checkin

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A checkin is the action of checking into a location and sharing that information, often as its own post. The term is often also used as a verb, to check-in.

Services like Swarm are social community sites specifically designed for sharing checkins.

The indieweb community is exploring how to post checkins to one's own website (often privately or visible only to friends), and how/when to syndicate (in POSSE style) such checkins to checkin-related community sites.

Why

Why should you publish checkins? A few use cases:

serendipitous meetups

If a high enough percentage of your friends use checkins, or view them, you can checkin to increase the chance of serendipitous meetups happening[1].

But to enable this use-case, checkins have to be really simple and unobtrusive, i.e. like the old Dodgeball txting UI was so simple that it made it very efficient to do so, so more people did so more often, thus enabling serendipity.

personal logging

I'm entering a specific venue, I'd like to quickly/automatically capture the fact that I'm entering that venue (similarly for exiting) for personal logging / quantified self purposes.

Personal tracking could be done purely with private posts, however, friends-only checkin posts, without any expectation of anyone showing up, serve the purpose of also letting friends know where you are (and thus providing a feeling of being implicitly connected, even if mediated through such an indirect means)[2].

in town

I'm visiting a city other than my home town, and rather than try to figure out who I know may be in that town at the moment and compile far too many explicit messages or a long BCC email, I'd like to announce to my friends who happen to also be in that city that I've arrived there and will be around a bit in case they'd like to meet up.

just in time social meals

I'm out at a coffee shop and want to quickly see if any friends are are nearby and might interested in getting brunch/lunch/dinner/drinks together.

finding people in a crowd

I've just arrived at a busy place/event, and I want to see if other people I think are coming have arrived yet so I know whether to look out for them.

earning cred

  • I want my local coffee shop to see I'm their best customer.
  • I want my boss to see I'm always in the office.
  • I want people to see I regularly help out at the local children's hospital.

awkward situation mitigation

  • I want to see who else is here before I go in, so I can avoid people I don't want to see.
  • I want to tell the world I'm somewhere I'm not.

geo-gaming

  • geocaching is a game in which players try to find containers hidden at particular locations and checkin usually via a silo site
  • geohashing is a game inspired by an XKCD comic in which players checkin to coordinates randomly-determined each day

why not to checkin

  • home. Frequent checkins at home can be annoying to your friends that see your checkins.[3]
  • work. Similarly, if you mostly checkin to work at the same time every day, that too can be annoying to your friends.(from personal experience with early Dodgeball usage).
  • privacy. Some people won't checkin to maintain privacy or are worried about potential stalkers and/or harassment. Checkin after the fact may be a potential solution. See also postsquare.

How

Publish

How to markup a checkin post:

  • Use h-entry
    • Use the property u-checkin and make the value the h-card for the venue
    • Include your other h-entry properties as normal
<div class="h-entry">

<span class="p-name">Checked in to <a href="http://example.com/venue" class="u-checkin h-card">Venue Name</a></span>

...
</div>

or a checkin with content from the user 

<div class="h-entry">

<span class="p-name">Checked in to <a href="http://example.com/venue" class="u-checkin h-card">Venue Name</a></span>
<div class="e-content">User-entered text as part of the checkin</div>

...
</div>

of course if you want to include latitude/longitude information for the venue, then your h-card will be larger: 

<div class="h-entry">

<span class="p-name">Checked in to 
  <span class="u-checkin h-card">
    <a href="http://example.com/venue" class="p-name">Venue Name</a>
    <data class="p-latitude" value="34.009136521684"></data>
    <data class="p-longitude" value="-118.49301381226"></data>
  </span>
</span>
<div class="e-content">User-entered text as part of the checkin</div>

...
</div>

Most consumers of checkins will ignore the name of the h-entry, so that is really only there for fallback for consumers that don't recognize the checkin property.

POSSE

What are best approaches to POSSEing checkins?

POSSE to Foursquare

Ben Werdmüller POSSEs his checkins to Foursquare with Known.

POSSE to Facebook

Ryan Barrett currently manually POSSEs from his site to Facebook, manually picks the venue etc.

Can likely call Facebook API to get a list of venues at a geo location.

Could also create a Bridgy Publish feature that looked checkin post with a Facebook venue URL and then POSSE the checkin to FB.

PESOS

For those not using POSSE yet.

PESOS from Foursquare

Main article: OwnYourCheckin

Felix Schwenzel modified OwnYourGram by Aaron Parecki to allow PESOS of checkin on Foursquare (really Swarm) via micropub using OwnYourCheckin.

PESOS from Swarm

Main article: OwnYourSwarm

OwnYourSwarm, also by Aaron Parecki, PESOSes your Swarm check-ins, photos, and "with..." person-tags to your own site via micropub.

PESOS from Geocaching sites

Main article: geocaching

Dan Q has implemented a plugin which streamlines PESOS of geocaching logs from the dominant silos (e.g. Geocaching.com) into WordPress.

IndieWeb Examples

In rough launch/implementation order:

Barnaby Walters

Barnaby Walters is using Taproot on waterpigs.co.uk to post notes with location data (including rev-geocoded address data) represented with an embedded h-card venue and in an embedded map, since 2013-01-24. Currently manually tagging specific check-ins with #checkin, but is working on adding richer venue information. Examples:

Tom Morris

Tom Morris is using Ferocity on tommorris.org to publish notes with venue data in an embedded h-card with geo microformat hyperlink (with title="lat;long") since 2013-02-02 . Examples:

Ben Werdmuller

Ben Werdmuller is using Known to post checkins since ????-??-??. e.g.:

Michael Owens

Michael Owens is using indie.js to post checkins with POSSE to Foursquare since 2014-09-07 e.g.,