Episode 10: Location Based Games
Geolocation related games. Foursquare, Brightkite, Gowalla, Yelp - lots of options. Facebook for mobile getting in to the action soon? Checking in to locations for fun, profit, and status. Dave uses Foursquare, Michael steers clear from the location based gaming (but uses Brightkite on occasion). Michael likes the technology, but dislikes the cross stream pollution ( Foursquare > Twitter > Facebook, Etc. ). It all comes back to filtering darn it. Twitter? Hello! Ultimately, it's the discretion of the user to post to other services. Updates should be set to a certain radius. Gowalla sells ads to Incase so that if you check in at an Apple Store you see a larger selection of cases than Apple carries. This is really cool Scifi. Check in at a restaurant in Foursquare, and get an offer for a bar down the street. Brightkite seems old school. LOL. Dave never used Brightkite. Foursquare is better because of the point system for him - he's a competitor. The first week or two with Foursquare is fun because you get a crap ton of points because you're a newbie. There are some security issues. Check in at the airport, and people know you're not at home. Dave never checks in at the bank, the school, and usually never checks in when the kids are with him. Dave has no pictures of his kids online - he wants to protect their privacy. There's a desktop app called Foursquarex that brings the game to the desktop (Mac OS X, 10.6 only). It uses Google Maps to show the location of your friends. When shouldn't you check in on these things? On a date? What if you both check in? They all have security settings... just set the prefs and forget about it? What if McDonalds tracks your checkins and gives you free drinks? Would you be able to see checkins at McDonalds.com? PlayFoursquare.com shows checkins from users. The technology is amazing - Michael is enamored with real-time data. What do we do with all of this data? Decide for yourself how to use these services. What are the implications? Does this stuff work with Second Life. That'd be swell.
That's a wrap. You can find Dave at http://davetayloronline.com and Michael at http://friendmichael.com . You can find the show at http://boulderopenpodcast.com, iTunes, and http://callisto.fm