In this work we present a mobile application we designed and engineered to enable people to log their travels near and far, leave notes behind, and build a community around spaces in between destinations. Our design explores new ground for location-based social computing systems, identifying opportunities where these systems can foster the growth of on-line communities rooted at non-places. In our work we develop, explore, and evaluate several innovative features designed around four usage scenarios: daily commuting, long-distance traveling, quantified traveling, and journaling. We present the results of two small-scale user studies, and one large-scale, world-wide deployment, synthesizing the results as potential opportunities and lessons learned in designing social computing for non-places.
Check-in apps emerged around 2003 to enable a virtual social experience anchored around physical places @cite_34 . These apps allow users to broadcast their presence at venues, that is, the places they go to. Venues include restaurants, bars, offices, apartment buildings, homes, museums, parks, movie theatres, shops, and caf ' e s. Dodgeball, GoWalla, Foursquare and now Swarm are some of the apps that embodied this concept of checking-in to a venue. More recently, Facebook has adopted this as a feature that people can use to attach a location to their posts.
@cite_34
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There have been many location sharing systems developed over the past two decades, and only recently have they started to be adopted by consumers. In this paper, we present the results of three studies focusing on the foursquare check-in system. We conducted interviews and two surveys to understand, both qualitatively and quantitatively, how and why people use location sharing applications, as well as how they manage their privacy. We also document surprising uses of foursquare, and discuss implications for design of mobile social services.