A community creating their own rules on foursquare

People´s willingness to share where they are, what they are doing and with whom using location-based technology has led to the emergence of applications which are being used to create new ways to represent and navigate space. One of the most popular applications in this area is Foursquare. In this paper we report the results of a short ethnographic study of the use of Foursquare in East London, combined with further analysis using the developer site to acquire data in order to investigate findings further. We describe how the Foursquare community appropriates the relatively simple communication capabilities of the application to develop their own informal rules of interaction. This behaviour is important to both application designers and businesses using social networking sites to reach and engage with consumers. Specifically we argue that tips are used for more than the intended purpose of commenting on a venue and that mayorships are a vehicle for cheating the leaderboard. We conclude by noting that designing functions to fulfill a specific purpose in media space offers no guarantee that the community will use them solely for the intended purpose.