This post was originally published on November 30, 2009 on Sexy Widget.

In light of our recent claim that Google Buzz is unlikely to kill Foursquare due to the check-in process being significantly more complicated, we thought the discussion around ease vs. proliferation was worth another look.

Conventional wisdom tells us that the easier an action is, the more people will do it.  It’s easier to write a blog than to publish a book, so there are more bloggers than published authors.  It’s easier to tweet than to write a blog post, so there are now more tweets than blog posts per day.  And of course, it’s way easier to read than write, so there are far more lurkers than participants.

This helpful pyramid from Clara Shih also reflects this behavior.  In the typical online community, there are more taggers / voters than commenters, and more commenters than content producers.  It’s hard work to write a blog post or a review, slightly less hard to comment on said post, and really not a big deal to vote / like / or tag that review.

Current media darling Foursquare is built around an action that is even simpler than commenting or tagging – Checking in.  On an iPhone, a Checkin is just a single tap of the phone.  If other patterns of UGC participation are any guide, a community built around a single tap has a better chance of going mainstream than a community built around a more in depth behavior like writing an article.

But is there any value in the content created by a single tap of the phone?  On Foursquare, yes.  My Checkin tells my friends where I am.  It tells the business that I am a customer.  That Checkin gives the (awesome) future me a historical list of the places I’ve been.  And on the aggregate, those Checkins tell Foursquare what places are hot at
any given time.

One little tap can carry a lot of data.

By now, if you’re like me, you are probably thinking about how you canlet folks check in to your web service.  And taking a quick look around the social media landscape, there are plenty of Checkins to be found.

You can Checkin to a place: companies like Foursquare, Gowalla, and the mysterious DoubleDutch (my current project) are all over this.

You can Checkin to a piece of content on Facebook: try “liking” something in your newsfeed.

You can Checkin to a product: try clicking “I want this” on GDGT.

You can Checkin to a link: just click it.

And on and on.

Checkins are easy, fast, lightweight, and most importantly, are a data point tied to a larger intention.  For Foursquare, a Checkin represents a person’s connection with a local business, their location, and probably an indication of a dollar spent.  For Facebook, a Checkin is a signal of the content preferences of the “liker,” a newsfeed story in its own right, and a gentle, hugely important tap of encouragement for the content creator.  For Google, a
Checkin is revenue, a signal of content quality, and on the aggregate, a view of how the world surfs the web.

The dirty little secret of User Generated Content has always been that a tiny percentage of the population contributes most of the content.

Perhaps the proliferation of Checkin-like actions can begin to change this.

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