Susan Cain argues that the lack of privacy and freedom from interruption in modern offices might not be the best way for those office employees to be creative...particularly for introverts.
The New Groupthink has overtaken our workplaces, our schools and our religious institutions. Anyone who has ever needed noise-canceling headphones in her own office or marked an online calendar with a fake meeting in order to escape yet another real one knows what I'm talking about. Virtually all American workers now spend time on teams and some 70 percent inhabit open plan offices, in which no one has "a room of one's own." During the last decades, the average amount of space allotted to each employee shrank 300 square feet, from 500 square feet in the 1970s to 200 square feet in 2010.
The new offices of Foursquare and Buzzfeed (where I work from) are a perfect example of the New Groupthink Cain refers to....rows and rows of people sitting next to each other in open spaces. Much of this is because of NYC's insane rental market, but Fog Creek's offices are a nice counterexample:
Every developer, tester, and program manager is in a private office; all except two have direct windows to the outside (the two that don't get plenty of daylight through two glass walls).
Great annotated list by Dennis Crowley of places that contributed to the creation of Foursquare.
Foursquare (and it's predecessor, dodgeball.com) were designed and built in downtown NYC. Here's a walking tour of where a lot of the ideas came from.
As Steven Johnson said, this is a "case study in how urban space fosters innovation".
...and how to get them.
Epic Swarm badge: Check in to a venue that has at least 1,000 people checked in. Yes, if you are number 950, you will get the badges when person number 1,000 checks in.
If you're running the NYC marathon tomorrow, have an iPhone, and are a Foursquare user, 4SQ CEO Dennis Crowley has the low-down on how to track your progress throughout the race by auto-checking-in to 4SQ at all the mile markers.
I'm going to use Mayor Maker tomorrow during the NYC Marathon to auto check me in to every mile marker as I run past them. I'll be running w/ my iPhone in my pocket (with GPS turned on). Every time I run over a mile checkpoint, Mayor Maker will send that checkin to foursquare and foursquare will send it back out to Facebook and Twitter. Cool, right?
Think about the following platforms and when the first traditional media activity/participation occurred in that platform's history: Friendster, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare, Chatroulette. It was a shorter and shorter period for each platform.*
Let's call this the adoption half-life. It's a bastardization of Moore's Law, but the level of adoption required for a social platform to be covered as The Next Big Thing in social platforms will continue to decrease until NBT status is bestowed upon a platform used only by those in the media.
I'd been writing a post about this that wasn't coming out the way I wanted, so I shelved it until I saw The Onion's take on last fall's New York Times' take on Foursquare. Then I decided to jam 2 posts together.
The Onion sums this all up way more succinctly:
Aging, scared newspapermen throw themselves at the latest mobile technology trend in a humiliatingly futile attempt to remain relevant.
For his part, Foursquare founder, Dennis Crowley, had this to say:
Um, The Onion poking fun of @foursquare (and me). This is the greatest moment of my entire life.
*If someone has a LexisNexis account and can find the first mention of these platforms, I'd be grateful, but since this is the internet, I don't need sources, mirite?
There are likely several "Foursquare for X" apps out there (and many more to come), but I thought Miso was pretty interesting. From Cinematical:
Instead of checking in to a location (though you can do that too, if you link your existing Foursquare account), you check in with what you're watching. Miso keeps track of your check-ins and rewards you with badges relating to specific genres (and sub-genres) of film and television. Link your Twitter or Facebook, and suddenly, you're posting what you're watching with friends and seeing what movies they're watching as well. Genius.
iPhone/iPad-only for now.
Doree Shafrir wrote this week's New York magazine cover story on the NYC tech/media start-up scene. It's the first one I've read in awhile in which Tumblr's not the centerfold. Foursquare is the new hotness I guess.
Dennis Crowley is making a successor to Dodgeball called Foursquare. It's an iPhone app that treats nightlife like a video game.
Users rack up points based on how many new places they visit, how many stops they've made in one night and who else has been there. You become a "mayor" of a hot spot if you're there often. [...] "People get kind of competitve about this." There's a "Leaderboard" which lists the most adventurous users with the most points.
(via fimoculous)
