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.
3 Responses to “The social needs context… please”
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David on June 8th, 2010
I for one have started unfollowing Twitter users. There does not appear to be a way to filter out these messages…
Stephen Cerruti on June 8th, 2010
For a great example look at Google Latitude. Google Latitude will send you a notification that a friend is nearby if, and I think only if, it is outside their normal routine.
Combine with this the check-in example above. It would be useful to me to know my friend checked in at Starbucks if their normal routine was then to arrive at my location and if I had not checked in at Starbucks recently. Otherwise, what’s the point?
Andy on July 8th, 2010
Yes, I have used it. It is very cool. I found myself waiting for my friends to move…then I got bored. Many of them were reluctant to share that level of detail. If Lattitude was visible to other apps, one could get more location based updates in context. Thanks for your views!