If you happen to be a Foursquare user, you might like this little Election Day feature. A site called GeoPollster is using Foursquare check-in data to see which party has control of which state.
In case you don’t know, Foursquare is a sort of online game/social network. You earn points when you “check-in” to locations on your cell phone or other Internet-capable device. You get bonus points for certain kinds of check-ins or earn badges or even become the “mayor” of a place. I recently started playing with the service, and I’m not sure of its point yet. But all my Twitter friends were on it, so I felt like I ought to jump on the bandwagon.
With GeoPollster, you sign up and choose which party you want to vote for. Then, whenever you check in on Foursquare, your check-in is counted as a vote for that party. (You can switch parties at any time.)
GeoPollster justifies itself by saying:
Traditional polling organizations conduct polls by calling people who have landline telephones. This means that existing polling data is gathered from people who own landlines and are too polite to hang up on cold callers. GeoPollster changes this by conducting polls through a location-based service (currently Foursquare). GeoPollster users can change their party affiliation at any time, allowing GeoPollster to keep track of real-time voter sentiment.
As with Foursquare, I can see no real point to GeoPollster. The methodology here is so incredibly flawed (or poorly explained on the site) that there’s no way these results could be understood as reliable poll data. Still, it might be fun, and with a long night of election results looming, fun sounds good right now.
Related articles
- Election Badges, Vote by Check-In and Twitter Bubbles (gigaom.com)
- Can Foursquare Make Voting Cool? (observer.com)
- Will Social Voting Increase Real-World Participation? Foursquare Founder Says Yes (readwriteweb.com)
- Check-in and Vote to get the Foursquare ‘I Voted’ Badge (appscout.com)
