A Week on Foursquare
What can Foursquare tell us about how people live?
The location-based social network, which lets people “check in” to places using their mobile phones, has about 8 million users and is used more than 1.5 million times a day world-wide. But a survey last year showed that fewer than 5 percent of Americans had ever used Foursquare or its rivals, and only about 1 percent used such a location-based service on a daily basis.
To learn about where people go and what they do on Foursquare, Digits collected every check-in on the service for a week earlier this year, via the Foursquare “firehose.” And what did we find?