How I Arrived at Tumblr (part 2)
In the first installment in this series, I covered my “rise and fall,” as it were, on LinkedIn. In this entry, we’ll take a more light-hearted look at my time on FourSquare. I don’t remember how I learned about FourSquare, but it seemed like fun to check in everywhere I went. At the time, I was becoming serious with the woman I would later marry. We were going out to many different places in the Washington, DC area, so my check-ins covered a wide range of places, from restaurants to battlefields to cemeteries. She saw that I was having so much fun with it that she downloaded the app and started playing too.
FourSquare is an excellent case study in how gamification can take a simple, everyday task (e.g., going somewhere) and turn it into an adventure. In so doing, we become addicted. In a way, the check-ins and badges became just as important as, if not more important than, where we were going in the first place. A few examples will illustrate my point.
We began attending my gym together 4-5 times per week. Once the car was parked, the first thing we did was check in on FourSquare. The gym already had a “mayor.” The mofo had his picture on his profile; he didn’t look familiar to either one of us. After about two weeks of this, I got the exciting message that I had replaced mofo as the mayor of Gold’s Gym! In that moment, I don’t think I could have been more excited if I had just been elected President of the United States. I held on to this virtual “city hall” until we stopped playing a few months later.
Since we worked in the same building, the race was on between my fiancée and I to become the mayor of our office. The challenge was to be the first to check-in each morning as the mayoralty was neck-and-neck. I was relieved when I was designated the mayor upon check-in, and couldn’t resist rubbing it in a bit.
“I’m still the mayor,” I proudly announced.
“I know, I saw your mug,” she replied, with some distaste.
The badges were another thing, although I was much more into winning them than my fiancée, given my obsessive personality. For some reason, I took a special pride in being awarded the “Crunked” badge, which, as I recall, involved checking in at some ungodly hour of the morning. I even announced it to my office mate, who didn’t play herself but found me amusing nonetheless.
Great fun, right? So what happened? One reason was the increasing risk of letting bad actors know where we were at any given time, increasing the possibility of a burglary or some other criminal mischief. I suppose I knew that all along, I just chose to ignore it. The main thing, though, was that we were just becoming bored with it. My fiancée quit first, then I followed suit as it wasn’t as much fun without her. I find that boredom eventually sets in with most online obsessions, at least for me. I have to be mindful of that, and be sure not to get burned out with writing these blog entries. Anyway, that’s two networks down.
In the third installment, I’ll address the mother of all social media sites: Facebook.
