travisstoliker.com

My favorite local magazine, The Capital Gains, asked to interview me about why I use foursquare. Only two or three sentences of my interview are going to be printed so I figured I would post the entire transcript here.

[Capital Gains Media] - Why do you play foursquare?
[Travis Stoliker] - I don’t “play” foursquare really. The points and mayorships are not the reason why I use Foursquare. I use foursquare as a means to track my activity, share it with friends, observe my friends activity and engage with others based on their location.

How does foursquare help you discover local venues, bars, and cafes?
This is an important part of Foursquare. While it is unlikely that your morning breakfast will be memorable enough to take the time to mention it on Twitter or Facebook, my friends will check-in on foursquare repeatedly at their favorite establishment and it is often somewhere I had never heard of. This lets me discover the places that my trusted group of friends frequent often so that I may uncover gems within my own community that I was previously unaware of.

What have you learned about your neighborhood via foursquare?
People love to drink. A lot.

Do any Lansing businesses offer incentives for foursquare players? Which?
None that I am aware of but it is only a matter of time. This is a missed opportunity currently.

About mayorships…
Are there particular places that you are often the mayor?
Honey Baked Ham, Los Tres Amigos in East Lansing and sometimes Liquid Web data centers.

Do mayorships general rotate weekly between a couple of people in a friendly competition or do they tend to be more random?
Foursquare is still a brand new technology and it is growing fast. It’s too new to have trends in my opinion

How often can/do you hold a mayorship?
Pretty much the whole time since I joined, but I am generally an early adopter. I should state that I don’t care if I’m the mayor of anything. I do it for the social aspect’s. I have never been fond of games.

Who’s playing foursquare in Lansing?
Thats a pretty easy answer, early technology adopters. In general it is the same crowd that was on Twitter with me 3 years ago. There is just a certain personality that is passionate about understanding new tools constantly.

What benefits do you think this type of competitive neighborhood exploring could bring to the tri-county area?
I disagree with the premise that it is competitive. It’s more like Boy Scout Merit badges, or whatever those things are. I wasn’t a boyscout as if that was a surprise. It’s not like you’re competing against other people, it’s more like you’re competing with yourself. The point, the badge, whatever, is it’s own reward. I do not see it as a comparative metric to quantify my social status.

Who are your foursquare friends? Are they friends from the 3-D or met via foursquare?
They are all my friends from real life. Mainly coworkers from LiquidWeb and twitter friends that are tech savvy.

Have you ever, say, met up with other foursquarers at a locale because they saw that you’d checked in there?
Absolutely. Several times after work a group of co-workers have met at a particular location and other co-workers joined simply because they saw the foursquare check-in. I have also had several occasions where multiple groups of friends were at the same location but only knew it because of the foursquare notification. This is by far the most personally valuable aspect of foursquare that I have found.

What has been the biggest surprise about foursquare?
How fast adoption has been. This is not the first “geo location social media” or whatever you want to call it. Google has one, Latitude. Twitter has geo-location enabled in their API. Facebook has some Geo features in development and it, in general, was started as a Geo product by being limited to College campuses. Here is the most important part of what I am going to say, Geo Location is the next big opportunity. Hyper local news, hyper local advertising, hyper local social media - these things all exist in some form currently but they have been limited due to price, availability (how many people have them) and distribution (was hard to sell mobile apps). These things have all converged. I am going out on a huge limb and I am not qualified to make predictions, that being said, I believe that where we sit right now with technological progression of mobile technology is similar to the the point of progression in Internet technology when most people had broad band access in their homes. After everyone had broadband in the home, everything was possible. It was “always on”, gave access to Audio, Video, large email attachments, high quality photos, and everything else we take for granted now. This, in my unqualified opinion, is where we are with mobile technology. Most people have a data plan. Most people have some version of a browser on their phone. Camera, video, GPS, truly high speed internet, and 3rd party app delivery. All this technology - always on them. This is gigantic. Foursquare is just the beginning of location aware technologies.