Now, of course, all this has potential for the European Parliament. Say some itinerant tourist checks into the Place du Luxembourg in Brussels, wouldn’t it be excellent for him or her to find a tip like this: “You’re only 200m from the Parlamentarium, the awesome (people say “awesome” on Foursquare, apologies…) new visitors’ centre of the European Parliament”? That tip might be left by us (in which case it wouldn’t include the word “awesome”), or by some random Foursquare person. Either way, it might just mean someone discovers the European Parliament (and, thus inspired, twenty years later becomes its President, perhaps).

(From memeburn.com)

At the moment, all this is still a gleam – albeit quite a bright one – in the eye of the WebCom social media team. Right now, we’re testing, which means a bunch of webcommers, and even a quite senior guy who has been known to hang out with them, are suddenly avid Foursquare users. Which is where the inner teenager comes in.

If you don’t know Foursquare, you should be aware that it has another feature I didn’t mention above, a rewards system for checking in. You score points for every check in. There are all sorts of bonus points to be won for various forms of extra merit, such as checking in at the same time as a friend, checking into a new category of place, checking in in a different country and many more, often quite spurious, virtues. As time passes, you earn, or “unlock”, a variety of “badges” (thereafter associated with your user profile), and, crucially, you can even become “mayor” of places you frequent. The undersigned, unbeknownst of course to the municipal authorities, is currently mayor of the local swimming pool, and the corridors round here teem with the mayors of various lunchtime sandwich bars in the locality. We even have in our midst the mayor of the building we work in, something which might surprise the real boss sitting on the sixth floor…

We have a new daily subject of conversation as we all arrive (and check in, of course) in the office each morning

So far, so trivial. But it gets even more gloriously trivial. The real genius of Foursquare has been to make all this competitive. After each check in, you are immediately shown a ranking vis-à-vis your friends, which naturally means we are constantly vying for top spot. Even greater pride is vested in mayorships, from which it is relatively easy to be ousted. I, for example, temporarily lost my mayorship of the swimming pool thanks to the Strasbourg session, a week’s absence which allowed someone else to assume the mantle.

So guess what? We have a new daily subject of conversation as we all arrive (and check in, of course) in the office each morning:

“So, some fancy checking in gets you number one spot, but not for long!”

“Damn, you overtook me! I’ll be back”

“What’s going on with T***, he earned 150 points since last night???”

“Hah, gotcha, I’m mayor of Le Sandwich Rapide now”

… and so on.

All a bit ridiculous for a bunch of hard-bitten professionals such as us? Of course it is. But remember, this is about research and understanding the client base. Good will come of it, I’m sure. Five minutes’ regression a day to teenagerdom is a small price to pay.

UPDATE: This video about Foursquare did the rounds this week. Have a look, it’s exceedingly cool!

A Week of Check-ins on the Path to One Billion from foursquare on Vimeo.

It's difficult to find new challenges after the elections... Photo by Koshyk on Flickr

And now? What’s next? After the tension of the election night (“Here are the first results! Tweeeeeeeeeeeet please! Asap!”), we’re coming in what I call a “post-electoral depression”. Nothing matters any more. Day-to-day work seems quite boring. What’s the aim of the articles we write, if not to increase the turnout in the elections?

On top of that, after having been in the “centre of the world” – or the “centre of Europe”, with hundreds of thousands of visits (i.e. readers) each day, nobody cares about us now. The stats are going down. We will become anonymous again on the web. No banner campaign, no Google adwords. Well, is that strange to be a normal citizen, waking up each morning for going to work instead of changing the world!

Retrospectively, overmotivation is probably dangerous. We should now wait five years until we can experience again an electoral campaign. For the time being, I will go on holidays. Just to forget a little bit the work, just to remind me that there are some wonderful things in the world which have nothing to do with my job. And when I will come back, I will be highly motivated for the next challenges. Because fortunately, we will find new goals, new projects, new deadlines … La vie est un éternel recommencement, en somme…