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Visualising Locative Media with Foursquare’s Time Machine
I’m currently working on a chapter for the forthcoming Locative Media edited collection; the piece I’m co-writing with Clare Lloyd examines some of the pedagogical strategies that have arisen to better inform users about the data that they generate whilst using locative media in various forms (from explicit check-ins with Foursquare to less obvious locative metadata on photographs, tweets and so forth). We’ve been looking at several tools and services like PleaseRobMe.com, I Can Stalk U and Creepy which visualise the often hidden layer locative media layers of mobile devices and services.
Given this context, I was fascinated to see Foursquare’s release of their ‘Time Machine’ (deployed as a promotion for Samsung’s S4) which creates an animation and eventual infographic visualising the a user’s entire Foursquare check-in history. Since I’m very conscious of where I do and don’t use Foursquare, I was fascinated to see what sort of picture of my movements this builds. The grouping of check-ins in Perth (where I live) and the places I’ve travelled to for conferences (which is the main time I use Foursquare) was very smooth, and made my own digitised journey through the world look like a personalised network diagram. The eventual infographic produced is fairly banal, but does crunch your own Foursquare numbers. I’ve embedded mine below.
While Foursquare users are probably amongst the most aware locative media users and generators of locative data, it’s still fascinating to see what a rich and robust picture these individual points of data look like when aggregated. In line with the writing I’m doing, I can’t help wonder how people would respond to a similar sort of visualisation based on their smartphone photos or Facebook posts or some other service which is less explicit or transparent in the way locative metadata is produced and stored.
Digital Culture Links: September 7th 2011
Links for September 2nd 2011 through September 7th 2011:
- 28% of American adults use mobile and social location-based services [Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project] – Pew research, September 2011: “More than a quarter (28%) of all American adults use mobile or social location-based services of some kind. This includes anyone who takes part in one or more of the following activities:
* 28% of cell owners use phones to get directions or recommendations based on their current location—that works out to 23% of all adults.
* A much smaller number (5% of cell owners, equaling 4% of all adults) use their phones to check in to locations using geosocial services such as Foursquare or Gowalla. Smartphone owners are especially likely to use these services on their phones.
* 9% of internet users set up social media services such as Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn so that their location is automatically included in their posts on those services. That works out to 7% of all adults.” [Full PDF Report] - Random thoughts about piracy [Social Media Collective] – boyd on the culturally-specific takes on media piracy: “I was absolutely enthralled with how the discourse around piracy in India was radically different than anything I had seen elsewhere. In India, piracy is either 1) a point of pride; or 2) a practical response to an illogical system. There is no guilt, no shame. I loved hearing people talk about mastering different techniques for pirating media, software, and even infrastructural needs (like water, electricity, even sewage…) There was a machismo involved in showing off the ability to pirate. To pay was to be cheated, which was decidedly un-masculine. Of course, getting caught is also part of the whole system, but the next move is not to feel guilty; it is to bribe the person who catches you. Ironically, people will often pay more to bribe inspectors than it would’ve cost them to pay for the service/item in the first place. Again, we’re back to pride/masculinity. Pirating was an honorable thing to do; not pirating is to be cheated.”
- Practise the web safety you teach [SMH] – Important little piece reminder K-12 schools that they need to practice what they are starting to preach. It’s great to give students and parents tips on protecting their identity online, but when schools post photographs of students with full names online – often without getting parental or student consent – that’s hardly reinforcing the privacy-aware message.
- The Fall of WikiLeaks: Cablegate2, Assange and Icarus [techPresident] – One (of many) takes on how Julian Assange and Wikileaks went too far in releasing entirely unedited records unedited. They’ve not only lost the moral highground, but tarnished past partners and ensured anyone in a position to leak something in the future would be even less likely to do so: “WikiLeaks has now indiscriminately dumped the whole cable set into the public arena, and in doing so it has tossed away whatever claim it might have had to the moral high ground. The argument that others were doing it already, or that bad actors were already getting access to the leaked master file and thus this was a mitigating step to reduce coming harms, or that it’s somehow The Guardian’s fault for publishing what it thought was a defunct password, doesn’t absolve WikiLeaks of its large share of responsibility for this dump. People are human; to err is human. But refusing to admit error, that is hubris. Assange, like Icarus, thought he could fly to the sun.”
- AFACT Uncle Sam’s puppet in iiNet trial [SMH] – “US copyright police are pulling AFACT’s strings as it drags iiNet through Australian courts, but is anyone really surprised? The Motion Picture Association of America is driving AFACT’s legal attack on Australian ISP iiNet, bringing in Village Roadshow and the Seven Network to avoid the impression of US bullying, according to US diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks. It seems the MPAA deliberately avoided picking a fight with the more powerful Telstra, instead hoping for a quick victory against the smaller iiNet which could set a national and perhaps even international legal precedent to aid the Americans in their global fight against piracy. The undertones of American imperialism and Australian subservience are disturbing …”
Initial Thoughts on Facebook Places
Earlier today Facebook announced the release of their long-rumoured geographic tagging tool, Facebook Places. In a nutshell, Places will allow smartphone-wielding users to ‘check in’ at whatever notable location they happen to be, and share that information with friends on Facebook (who, as per your privacy settings, will either be a very small group or all 500 million+ Facebook users). The history of whose checked in where will become part of the Facebook record for that place, and thus any tagged comments people make in or about those places will become part of, effectively, place history.
While similar check-in services like Foursquare already exist, the huge number of Facebook users means that this has the potential to bring place-based social sharing even further into the mainstream. Indeed, at the Places launch, Facebook has already announced partnerships with many place-based services, including Foursquare, Gowalla and Yelp; check-ins on those services can also become check-ins on Facebook Places in the near future.
Facebook’s unique selling point, of course, will be capitalising on the existing social networks people have established. Facebook Places will actually allow people to tag friends, much in the way you can currently tag friends in photos. One iPhone user will be able to tag the all of their relevant Facebook friends as they check-in somewhere. While this is certainly very social, it’s also a huge boon to business and advertisers, and raises a whole new raft of privacy concerns.
For businesses, especially small businesses, Facebook Places has enormous potential. Localised reviews and ratings have been popping up all over the web for years, but the reach of Facebook, and the ease of access, will make social commentary of restaurants, clubs and other businesses easily aggregateable and accessible. Facebook have already indicated that Facebook business pages will be able to integrate the related Facebook Place information. While Facebook themselves aren’t immediately releasing game-based tools with Facebook Places, canny businesses will surely take up this data to reward/encourage customers – as the have with Foursquare – ‘10 Facebook Place check-ins and get a free muffin’ will be with us soon. Of course, an inevitable legal battle is also just around the corner: which will be the first business to sue a Facebook user for a negative comment about that place? The divide between expressing an opinion, and effectively reviewing a location, will certainly blur even further.
With all of this new information sharing come massive privacy questions, and questions which in typically Facebook style they’ve deferred to an opt-out mentality: users will be able to chose, using one of those elusive privacy settings, to either disable other people checking them into places, or they can remove check-ins manually, similar to the way folks can un-tag themselves in unflattering photos. By default, though, it seems everything will be turned on, and users will have to actively seek to disable Facebook Places if they don’t wish Facebook to build a history of where you’ve been. It’s worth noting that the New York Times, The Guardian and Mashable all have articles up citing privacy concerns about Facebook Places, before the service is even a day old. It’ll be interesting to see what problems Facebook encounters with Places, but they’ll no doubt do as they always have: turn it on, let everyone try it out, then slowly deal with whatever complaints and protests arise, knowing full well that 99% of users will never leave Facebook for fear of giving up vital social capital.
Initially, Facebook Places is only available in the US (and thus the official Facebook Places page will show you nothing in Australia today) but it’s sure to land here in the near future. Oh, and no use trying to set you privacy in advance: I’ve checked, and I can’t find a way to pre-emptively disable other people checking me in; I guess I’ll have to remember to do that once the service is activated down under. Update: It’s now possible to opt-out and disable other people checking you in, no matter what country you’re in. If you want to disable other people’s ability to add you to their check-in entirely, then follow these instructions from Valleywag.
Update: While it’s pretty clear that Facebook Places is yet another tool to entice advertisers to Facebook, often seen in direct competition with Google, in a move that really highlights Facebook’s desire to challenge Google, the maps used by Facebook Places will be exclusively powered by Microsoft’s Bing Maps.
Update 2: Facebook Places went live in Australia on 30 September, and it took only hours for the first privacy concerns to arise.
Digital Culture Links: July 2nd 2010
Links for July 2nd 2010:
- Google to Add Pay to Cover a Tax for Same-Sex Benefits [NYTimes.com] – On this front, at least, Google have got their ‘Don’t be Evil’ stance right: “On Thursday, Google is going to begin covering a cost that gay and lesbian employees must pay when their partners receive domestic partner health benefits, largely to compensate them for an extra tax that heterosexual married couples do not pay. The increase will be retroactive to the beginning of the year. “It’s a fairly cutting edge thing to do,” said Todd A. Solomon, a partner in the employee benefits department of McDermott Will & Emery, a law firm in Chicago, and author of “Domestic Partner Benefits: An Employer’s Guide.” Google is not the first company to make up for the extra tax. At least a few large employers already do. But benefits experts say Google’s move could inspire its Silicon Valley competitors to follow suit, because they compete for the same talent.”
- Don’t buy The Australian iPad app [Refined Geek – Blog] – A detailed look at the shortcomings of The Australian’s iPad application (almost all text is presented as images, for example, which is silly to start with …)
- [Media] Cognitive surplus, the soma of television and being on Newsnight with Clay Shirky [Aleks Krotoski] – Aleks Krotoski outlines her disagreements with Clay Shirky’s ‘cognitive surplus’ argument: basically, she suggests Shirky makes too sweeping an argument, which encompasses too many people, and devalues the participatory nature of earlier media forms, especially television, in ways less visible to contemporary social media forms.
- Foursquare Puts Money Before Privacy [Threat Level | Wired.com] – Foursquare demonstrates they really don’t care about users’ privacy, when they take a long time to fix one privacy flaw, fail to fix two more, don’t disclose any of this to users, and spend most of their energies pursuing more funding.
- Apple introduces iHand: the right way to hold your iPhone [Scoopertino] – Yes, it’s a parody: “Responding to complaints that the new iPhone 4 loses signal when held by a human hand, Apple today launched iHand — a synthetic appendage that makes it easy for anyone to “get a grip” on iPhone and remain connected. iHand is so easy to use, it doesn’t require a manual. Simply insert iPhone 4 into iHand’s adjustable fingers, raise it to your ear and start talking. With iHand, you get all the functionality of the human hand, without the signal-sucking biology that encumbers most iPhone owners.”
Digital Culture Links: April 20th 2010
Links for April 19th 2010 through April 20th 2010:
- Media Watch: A Lesson in Facebook Friends (19/04/2010) [ABC TV] – Media Watch piece about two Warwich (QLD) teachers whose private Facebook photos of themselves dressed in supposedly suggestive school uniforms got them suspended from their jobs after the photos were posted in the local newspaper. It seems the photos were lifted from private Facebook accounts and that the journalists who ‘uncovered’ the story were actually Facebook friends with one of the two teachers they exposed. A suitable reminder that ‘friend’ isn’t always the best word for a social network connection! (The two teachers are now suing the journalists in question.)
- Teens and Mobile Phones – Report April 2010 [Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project] – “Daily text messaging among American teens has shot up in the past 18 months from 38% of teens texting friends daily in February of 2008, to 54% of teens texting daily in September 2009. And its not just frequency – teens are sending enormous quantities of text messages a day. Half of teens send 50 or more text messages a day, or 1,500 texts a month and one in three send more than 100 texts a day, or more than 3,000 texts a month. Older teen girls ages 14-17 lead the charge on text messaging, averaging 100 messages a day for the entire cohort. The youngest teen boys are the most resistant to texting – averaging 20 messages per day.”
- Facebook Now Commands 41% of Social Media Traffic – STATS [Mashable] – “Facebook and YouTube are displacing rivals and taking over the social web, according to data we’ve just received from comScore. In addition to showing massive and continued traffic growth throughout 2009 and the beginning of 2010, Facebook and YouTube continued to capture the highest volume of social web traffic. Twitter also garnered a ton of mainstream attention, helping the company increase the number of visitors to its site by fivefold over the course of the year. […] Taking a look at the unique visitors charts, we see the widespread migration from MySpace to Facebook even more clearly. As of March 2010, Facebook traffic made up 41% of all traffic on a list of popular social destinations. MySpace was in second place, capturing around 24% of traffic. Gmail had 15%, and Twitter had 8%. However, during the same period in 2009, MySpace was in the lead with 38% of site visits over Facebook’s 33%.” (Original post has some useful graphs, albeit without a scale.)
- How Tech Start-ups Like Foursquare and Meetup Are Tring to Overthrow Old Media and Build a Better New York [New York Magazine] – Long article from Doree Shafrir about the tech start-up culture that has gripped New York city. The featured start-up is definitely Foursquare, and there are plenty of quotes about the role of start-ups in relation to tech giants like Google and Yahoo. There is some sense that the realm of start-ups is moving toward a new tech bubble, but the dominant business model still seems to be: get popular, get the eyeballs, and then let Yahoo and Google (and maybe Microsoft) bid to buy your business.
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