I’ve spent some time recently trying to concept ways to get people outdoors using Foursquare. Here are some of my thoughts:
- Mayor offerings from outdoor retailers from park locations. (Mayor offerings would help businesses more if there was a top 10, top 50, and top 100, allowing for more competition)
- Flash mob city park clean-up events.
- Checking in astrological, or weather related events. There are three stars in the sky, harvest moon, first snow of the year, etc.
- Location based services and geo-tagging bring the possibility of a real-time local newspaper app of an area, down to the street. The 18th Street Newspaper brings you the best recommendations for places to eat, the latest tweets in the area, and pictures tagged from this location. (Although this has nothing to do with getting people outside I didn’t want to delete it.)
- Record the places I have been, not for the game, but as a log of where you have been. If a person walks in the woods and nobody knows, did he still walk in the woods? It could be my trail log, my peak log, my vertical feet skied log.
- You are rewarded for being adventuresome and not visiting the same place multiple times. Can you bag the highest peak in each state? Every state park? Every 18th Century statue?
- Giving the city, state, and federal govt the opportunity to offer mayorship rewards and badges for visiting parks, wilderness areas, and monuments.
- Working in a geocache system “now that you are here, did you know …” would be a cool thing to see.
- Outdoor retailers having secret free gifts for people that discover areas. Discovering virtual treasure coupons by visiting wilderness locations.
- Group feeds, like having a NOLS alumni group, for check-ins. Endorsements from trusted strangers, like twitter lists.
- Checking in at an area gives people the location of your last where about. Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego could come back in a big way. Hide and Go Seek also has a place here. Set someone up as “it” and spend the day trying to track that person down with clues.
I also posed this question to the NOLS Facebook page: How would you make going/being outside a game? Here are the answers.
Here are a few resources about Foursquare that I found helpful and interesting.
http://www.thisisgoingtobebig.com/2009/07/why-yelp-should-support-foursquare.html
http://mashable.com/2009/07/25/foursquare-app/
http://adage.com/digitalnext/post?article_id=138305
http://mashable.com/2010/01/16/foursquare-world/
Love the idea of the log. When I was in college, I always thought it would be cool to keep a map of the state of Wisconsin (that’s home!) and mark every lake that I skinny dipped in. And then when I was old, pass that along to my grandkids. Struck me as a kinda awesome/kinda creepy thing that you’d like from a grandpa. But anyway, yeah, foursquare. Would make the skinny dipping log easier to maintain. Except where would I keep my phone?
Also, flash mobbing parks for clean-up is an awesome idea!