Live and Unplugged

(Wrote this for the latest TimeOut India cover story on how social networking affects real life and vice-versa along with my colleagues Vandana Verma, Jaideep Sen and Aditya Kundalkar.)

Moksh Juneja was an early victim of a geo-social privacy breach. No, that’s not what happens when a renegade spy breaks into the CIA mainframe. It’s what happens when you tell your father you’re going to Malad, a northern suburb of Mumbai, but you check into Andheri station on the geo-social application Foursquare.

“That was updated on his Google Buzz,” said Juneja, the CEO of Avignyata, a social media marketing company. “When I got home, he needed to know what I was doing there. I said I was getting a bottle of water at Andheri station, that’s all. I disabled the updates on my dad’s Google Buzz that day.” For years, Facebook has asked us everything about ourselves, except the question “Where are you?” The answer was usually obvious: “Stuck in front of my computer”. But 2010 was the year that new applications, like Foursquare, UberTwitter, Google Latitude and Gowalla, operating on our smartphones, began to ask where we were. Not in which city, but which nightclub, which ice cream parlour, which mechanic’s workshop. 

And people answered.

This wave of mobile apps use the global positioning system found on most smartphones to broadcast your location to your online social network. By taking the powers of existing online tools – your friend list on Facebook, your feed on Twitter, your iPhone’s mobility and GPS – and plugging them into each other, “geo-social networks” could change basic assumptions about how we live with the internet.

We’ve always experienced our virtual and real social lives as a zero-sum game. These new apps represent the threshhold of a lifestyle in which there’s no difference between going online and going out on the town. But as it is, most of us have only the foggiest idea of how to protect the privacy of our online presence (things like photos on Facebook). Now we’re already thinking – or not thinking – about the privacy of our offline presence, also known as our real lives. Take Foursquare. The most well-known of the lot, it lets users “check in” every time they arrive at a destination, earning a point for every visit. They can share insider tips (“try the fig mojito at Shiro”) or post quick reviews. More importantly, 4SQ frequent-fliers rack up “badges” for the nature of their social lives: for adventurousness (a first-time visit), loyalty (repeat visits) or bad behaviour (the “bender”, for many successive nights out).

Obviously, it’s a fantastic way to see if friends (or strangers with shared interests) are around. In March this year, Sarthak Raheja and his wife were holidaying in sunny Pattaya in Thailand. They ventured into Swensen’s, a local ice-cream parlour, to try its“outrageous sundae”. Before they dived into it, Raheja pulled out his Blackberry, fired up “4SQ” and checked in. Moments later, Sumit Berry, an old college chum, saw him check in at Swensen’s – which Berry had done only a little while earlier. He and his wife walked over and introduced themselves to the Rahejas. The two couples ended up exploring Thailand together.

But geo-social life is also almost instantly competitive. Really, for as long as there’s been Orkut, Friendster, Hi5, MySpace or Facebook, friends have been involved in a sort of virtual one-upmanship. We vie to post funnier status updates, better-shot profile pictures or the next awesome viral video. Traditional apps like Farmville gave users virtual rewards (like an elephant topiary) for performing incredibly repetitive game tasks, like harvesting virtual strawberries. But 62 million people were drawn into organising their lives so they could be at hand at harvest time. With 4SQ, life is the game. Every place that you go, when you go, how often you go and even who you go with, all potentially earn you points and medals, virtual scores that pit you against other users on your network.

Juneja is a 4SQ “Super User”. He’s made nearly 2,000 check-ins. By having the most check-ins at any one location, he’s been crowned “mayor” of that place, and Juneja is the mayor of 82 places, from Diamond Tyre-Shop to the Gateway of India. (Actually, no longer: “I was the mayor of Gateway of India,” he said, “but one day someone said ‘Moksh Juneja, tu Gateway ko toh chhod de.’ So I left it.”) Every subsequent visitor is informed of his supremacy, at least until one of them tops him, and steals the title. It’s a virtual twist on the hallowed tradition of the regular, who prides himself on haunting the place, and gets his last beer gratis from the bartender. On 4SQ, the pride is replaced by a mayor’s yellow crown, which proclaims your reign to the world... Or at least to the network. “The game is the mayorship. It’s the number of badges you can get,” Juneja explained. “For me there are no physical returns, only psychological benefits.

I’m getting famous, somebody is recognising my efforts… and my effort is only that I’m going to my favourite place.” The competition for a yellow crown means that off-beat locations quickly find themselves on the radar. “It brings a smile to my face to see chai-wallas and bhurji-wallas listed,” said Twain Taylor, a marketing professional in Bengaluru. “One of them is the Cantonment bread omelette wagon, which I’m trying hard to become mayor of.”

More and more, though, being mayor means real rewards as well as virtual ones. The regular’s on-the-house pint is being replaced by the mayor’s special deal. At Mumbai’s Blue Frog, mayors would get a free drink. At Faaso’s, a kabab chain in Pune, the mayor of any outlet receives a free kabab wrap with their meal.  On behalf of his client Inorbit Mall, Juneja contacted all its mayors, and handed each one a Rs 1,000 voucher for Crossword Bookstore. At Delhi’s The Yum Yum Tree, tech-savvy proprietor Varun Tuli is among the first in the capital to offer real rewards for virtually logging real activity. (Still with us?) Book a table at YYT via 4SQ, and you get a free round of draught beer. “The idea here is to be a market leader, and to be prepared for when the masses start calling on us via 4SQ or Twitter,” Tuli said. “I’d say that the reason we have so many reviews online is that we have such an online presence. But customer feedback is the primary motive. People can tell me there was too much wasabi in the wasabi prawns and we can jump on it right away!”

But the larger potential value of geo-social networks lies in harnessing them for marketing. Preetham Venkatesh of Bengaluru-based Catalyst Labs is a “techvangelist” for 4SQ, and his job is to convince businesses like bars and hotels to help 4SQ help them. That means they need to create more rewards for mayors and badges, incentives that will get more people onto the network and spur customer loyalty battles. “While other sites connect people with their actual GPS locations, 4SQ is completely based on game mechanics,” Venkatesh explained. “The game-like competitive environment of badges, mayorships, and points lets businesses reward specific actions.” It’s actually integral to the design of 4SQ that business-side incentives, rather than user buzz, drives its expansion in new cities.

Apart from getting customers to competitively visit, businesses gain access to “data that is specific to their retail outlet… which times of the day and times of the week their top visitors drop by,” Venkatesh said. The involvement of businesses will also help clean up the sometimes chaotic 4SQ map. They create their own virtual establishments, and make sure that sly users don’t duplicate venues to win bogus mayorships. In fact, Venkatesh said, the ability of 4SQ Super Users to merge or delete fraudulent venues is the earliest form of moderation to be introduced on the network. (More authority for moderation is likely to become necessary, especially to certify users’ feedback and tips. Self-marketers and spammers are already afield.)

Proprietors’ involvement may be essential to blowing this spark into a social fire. The number of Indians checking into geo-social networks is currently miniscule, as is the number of reward-schemes. The cycle by which virtual networks spread beyond just the early adopters, and become popularly indispensable, hasn’t begun to turn. Blue Frog actually dropped its mayor’s reward because “the mayor turned out to be the same one guy,” said Lilian Ricaud, head of programming at the bar.“There needs to be more population there, so people compete for mayorship.”

Yet the fire is probably inevitable. Three months ago, Facebook introduced its app Places, a 4SQ-alike that piggybacks onto the network’s existing database of 500 million users. If location-sharing is going to go mainstream, Facebook Places may be how it will happen. And predictably, once Facebook enters the picture, things start to feel a little creepy. If you pop into a bar with another Facebook Places user, it allows them to “tag” you as they check in – meaning your location is broadcast, even if you don’t know about it. That information could be useful to burglars, letting them know you’re not home, or stalkers, letting them know where you are. A trawl through web-safety forums turns up 4SQ safety guidelines – such as checking in when you leave a place, rather than when you arrive – all just waiting to be neglected.

Savvier users are thinking hard about how they manage their geo-social privacy. “The advantage with 4SQ [over Facebook Places] is that you can choose who knows where you actually are,” said Ishita Kapoor, a student at Delhi University. “On Facebook I’ve got around 500 friends and they really don’t all need to know whether I am where I’ve said I am.” Places does, in fact, allow users to define a subgroup of friends who have access to location updates. But set-up is fiddly, a fact that may be nudging most geo-socialisers toward 4SQ. “They’ve got sexy privacy settings. They’ve learned from Facebook’s mistakes,” said Juneja, though he conceded that settings are only as good as their users. “There’s a girl [who] I always tell, you make so many check-ins, and you’ve given the addresses for your home, your office. People can stalk you whenever they want. That’s a serious danger.”

These apps don’t just encourage direct contact between friends, or users and businesses, but they also imply a level of trust between both. “It [geo-social networking] can be a real problem because of the absence of privacy-protection laws in India,” said Peter Griffin, the Forbes India editor for social media. “Apps like 4SQ can be used by companies as marketing tools. The more they know you, the better their service to you. So essentially it’s a trade-off for you: how much privacy are you willing to give up? Now, a lot of these apps are used by younger people who don’t seem to care about how their personal information might be used by companies.”

On the other hand, said Hardik Sanghani, a PR executive with Text 100 and an advocate for “increasing awareness and brand loyalty” through geo-social networks, users have the option of logging into a place but not broadcasting their location. “It’s called ‘going off the grid’.It’s like going into invisible mode,” he said. But will venues you’re checking into still give you points, if you’re invisible? “No. They can’t see it either. If you’re off the grid, you’re off.” It’s not hard to imagine that, in a few years, going off the geo-social grid will feel as impractical as getting off Facebook does today. Anything you hate dealing with online – the laissez faire information economy, the “friendship” of total strangers, the endless distraction of  renewing the News Feed – is likely to crop up again, in all-too-real dimensions. But geo-social networks also point to solutions to many online-lifestyle issues. 

Having more than just information at stake may make us finally take e-security seriously. If 4SQ and its descendants actually make us go out more, rather than less, they could solve the paradox that social networks seem to make us antisocial. Having fresh information and live social options layered over real geography could make living in a new city, or the same old city, a lot more pleasant. In the future, when we connect to the internet, we might really find ourselves reconnecting with the world we live in.