the 12th of november

• 1323 check-ins on the 15th of november

• Top 10 most checked in venue for 3 days

• 15th: Promotion, 10% off for a check-in + Badge when checked in to 5 stores

• (Online data influenced by small features + local deviations)

Humour

• Mis-categorizations

• Home -> Strip joint (27 instances)

• Invented locations

• ‘Faux-tini’

• ‘In your pants’

Questionable

• midnight - 6am

!

• Fake, or something else?

So?

• So what have we looked at?

• Examples of communication within Foursquare over a period of time, sharing experiences

• Not exhaustive or representative of what people do, but examples of how people communicate

Check-in != Location

• #check-ins != #visitors

• Snowpocalypse started on Foursquare, not by snow

• External factors motivates checking in

Situation sharing

• Shapchat + Foursquare

• ephemeral venues, serendipitous events

Snapsquare!

@rrostt http://rost.me