ASU students now have a new Foursquare badge to show off their school pride and can access My ASU through the new ASU iPhone application.
The social media app Foursquare allows users to interact with each other by sharing their locations. Users can earn rewards, or badges, by “checking in” to certain places.
The Sun Devil Super Fan badge is available to those who check in to seven or more ASU tagged venues such as Sun Devil Stadium and the Memorial Union on the Tempe campus as well as locations on the other campuses.
“People like rewards. You go back to when we were children, we got gold stars,” said Retha Hill, director of the New Media Innovation Lab at the journalism school.
Wi-Fi users are more willing to check in or share their location if they receive something in exchange, Hill said.
“This is what’s driving more and more people to use these check-ins,” she said.
One reason users share their locations is to receive relevant information.
“So, I will share my location so I can find the Indian restaurant that is really close to me as opposed to just giving me a general list of Indian restaurants,” Hill said.
Users who are motivated to check in because of these rewards are the same users who broadcast themselves on Facebook and Twitter, she said.
“The Foursquare badges are just kind of ego,” Hill said.
Computer science freshman Sean Loiselle used Foursquare but quit after a few weeks.
“I just think it’s a waste of time,” he said.
Foursquare and other social media sites give users the fantasy that they are actually interacting with the people around them, Loiselle said.
“I think people are bored. It adds a lot more excitement by creating this sort of meta-reality,” he said.
People like having the structure of a task to complete, Loiselle said.
“It gives people those silly badges like a way of achieving something,” he said.
Loiselle did benefit from his brief stint with Foursquare. The Gap was offering a coupon for a free pair of jeans to the first 100 Foursquare users who checked in at the store.
“When I got there I was the 115th person. They gave me a 40 percent-off coupon for checking in,” he said.
The ASU iPhone app was released a week before classes started.
“For now, it’s got the same look and feel of our mobile website,” said ASU web app lead developer Matt Rapp.
ASU partnered with Straxis Techonology to develop the feature. Since the app is a native one, in which information is stored in the application itself instead of solely online, it works faster than the mobile site.
“The pictures and the videos come through a little bit quicker,” Rapp said.
Both the ASU iPhone app and the ASU mobile site provide the same information, he said.
“Regardless of whether you are at the mobile site or (using) the native app, you are still getting access to the same features,” Rapp said.
Hill finds the app and mobile site useful.
“Any of the mobile ASU pages are really handy for when you’re looking for buildings, particularly on the Tempe campus,” she said.
Reach the reporter at ryan.mccullough@asu.edu
