The community of people using foursquare is growing rapidly and nowhere is this more readily apparent than right here in our lovely Slovenia.

Back when I first started using foursquare for some strange reason (I honestly don’t know) pretty much everywhere you went you were forced to first add the location. Then check-in. And you were seen as this strange voodoo magician with a funky thing that  tells everyone where they are.

However since my first check-in at Hekovnik on the 27th of January this year a lot has changed. Nowadays anywhere I want to check-in the place is already available and what’s more, someone’s a mayor! Hell, just the other day I even noticed some sort of location-based advertising. That was a real shocker to be honest.

But the biggest question on everyone’s mind is: What the hell is the use here? Why am I doing this? Why do I keep checking-in everywhere I go? What possible reason could there be for publishing my location on the internets shy of wanting to get raped?

Two months ago I thought I had the answer: Electronic Graffiti

And sure enough, foursquare can indeed be used as a medium for electronically leaving a mark on places you visit. Everyone who checks-in somewhere near will see what you wrote and will wonder “Who was that guy. What was he doing here. I wonder if he liked soup”

But I soon grew weary of that. Half of the time I couldn’t think of anything whimsical to say and the other half my phone lagged and spazzed out and before I could leave a note for the world to see I felt like bashing my face in with the frustration.

So that can’t possibly be the usefulness.

Then last weekend as I was checking-in on yet another hill in the middle of nowhere a moment of clarity strook me.

Birdwatching! Trainspotting!

Foursquaring is as much a silly hobby as birdwatching or trainspotting! Back in the old days people would travel far and wide to put a check next to a colourful picture in a book, or to cross off a number in a long list of numbers inside a fat notepad of numbers.

These days, we travel far and wide to put a virtual mark on a virtual medium inside a virtual network. All we want is to go “Hey, I’ve been there and that’s great.”

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When we first started the Preona project one of our most important assumptions was that actively liking things is very cumbersome and few people will want to do it in order to personalise the reading suggestion system.

What we wanted to build was a system that could automagically learn from what the user is doing, be intriguingly implicit and invisible.

This was wrong.

After observing what people are doing online and how they behave, we, or rather I, have come to the conclusion that liking is a very important action that transcends cultural and technological bounds. And that people do it for everything but improving the ratings of what they’re reading.

The reason people like liking things is simple: Feedback.

And I don’t mean giving feedback to developers, or recommendation systems. No, they’re giving feedback on a completely personal level. The act of liking things online has gained a significant cultural and sociological dimension – it’s a lot like giving flowers to people, the meaning depends wholly on the context.

But this makes the whole act very difficult to interpret and base your machine learning systems on. When the context defines the action’s meaning, rather than the action itself that’s a very big problem. Sure, in general you can assume that liking means people would like to read more of that particular content, but what about when they’re just expressing agreement, or mutual dislike of something? Or expressing condolences? Nobody wants to read a lot of sad things …

This sounds like a very difficult problem to solve, but perhaps the solution is incredibly simple.

Implement liking as a purely conversational feature and ignore it completely from a machine learning perspective? I don’t know, we’re going to have to try and see what works best.

An interesting experiment would be to try predicting whether a person will “like” something with Google‘s new prediction API. This probably calls for a weekend project, hopefully I’ll have a chance to play with that in the following days and try it out.

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Lately facebook has been taking a lot of flak over user privacy regarding the changes they’ve implemented to their API and how easy it is for 3rd parties to access user’s private data … or more to the point, how much pain users have to go through to hide their personal data.

My personal opinion is that, yes, facebook is being a bit of an arse about the whole issue. At first they were promising everyone a walled garden free of outside scrutiny where you can behave just like you were locked up in your little dorm room having fun with a few mates.

And people got used to that.

For example you’ll never see anyone complain about the fact their tweets are public, or that whatever they post on their blogs is public, or flickr or forums or irc and a miriad other services. The whole online world is … public. And nobody bats an eyelid.

Then facebook becomes slightly more public.

Public outrage!

Villages, internet and old women peeking out of windows

The fact of the matter is that facebook was never private even though it promised to be. In fact I’ll wager it’s more private now than it was ever before!

Wait what?

It all boils down to rumors and basic human behaviour.

if you’re worried about looking like an idiot, don’t be an idiot when someone is looking

Now I’m not a psychologist or sociologist or anything like that, but because I’m a computer scientist I like to pretend I can understand anything algorithmically complex – like people.

Also I’ve talked to one or two people who have lived in a small enough village to explain this effect to me.

When you have a small population of people living in a confined area everybody knows a little bit about everybody else. It doesn’t matter who you are or how many friends you’ve got. Someone will always know what you did last summer or how drunk you got on that party on Friday and not to mention what big of an arse you turned out to be when you dumped that poor girly.

Everybody! Will! Know, When. You, Fuck Up! They just will.

But when you live in a big city, it’s a little different. Suddenly there are so many people on so big an area you hardly know anyone. Most of us don’t even know any of the people living in the same building we are. If you’re lucky you’ll have a vague idea of what profession they’re in.

This gives us a super huge expectation of privacy and we’ve grown so used to being anonymous and unknown that we want this notion of privacy to extend into every little facet of our world.

So where lies the problem?

The problem is when these city slickers reach the online world. It looks anonymous. It smells anonymous. And it certainly likes to talk anonymous. No names. No identity. Nothing

Hoorah! I can make a total idiot of myself and no-one will know! yay

Well no, not really. Google and a bunch of other things are tracking your every move, every keystroke almost. They do this to make more money off of you through targeted advertising and some other unimportant stuff.

We’ve gone full circle, suddenly the online world behaves a lot like a village. Everybody knows everybody and so on.

So why such an outcry over privacy issues?

Well, because us city slickers don’t really know how to handle this kind of information. We’re not used to knowing so much about people around us, we’re not used to always having a pair of eyes on our back through the curtains of the window across the street.

That’s why we do strange google searches of people we want to hire, we research people we want to date, we … I don’t know, we basically dig up every little detail of anybody we encounter and think is important enough.

We want all that info.

But we can’t handle it.

A long time ago people in villages learned that being drunk at a party 20 years ago does not reflect poorly on a man today. The rest of us still need to figure that out so there won’t be cases of people not getting hired due to an obscure image found online or a drunk photo posted on their facebook etc.

Until then, for fuck’s sake people, if you’re worried about looking like an idiot, don’t be an idiot when someone is looking!

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