Foursquare is an iPhone (and other mobile) app that essentially dumps mobile GPS, Social Media and game theory in a big giant blender and hits puree. I like GPS. I like Social Media. I like gamesmanship, maybe a little too much. This should be RIGHT UP MY ALLEY. In theory, it is.

You use your phone to “check-in” to different venues where you happen to be, and if you make a habit of it, you also collect badges for any number of achievements, like being out past 3am, becoming a regular, going out for ten nights, etc. You are also pit against other users to compete for the title of “mayor” of these establishments, based on the frequency and total number of your visits. This is all good fun to me. I saw a post the other day where the author was quitting foursquare because of the spirit of the competition. I get that, but I don’t mind it so much. What I can’t abide are the UX issues that suck the joy out of playing along.

I seem to have bad luck / timing with site downtime. Countless times, I have opened up the app to have an error show up when I attempt to check in. I’m not sure what the actual downtime is for them, but whatever it is, it seems to coincide with many of my outings. More annoying than this, however, is when you take the time to enter the information to add a venue to the app and then submit it only to have it fail with aforementioned sporadic downtime…and NOT preserve all the information you had entered in your form. Why?? This seems like a pretty standard safety to preserve a decent user experience, but alas…nope.

Speaking of adding venues, twice when I have tried to check in, I have been unable to find my current location in the list of existing venues. No big deal. Upon adding the venue, I click “Check-in” only to be checked in NOT where I am, but rather in a location that happens to have the same name, but is miles and miles away. The first was 50 miles away, then the second something like 70+ miles away. I mean, you know where my phone is, WHY would you do that? Why is there no confirmation screen when you add a venue that includes the address, so you can either confirm or say “ACTUALLY, NO…I AM NOT, IN FACT, IN SANTA ROSA. THAT IS A COUPLE HOURS DRIVE FROM HERE.”

Added bonus: NO WAY TO CORRECT THIS ON THE WEBSITE. What? How can that be? Yeah, I can’t believe it either. Are they worried about someone gaming the game? Well, then it seems kinda stupid that they would allow check-ins from hours away then, doesn’t it?

Also, noted for lameness is the part where if you actually go to the website and click to “browse the content” in another geographical area, that actually changes where your account is based. GREAT. You *should* have the ability to change where your account is based, but you should also have CLEAR VERBIAGE on your controls to let you know that *that* is what you are doing. Come on, guys. Super frustrating. If you are not clear with simple stuff like this, a user’s tolerance is already going to be worn down by the time they deal with the bigger UX issues.

As mentioned previously, Foursquare is about as close to a spouse lojack as you can get. It is helpful to know where @aaronh is gallivanting around town, but the UX issues with the app are making it hard to love, or even like. It wouldn’t bug me so much if I didn’t think there was a nugget of something really fun buried in there. Fixable, which makes it all the more frustrating.

I’ve been known to misplace my phone at home, but never outside those confines unless you count the backyard. Immediately, @aaronh attempts to log into mobile me on his iPhone to try the “find my phone” feature. Turns out that when you attempt to access the me.com web interface from an iPhone, you are out of luck. I’m guessing the assumption is that you are after your own contacts or email, and you can’t get to the interface to access the other features. lame. Dear Apple, please fix this, and if we are morons and missed how this is possible, please do let us in on the secret.

After a couple phone calls to folks to see if they were near an actual computer and could log in as us, we struck out and headed home.

Once at home, we logged into me.com and clicked “find my phone”. Lo and behold, my phone was online and in a mall on the other side of town. W. T. F. Clearly, it had been pilfered by miscreants. How and where this happened, I’d no idea. Unfortunately, the location we got on the phone was just a vague grey circle, presumably because there was no GPS available inside the mall, heretofore known as the Big Metal Building (BMB). We were relying on the less than reliable cell tower triangulation. We tried calling the phone, but got no answer, of course. I sent a message to the phone.

“Hi person that took my phone, where do you want to meet up to return it?”

When they still didn’t answer our calls, I sent another.

“Please answer my call.”

Still nothing. No answer, not that it was that much of a surprise. We quickly recruited @rfriess (my dad) to log into our account and keep an eye on the vague marking encircling the BMB, and jumped in the car to head that way, banking on the idea that the person that absconded with my phone would eventually have to leave the BMB and GPS would pick him up at that point. We just wanted to get there in time to meet him on the way out. Before we left, I sent one final message.

“This phone is being tracked. There is nowhere you can go that I can’t find you.”

Admittedly, I may have been cutting my nose off to spite my face, but I was pissed. @aaronh, always the more reasonable of the two of us, was quick to point out that now that I had threatened them, essentially, they would likely turn off the phone and we were cooked. There was also a good chance we would be cooked soon anyway, because my battery had been close to dead at last check when it was in my possession. Our only hope was that the perp was both stupid and not into playing all the battery sucking apps on my phone. Could both variables possibly fall in our favor? Time was short.

Once at the BMB, we went inside and looked around for any obvious suspects, meaning groups of teenagers with big neon arrows over their heads saying “Pick Me. I’ve Got Your Phone!” We didn’t really see anyone, but then two totally shifty teenagers walked past me into Target and I followed them, SURE that they were the perps. We called the phone a few times hoping to see someone reach to turn it off or, in some way, show a tell. Nothing. Just then, back on the phone with @rfriess, he tells us the circle was moving and was now, in fact, A BLUE DOT. This happened to coincide with me following the shifty teenagers out the door of Target. Now, I was positive I found the weasels. WAIT..NO! The dot was on the opposite side of the mall! The shifty teenagers were off the hook, but I am willing to bet they were up to no good regardless, just not this “no good”. I’d lay dollars to donuts they either were carrying weed or were shoplifting, or possibly they were weirded out by me following them and that is why they were acting all suspicious. Whatever, I digress. We raced back to the car and hopped in and followed turn by turn directions from @rfriess on the phone. When we finally reached the magic blue dot, we were in a quiet residential neighborhood very near the mall.

According to @rfriess, the dot was right in the middle of the street. There was nothing amiss here, however, there was one black car with tinted windows parked somewhat poorly on one side of the street, and there was a woman sitting in the driver’s seat. We parked a little ways down the street. I told @aaronh I was going to go talk to her and got out of the car. On my walk back to her car, I pulled my sunglasses down over my eyes, in a somewhat feeble attempt to look like a badass. The woman looked up at me and smiled a bit sheepishly. She clearly knew I was headed right for her. I walked up to her window and did the “roll down your window” hand-motion making little circles in the air. She rolled it down and I said, “Hi, did you find a phone?” She immediately reaches over on her passenger seat and tried to sound surprised when she answered with, “OH! Yes…I didn’t know how to answer it.” Um…I’m pretty sure an IPhone is about one of the easiest phones to answer, but nonetheless. She was quite obviously busted and more than a bit shaken up that we had tracked her down, AS WELL SHE SHOULD BE. She handed it back to me and said that she had found it in the parking lot of the movie theater we had been to earlier in the day. It most likely had fallen off my lap or out of my hands when I was getting out of the car, I’m betting.

Turns out that final message I sent was probably just the right one in this case. It scared her. A lot. She knew we were headed for the BMB and she left, thinking we were going to find her there. When she left, she went into some random neighborhood nearby by taking all the first right turns she came to in her car. She was trying to hide, but her leaving the BMB was exactly what gave her location away. AWESOME. It was like a total spy mission. For the record, @rfriess , @aaronh and I would make a totally kick ass operative team.

All’s well that ends well, however, important lessons learned:

1. My options with what to do with my phone were limited by the fact that I had not updated the software to 3.1. This left me with the option to remotely wipe my phone, which would have been great to protect my data, but had I used the remote wipe, I also would have rendered the phone unrecoverable through “find my iPhone”. With the updated software, I could remote lock the phone, which would have been way less stressful with regard to possible data loss or thievery in the interim and would have prevented a more savvy perp from changing the settings to disable “find my iPhone”. Software will now be kept right up to date.

3. Our Mobile Me family subscription is $100 bucks per year. @aaronh uses a bunch of the other features, but even if this was the ONLY time we used ANYTHING, it payed for itself 3x over, just in potential property loss. If you don’t have Mobile Me, you should buy it. Now. Like, right this minute.

Time elapsed between discovery of loss and recovery? 75 minutes.