What’s it all for(square)?

I feel ashamed to say it, but I’m giving up on FourSquare.  I have used it relatively heavily in the last 6 months (within the confines of my simple life), and I’ve got to finally admit that I take almost no utility from it.

Why am I ashamed?  I like to think of myself as about a “level 3 or 4” (out of 5) in digital savvy’ ness, and FourSquare was something that people whose opinion I respected digitally understood and raved about.  To give up on it feels like an acceptance that I’m at best a 3 (possibly a 2!).

Before you condemn me please read my frustrations:

• 1)      I no longer live in a big city.  There is nothing cool about taking the mayorship of your local Argos as I began to obsess about
• 2)      My life is quite boring.  Reading through my check-ins reveals: home, offices, train stations.  There is only a light scattering of cool places I’ve been to, and this is tempered by the next point…
• 3)      Lack of 3G at the only cool places I go to.  I was at Old Trafford recently and I thought that would be a good check-in with plenty of points (see another frustration), but I subsequently spent most of the match trying to get internet connection.  Check-ins in London are also wildly unpredictable given the city’s appalling 3G coverage
• 4)      The usability is pretty dreadful.  The app regularly locks up and there are too many steps from completing a check-in to returning to your “home” screen.  The league table is unreliable and slow to load
• 5)      What do I get in return?  I’m aware that I’ve given some pretty personal info (including where and when I’m on holiday), and all I get are a few lousy points?  I’m competitive enough as it is, I don’t need the pain of getting addicted to something else (I got addicted)

That said, we have shared a few memorable moments, almost exclusively at train stations, when reading the “tips”.  At Peterborough station I was informed “don’t stop here, it’s shit” (useful advice) and, my favourite, discovering the Ken Dodd statue at Liverpool Lime St.

I’m probably not strong enough to give it up altogether (still paranoid I might be wrong), but I will no longer be able to endorse it.  FourSquare will recover, but will I?

Help – I think I’m bored of the internet…

A bit of a ranty one this, but over the past few weeks I’ve found myself increasingly unsatisfied with internet.  Part of this is due to my addiction to the net, checking Twitter, BBC Sport etc which compels me to look regularly and, unsurprisingly, quicker than juicy content can be uploaded.

A smaller case of this problem is exemplified by regular watching of Sky Sports News where you are sucked into reading the ticker at the bottom of the screen in the hope that something new (and possibly interesting) is updated.  The waiting is as addictive as the content itself (and subliminally learning top goal scorers in La Liga).

In a world of 24 hour news channels and constantly updated newspaper websites the reality is that the world simply isn’t that interesting.  Alternatively, we’re so numbed by the updates that it’s hard to appreciate the privilege we have access to.  But more than this, I think that the quality of the content on the net is frankly not that good (I appreciate the irony of this comment).

With the economics of online journalism being as they are, it is becoming increasingly rare to find good quality content.  I’m as big a fan of Mail Online as anyone, but there’s only so much cheese I can take before I feel bloated.  I’m overly reliant on The Guardian for essays, though crave an alternative voice which just isn’t provided in the same depth by other news sites.  I had big hopes for HuffingtonPost, but I find the site so busy and the articles so cut and pasted that it fails on the initial promise of providing an online soap box for high profile bloggers.

Perhaps the world of quality online writing is going the way of most blogs, we start with great intentions and then just lose interest. 

Ultimately (and slightly worried this puts me in the Murdoch camp) there surely needs to be a way of making the economics work so that good quality journalism can be paid for?  I just don’t think the right forum has been found yet.  Sites like SabotageTimes touch on it, but I’ve yet to see a great example of it yet.  When I work out the answer I may finally stop needing to watch Sky Sports News…