The Chambers

Social platforms based on location, such as foursquare (www.foursquare.com), gowalla (www.gowalla.com) and facebook places (www.facebook.com/places) are growing their user base. The number of people checking in at locations is increasing and it is definitely an area which we’re watching closely at Tourism Queensland to identify opportunities for the Queensland tourism industry to become involved in.

At Tourism Queensland we have been running a foursquare promotion for the past three months, information on our foursquare promotion can be found on our website www.queenslandholidays.com.au/foursquare

I am very interested to see some of the facebook places promotions which will surely be rolled out by Destination Marketing Organisations (DMO’s) this year.

This post is not specifically about location based services though. The idea of checking-in and letting your mates know what you are up to is progressing beyond the location based check-in and that is what this post is all about.

I have been trying out two applications (Miso and GetGlue) which allow you to check-in to what you watching on television or what’s entertaining you. Depending on the application you can check-in to television programs, video games you are watching, books you are reading or movies you are watching. Why on earth would anyone want to do that?

Some of the benefits to using this type of an application:

A record of the shows you have watched. You could use these applications to know whether or not you have watched a program, rather than watch it for 10 minutes and then remembering you’ve already seen this episode.

The gameplay element, incorporating earning points and badges. With each check-in you have the possibility to earn badges. The badges are themed relative to the style of program you watch and also to individual programs.

Obtain discounts from production companies or television stations. I saw the Discovery Channel offer a discount code for “Deadliest Catch” merchandise.

Understand the content your social network is consuming. I’ve bought a book (From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor) after having seen someone I know check-in as reading that book (@teamgoodguys)

ReadWriteWeb wrote an article about miso http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/miso_a_foursquare-like_app_for_homebodies.php which was posted in March 2010. In that article the author (Sarah Perez) questioned whether Miso was “Foursquare for the Boring?”. The article also has an embedded video about Miso which is good to watch.

I am not sure how many users Miso has, but GetGlue apparently has 600,000 users. (Reference http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/getglue/id377615302?mt=8#)

From the iPhone application for Miso I can see that the television programs I most frequently watched (with the number of times watched after the show name) in 2010 were:

NCIS – 24
Deadliest Catch – 18
30 Rock – 13
Breaking Bad – 13
Community – 12
The Fixer – 12
How I met your Mother – 12
Eastbound & Down – 12
Law & Order SVU – 10
The Event – 9

NCIS and Law & Order SVU are time fillers, I generally have those running as early morning television while I am on the laptop and before Kylie and Jackson are awake.

I’m finding Deadliest Catch less interesting now, but it’s a show about crab fishing in the sea between Alaska and Russia and it has been entertaining. It was very sad to see Captain Phil die….

Breaking Bad is a great series produced by AMC in the USA. For a season one 60 second breakdown check out http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nK3EWNnb824. The story is about a science teacher who is told he has cancer and he starts making and selling drugs to pay for his treatment. It’s got Bryan Cranston (the dad from Malcolm in the Middle) as the main man and he does a great job in this role. I like this show, season three has just finished.

My other current favourite on that list would be Eastbound & Down. Kenny “freaking” Powers! This is a story about a baseball player who has passed his career peak, his life spirals out of control and he ends up running off to Mexico to start his life over. There’s a lot of inappropriate stuff on this show, youtube search it (http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=eastbound+and+down&aq=0) for a giggle. Funny program!

One of the most useful purposes of applications like Miso and GetGlue, like the location check-in applications, is that you have a record of what you have watched. I was surprised at how much television I watch. Even just in the ten most frequently watched programs I watched, there’s 104 hours of programming. Four days! Even though most of that would be passive, in that I’d be on the laptop doing something else, that’s still too much television…. I could be doing something more productive. Somehow, I dont think the makers of these apps want to slow down your television consumption, but maybe I can use GetGlue to check-in to more books, or one of the location services to check-in outside and doing something more productive.

Eventually a service which allows you to check-in to a location, a television show, a book, a movie, a computer game, drinking a certain type of wine and so on would be very useful.

I would also like to see the location based services take on some of the functionality from services like Miso. It would be really useful for foursquare to extend their reporting / statistics page (http://foursquare.com/ckjchambers/stats) report on a period longer than the last month.

Have you used miso or GetGlue? What do you think of the premise for these apps & why would you use one of them?