This is a guest post by Hunter Walk (@hunterwalk) who conducted a survey of 500 Foursquare users to better understand their check in behaviors and motivations. His obsession with Foursquare is unrelated to his day job leading the consumer product team at YouTube, although he did at one point hold the Mayorship of their San Bruno headquarters.
Have you noticed ?Off the Grid? [OTG] appearing in your Foursquare feed recently? No, it?s not the latest trendy West Hollywood club or SF food cart. OTG is Foursquare?s ?privacy? feature where you check in to a location but don?t disclose it to your friends (while gaining any applicable points, badges, etc). What purpose does it serve to notify your friends that you?re out on the town but to hide the location? And what does it tell us about the future of location-based services & privacy? This was the question I set out to answer by�surveying nearly 500 Foursquare users.
