The social needs context… please
Make no mistake, a huge segment of mobile phone users are jumping all over Foursquare. Its fun, hip and who wouldn’t want to be major of their favorite bar? Say it with me…Norm!
The only challenge with Foursquare and other check-in services and games is they generate chaffe. Chaffe is defined as “Trivial or worthless 
matter.” Other culprits include Farmville, Mob Boss etc…Oh My!
Let me explain. Chaffe is something that clutters your inbox, news or Twitter feed when the update is not relevant at the precise point in time. What do we do? We can set up spam filters, feed filters or simply stop subscribing…begrudgingly.
Now, imagine 100% penetration and uptake of Foursquare by all the mobile users in North America alone. If each of us checked into Starbucks on the way to work, the office, the gym, the local pub, then home….this would generate 1.5 Billion updates per day in North America. Twitter is currently serving 50 Million Tweets per day. They would need to increase their already overloaded capacity by a multiple of 30 just for North America.
Since the average person follows 125 people, this translates into 635 Tweets that are simply chaffe…unless you are mobile and keen for a meet-up at the coffee shop, coming out of the office, the gym or at the pub.
Enter the phrase, context sensitive updates and tweets. Today’s developers should be building out system level preferences that let users accept updates that are in context. For me, this would mean turning on a preference to let trusted applications know I am mobile and keen for a choice meet up. I would also like a custom alert that would literally have my phone poke me, so I don’t miss out. Make no mistake, this would open privacy issues with my mobile provider…but they already know if I am out of my home.
Leave behind a comment and pile on this agenda. If we don’t get context aware applications, the shear volume of inane updates will turn us away.
