Mad Men‘s Don Draper, a character of carefully woven secrets and deceptions, would find the time in which we live frightening and confusing. It’s a time where people share both their sundry and intimate life details daily on multiple public forums. We habitually share where we eat, where we’re going, what we’ve done and what we hope to do with to-do lists, check-ins, Tweets and pokes. Each act perhaps a venial sin of selfishness and pride, but each gesture one of community as well. Everything we share we do, in hopes that other may make the same decisions (or sometimes avoid making the same mistakes). By helping myself, in the end I help others. Or that’s what I’d like to hope.
For example, yesterday I was gifted a free hour to wander around at TechCrunch Disrupt to see what the nerds were up to. Armed with my cell phone, a notepad, and a gifted press badge, I entered TechCrunch Disrupt with a quality of stealth usually reserved to describe big cats. By which I mean… I went through the front door and no one paid me much mind. Before I headed off, I checked Google Maps for directions and to read reviews of places to eat around the venue. I checked-in to Foursquare before I boarded the BART in hopes of getting that much closer to the BART badge I’d seen a few of my friends attain.
Walking to the convention center, I had the luck of meeting a new acquaintance, who I surreptitiously looked up on LinkedIn after we parted ways (and after I checked-in to #tcdisrupt, of course.)
Will there ever be a check-in for food eaten?
That’s four social media interactions before I walked through the doors of the event, and with the exception of perhaps reading restaurant reviews, each interaction was done out of my own need for instant gratification. However, it is only through the similar acts of others that I can be awarded these small achievements.
The industry realizes this. While at Disrupt, I had the pleasure of meeting people from a handful of start-ups whose applications and programs relied on the same mantra: score for yourself, share with others.
Take for instance OneTrueFan. A fancy Mabzy/Foursquare clone, the premise of the company is simple.
“We’ve turned the Internet into a game,” said the wonderfully geeky and gleeful Tilly at the table.
Users earn points and patches for checking in to web sites, but only achieve the status of One True Fan if they continue to frequent that particular site and receive points, making it more about who’s the most loyal rather than who got there first. However, that’s not the end of it, as users must share their activities in order to get the big points. The person with the most points for the site within a two-week period gets the title One True Fan.
The schematic is pyramidic in shape, but it works. And even for those who aren’t so entrepenerial about their exploits, there’s still individual patches to be attained by doing things like listening to 100 bands on MySpace or installing both the OTF browser plugin and the javascript widget. What differentiates these patches from other location-based game badges is that these patches exist on two planes: virtual and physical. Yes, OTF will send out real patches for you to sew onto decorative quilts or to wear, Scout-style, on your favorite bag, jacket, or vest for all the world to see.
It's Mark Zuckerberg riding the Twitter bird. No, really.
In the end, unadulterated proliferation of badges, patches, mayorships, however greedy or selfish they may seem, serves to share information about the sites we see each day and in turn help the companies and businesses that we’ve frequented.
Of course it helps if people can see what you're sharing.