Author: Klint Finley / Source: WIRED
It’s Thursday afternoon, and I’m on the eighth floor of a nondescript building in the Flatiron District, sitting across from Foursquare cofounder Dennis Crowley. He pulls out his phone to show me an unreleased, nameless game that he and his skunkworks-style team Foursquare Labs have been working on.
Think Candyland, but instead of fantasy locations like Lollipop Woods, the game’s virtual board includes place categories associated with New York City neighborhoods. There’s a Midtown Bar, a Downtown Movie Theatre, Brooklyn Coffeeshop, Uptown Park, and so on.As in Candyland, you move your game piece forward by drawing cards. But in Crowley’s version, the cards are the habits and locations of real people whose data has been turned into literal pawns in the game. Foursquare knows where they are in real time, because it powers many widely used apps, from Twitter and Uber to TripAdvisor and AccuWeather. These people aren’t playing Crowley’s game, but their real-world movements animate it: If one of them goes into a bar in midtown, for example, the person playing the game would get a Midtown Bar card.
Crowley tabs to a different part of the game, and dozens of first names and generic cartoon avatars pop up on the screen beneath the header “Brooklyn Roasting Company,” a real cafe on the first floor of the building we’re in. “Downstairs in the cafeteria there are 40 people,” Crowley says, thumbing through the list. “These are the people that are there. These are not their names. And this is not what they look like. These are [their unique advertising] IDs that we turned into a fake name and a fake avatar.”
He taps on one profile, called “Harry,” and a pie chart pops up that details the habits of the real person associated with that advertising ID. “Harry spends a lot of time in Midtown, sometimes goes to parks, and rides the subway,” Crowley says, looking over the data Foursquare has assembled from the person’s use of popular apps and geotagging services. “I can say I want Harry to be on my team. And now that Harry is on my team, everywhere that ‘Harry’ goes generates a card for me.”
This nameless game wasn’t the reason I was talking to Crowley—it’s still at least a year away from being anything other than an internal prototype, he says. But it speaks to the almost incomprehensible vastness of Foursquare’s data empire.
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