Festival season is underway in the UK, with the mother of all of them, Glastonbury, kicking off this week. And anyone who’s had the chance to go will know what a fabulous myriad of colour and experience the festival has to offer. Two things struck me when I first went last year:
- Just how many different types of entertainment and areas of the site exist – it can be quite daunting at first to know where to start
- What diversity and choice of catering is on offer – fancy a roast dinner, duck wrap or macaroni cheese, they’re all there somewhere
Now just hang on one moment. Lots of different activities that you need to filter through to choose from. All sorts of places to eat, if you can only find them. This sounds like social technology o’clock.
And indeed it certainly should be. The organisers run two Twitter feeds to help put out timely news and information (@glastofest and @glastolive), but just think how handy a live feed of user generated #glasto tagged updates on what’s happening live at the festival could prove. Plus Orange will re-launch their Glasto App which uses augmented reality to guide people to amenities such as ATMs and who’s playing next on a particular stage – again super handy.
However for me, the arrival of 160k people to Worthy Farm to create what is effectively a new town for the week, is a huge foursquare party waiting to happen. Finding, rating, tagging and sharing details of a cool little jazz tent or the best real cider tent on site is what foursquare is surely all about, and it has the potential to really change your experience of the festival.
But is it a good change? I love social technologies, and technology in general, so the app will be duly downloaded and foursquare fired up… but I think perhaps only for a few hours. Yes that’s partly because my iPhone’s battery will die, but also for once, I perhaps don’t want everything I need at my finger tips. There’s something about stumbling across things at Glastonbury you didn’t know existed that gives it a bit of a magical feel, which social technologies could remove. But then again, when I suddenly get a craving for a great chicken kebab and some authentic Cornish folk music what better way to find them!
I’ll follow up when I return with how a foursquare festival panned out!
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My immediate thought is that it would be a great way to find where the heck your chums have got to if you’re lost…there should -definitely- be an app for that.
foursquare checkin in spots at Glaso was off the wall.
but if you look at the stats, there were only 271 unique visitors.
main issue in my mind is battery life for smart phones.
if we all had guaranteed phone coverage for the weekend, then in my view, foursquare / location based services are going to become the new sms for keeping in touch at festis !
i checked in when i arrived and then turned off my phone. it was mind blowing to see the array of checkin spots all around the site.
lets see where we are in 5 years.