Mattias Rost studied Foursquare check-in data and conducted interviews with Foursquare users. The analysis and interviews revealed that people use check-ins primarily for social communication and entertainment rather than just sharing their location. Check-ins allow people to coordinate with friends, share stories about their lifestyle, and engage in gameplay like competing for mayorships. However, norms around appropriate check-in behavior are still evolving.

1. studying foursquare
mattias rost
university of glasgow

3. Design, Build, Study

4. Design, Build, Study
Mobile social media

6. Two studies of foursquare
• Interview based study
Cramer, H., Rost, M., and Holmquist L. E. (2011). Performing a Check-in: Emerging Practices, Norms
and ‘Conflicts’ in Location-Sharing Using Foursquare. In proceedings of MobileHCI’11, Stockholm,
Sweden.
• Exploratory data analysis
Rost, M., Barkhuus, L., Cramer, H. and Brown, B. (2013) Representation and communication:
Challenges in interpreting large social media datasets. In Proceedings of CSCW’13, Feb 23-27, San
Antonio, Texas.

7. Checking in
Tips
Mayor
Friends

9. • "researchers conclude that people are hesitant to
share their location and would only do so when
they see a clear need to do so and usefulness to
the people they would share their location with or
request it.” - (Wagner et al. MobileHCI ’10)

10. • "researchers conclude that people are hesitant to
share their location and would only do so when
they see a clear need to do so and usefulness to
the people they would share their location with or
request it.” - (Wagner et al. MobileHCI ’10)

11. two alternatives
• 1) The researchers were wrong, because people
share their location through foursquare with no
“clear need to do so”
• or
• 2) There is a need with the foursquare check-in
that is not understood

12. Interviews
• 20 in depth interviews with foursquare users (15M,
5F. US, .se, .nl)
• 30-150 minutes
• students in their early 20s, to professionals in late
30s
• bus driver, IT consultant, event organiser working
from home, students, researchers

13. Questions about
• motivations for checking in
• with whom they shared
• which locations they would and would not share
• likes/dislikes about the service
• influence of incentives
• perceptions of other’s use of the service

15. The act (checking in)
• Coordination
• Tell people you have arrived somewhere, or to invite people
to come join you
• Impression management / story telling
• sharing lifestyle
• Choose to checking in or not check in tells a story
• Mayorships, points
• Promoting a place (c.f. Facebook like)

16. audience-less
• Something to do
• “If your business meeting is boring for a moment
then you think, oh yeah, I could check in now”
• Diary / tracking
• “I did check in to the restaurant we went for lunch.
Because it was kind of cool and if I check in I can
remember it”
• Sharing is rather a “by-product”

17. Audience
• 1-92 foursquare friends
• “actual friends”, “colleagues”, “work contacts”,
“supervisors”, “partners”, “siblings”, “parents”,
“people i don’t know who requested to be my
friend”

18. • “I'm only friends with people [for whom] I know I
can check in anywhere”
• “People I wouldn’t want to have a beer with I
wouldn’t add on foursquare”

19. Considering the outside
• “I don't know what notifications they have, so I don't
know whether it's going to buzz his iPhone at 2 in
the morning or like, I don't know how he's got it set
up, and so I was really hesitant”

20. Twitter & FB
• More hesitant to share cross media
• Avoid “Oversharing”
• Privacy concerns – Who’s following you on Twitter?
• The “wider” audience are not interested
• Politeness

21. Venues
• Venue creation as a means of expression
• ‘in your pants’, ’heatpocalypse’, ’drop your pants’
• “Because it is an imaginary place, as opposed to a
‘venue’, I want to express myself in terms of place, not
just create a history of my consumer behavior”
!
• (friend checks in to places around the house
depending on mood)

22. “Rules”
• What is a venue?
• “what happens now is we begin to construct our
own rules, because there aren't rules”
• While shared during check-in, also permanent
record of named locations
• Ephemeral in-crowd jokes, becomes permanent
• Over specific: airport gates

23. “Route 12 in the annoying
traffic jam”
• “you’ll never find that in the phone book, such a
place, but you can see a lot of people check-in,
because they are stuck in the same place”
!
• super user: “not a real venue”
• “to have a full database of real places, instead of
fantasy”

24. Acceptabel check-ins
• “I hate people who check into their homes. […] I
had a friend who checked in to his home all the
time and he checked in at 7 PM and he’d go to the
supermarket, and he checks in there, and he’d
check in again at 9 PM [...] And I was just like,
dude, what are you doing? I don't care that you're
home, I'm not your mother.”
• [Information Entropy] Unexpected checkins
informational: expected checkins non-informational

25. Fake check-ins
• Faux pas
• Checking up on: “...just to check whether [he] was
really there. Like, you’re checking in so often, that
cannot be true”
• Self-motivational: “…sometimes we go to places
just to check in. But not just passing by, we actually
have to be there.”

26. Rewards
• Sharing for reward, rather than utility
• Stealing mayorships
• Badges: incentive increase specific behaviours
• Discouraged when unattainable.

27. Unwanted rewards
• Mayor was social signal of ownership
• “it felt like it was more my place and like, in a social
sense, than it was his place. But then he claimed it
in the game, and that felt wrong to me.”

28. Service rules
“Too many check-ins, no
points”
“Must be using it wrong”

29. Physicality
• Considering those co-present
• “If I'm with multiple people, I usually check in
earlier. If I'm with one person I usually wait until that
person has gone to the bathroom or something”

30. • “I've been caught by my wife, ehm… doing it under
the table. I pulled it out, like, like at breakfast, like
what are you doing? And I'm like... she's like:
‘you're checking in to foursquare’ she's like: ‘that's
not coming here. Like, it’s Sunday morning, like
what are you doing?’”

31. • Invites “non-users” & engage fellow users
• Shared activity among users, e.g. competition who
can do it first under the table

32. Utility or game?
• use <-> play
• user <-> player

33. Norms and conflicts
• evolve as people learn what is a check-in, and
expect other’s to do the same
• conflicts between different style and purpose
• is a traffic jam a venue?
• is an event a venue?
• can a venue be ephemeral?

34. Why check in?
• by product
• check-ins for me (now for recommendations)
• rewards / game
Something to do!
while considering the audience

35. Conclusion
• ‘No clear need’ … but people ‘Do foursquare’ as a
need. We play, we laugh, we like to be entertained.
foursquare full fills a need: entertainment and
communication.
• Location as action, not state
• Not where people are, but what people
communicate

36. People say, People do

37. Studies of behaviour
• Facebook relationship status -> relationship
formation and breakup
• Status updates -> happiness, wellbeing
• Location-updates -> travel patterns and behaviours
• Location tracking -> Social events, human mobility

38. Representative?
• What is the data representing?
• Data cleaning… is it transforming the data into
something we want it to be?

39. Example
• Cheng et al. “Exploring Millions of Footprints in
Location Sharing Services” ICWSM’11

40. Communication
• Action, not status
• Communication, rather than representation of state

41. Our Data
• Foursquare check-ins over 8 weeks, 2010-2011
• Firehose of realtime check-ins
Venue name, category, location, gender, timestamp, timezone, badge

42. Analysis
• Exploratory analysis
• Filtering, Counting, Ordering
• Mysql -> Python parsing raw text files

43. E.g.
> python topVenues newyork.txt 2010-11-15 | head 5!
Radioshack 1323!
Starbucks 53!
MoMa 50!
Eataly NYC 35!
High Line 26!

44. Nov 8-Dec5
• 5,499,469 venues
• 7.6 check-ins to each venue (Md=2, Var=46.7)
• Long tail
• Top 20% venues, 74% of the check-ins
• 37% (1,963,091) had 1 check-in

45. • Americas: 24M check-ins, 2.9M venues
• Asia: 13M check-ins, 1.8M venues
• Europe: 4.4M check-ins, 770k venues
• Africa: 110k check-ins, 23k venues
!
• Top 100 venues: 55 America, 39 Asia, 6 Europe

46. # Check-ins Venue
1 26 159 Siam Paragon (shopping mall), Bangkok
2 18 140 Los Angeles International Airport (LAX), US
3 17 224 MoMA Museum of modern art, NY
4 16 878 John F. Kennedy International Airport (JFK)
5 16 804 NBC Studio 1A Today Show, NY, US
6 16 564 Madison Square Garden, NY, US
7 16 404 Hartsfield Jackson Atlanta Int. Airport, US
8 15 967 San Francisco International Airport, US
9 15 239 Chicago O'Hare International Airport, US
10 12 460 New York Penn Station, NY, US
# Check-ins Venue
1 26 159 Siam Paragon (shopping mall), Bangkok
2 18 140 Los Angeles International Airport (LAX), US
3 17 224 MoMA Museum of modern art, NY
4 16 878 John F. Kennedy International Airport (JFK)
5 16 804 NBC Studio 1A Today Show, NY, US
6 16 564 Madison Square Garden, NY, US
7 16 404 Hartsfield Jackson Atlanta Int. Airport, US
8 15 967 San Francisco International Airport, US
9 15 239 Chicago O'Hare International Airport, US
10 12 460 New York Penn Station, NY, US

47. # Check-ins Venue
1 26 159 Siam Paragon (shopping mall), Bangkok
2 18 140 Los Angeles International Airport (LAX), US
3 17 224 MoMA Museum of modern art, NY
4 16 878 John F. Kennedy International Airport (JFK)
5 16 804 NBC Studio 1A Today Show, NY, US
6 16 564 Madison Square Garden, NY, US
7 16 404 Hartsfield Jackson Atlanta Int. Airport, US
8 15 967 San Francisco International Airport, US
9 15 239 Chicago O'Hare International Airport, US
10 12 460 New York Penn Station, NY, US
# Check-ins Venue
1 26 159 Siam Paragon (shopping mall), Bangkok
2 18 140 Los Angeles International Airport (LAX), US
3 17 224 MoMA Museum of modern art, NY
4 16 878 John F. Kennedy International Airport (JFK)
5 16 804 NBC Studio 1A Today Show, NY, US
6 16 564 Madison Square Garden, NY, US
7 16 404 Hartsfield Jackson Atlanta Int. Airport, US
8 15 967 San Francisco International Airport, US
9 15 239 Chicago O'Hare International Airport, US
10 12 460 New York Penn Station, NY, US
2.5M annual
visitors
7M annual
visitors

48. Local events
• #5: public studio for recording TV shows
• #13 & #19: Macy’s thanksgiving parade
• #39 Conan blimp (Badge for checking in)

49. “Snowpocalypse”
• Large numbers of weather related ‘venues’ (85)
• January 25th 2011, snowfall record held since 1925
• Freezepocalypse, Slushpocalypse, … telling a
story of the perceived conditions
• Illustrates a shared experience

52. • Snowpocalypse as a foursquare phenomenon

53. External factors
• Radioshack
• 5 check-ins on the 12th of november
• 1323 check-ins on the 15th of november
• Top 10 most checked in venue for 3 days
• 15th: Promotion, 10% off for a check-in + Badge when
checked in to 5 stores
• (Online data influenced by small features + local
deviations)

54. Humour
• Mis-categorizations
• Home -> Strip joint (27
instances)
• Invented locations
• ‘Faux-tini’
• ‘In your pants’

55. Questionable
• midnight - 6am
!
• Fake, or something else?

56. So?
• So what have we looked at?
• Examples of communication within Foursquare over
a period of time, sharing experiences
• Not exhaustive or representative of what people do,
but examples of how people communicate

57. Check-in != Location
• #check-ins != #visitors
• Snowpocalypse started on Foursquare, not by snow
• External factors motivates checking in

58. Situation sharing
• Shapchat + Foursquare
• ephemeral venues, serendipitous events
Snapsquare!

59. @rrostt
http://rost.me