Friday, April 02, 2010

I just re-invented the book

Foursquare is a location-based social media platform. It works with your phone. You go to a place, click "check in" on Foursquare, and it uses the phone's GPS to confirm that you are where you say you are (say, a particular store). It then tells your friends where you are and awards you with badges and sometimes discounts. It's the hottest new social networking tool, in case you haven't heard of it.

So now social media is physical, in the real world, when before it was taking us out of the real world by having people communicate only digitally.

At the same time, books are moving toward the digital sphere and even social media sphere. They're becoming interactive--plugging into Twitter (with characters), etc.

Now, what if that digital side of books combined with the physical side of social media. That is, Foursquare meets ebooks or something like that. Books could be scheduled for certain times in certain cities. In order to read the book, you have to experience it by going to the places suggested on a site like Foursquare. The publishing company might have a page (on Foursquare) of places to go to in a certain order on a given day. You go to the first place, and there the first sentence of the book is chalked on the wall. The second place, actors (who seem to be real people) are acting out a scene (something that can be replicated over and over so it doesn't matter if you get there late -- maybe it's a dead body, for example). Maybe you got a clue in one place and check in at a store and give the password and get the next page of the book in some format. Or just checking into a certain location via Foursquare allows you to get the next page uploaded to your mobile device. Interact with characters and more. And the coolest part, you could be doing this with tons of other people if it's in a big place like New York where everyone's wandering around following the clues.

You can steal this idea. I don't have the power to make this happen, but someone should.

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