Foursquare – the rising star of social media
Location-based social media saw a lot of good things coming – and going. Dodgeball, for example, the first location-based social network of its kind. In 2005, founders Dennis Crowley and Alex Rainert sold the service to Google for an estimated $40 million [Source], but after they felt unhappy with the way Google treated their baby, they left Dodgeball in 2007. A couple of months later, Google shut down Dodgeball, dissapointing the already established Dodgeball community that lost their most beloved play tool for the cutting-edge urbanista.
But now, they’re back! With new ideas and a lot of learnings from their time at Dodgeball, Crowley invented Foursquare, a twitter-like social network, based on your location that adds certain gameplay features. Crowley and Co. simply turn the whole city into a playground! And a playground only makes sense when there are friends you can play with. And so does Foursquare. Adding your friends is rather easy, and you can even connect your Facebook and Twitter friends to Foursquare. Finding new friends however is a bit more complicated. I couldn’t manage to find new people in the mobile version, but could add some new people via some detours on the webpage.
With Foursquare, location based is not just an empty phrase. Seems like the whole idea of Foursquare circles around locations. Where you are, where certain people are, where you can meet your friends and how you can discover new locations. Members of Foursquare can create to-do lists, track their favourite spots, and post recommendations and tips for certain venues. Which makes Foursquare an exploration tool rather than a social networking tool.
And exploration is big in Foursquare! When you check-in to a venue, your friends are alerted and you can earn certain points or receive a badge. So you are rewarded for going out more often than your friends or if you try some new places. Some badges are defined by the tag the venue has. For example, if you check in to a gym, you receive the badge “gym rat”. Tags and badges are constantly updated and new ones are added, so members of Foursquare can do their part in keeping the service new and fresh. And the more you check in to certain venues, the more points you gain and the bigger your chance to become “mayor” of that particular spot or city, which makes you the leader of your pack. There are different types of points, and certain hours where you don’t get points at all. At some later stage, points might be traded in to create badges. Pretty complicated, huh? I can’t imagine explaining that to my friends…
However, Foursquare gets a big plus for mobile connectivity. It is not only reachable via mobile internet, you can also download it as an iPhone and Android app and you can also check-in by texting your location to a short code or updating your Twitter status. And this is the thing that makes Foursquare so much better than Dodgeball! Dodgeball worked mainly via SMS and the user interface nowadays looks much nicer than it did a few years ago. So Foursquare really took advantage of technical improvements and the rising smartphone ownership. And the social gameplay functionality could make it a viral hit (Source).
Furthermore, Foursquare could be a big hit for marketers. Especially small businesses could profit from Foursquare, rewarding people for their patronage once they check in to their venue by offering special deals. Mashable cites the example of a New York Café that put up signs indicating that mayors get free drinks, resulting in even more check-ins to become the next mayor of that place – followed by a free online promotion (Source). As of today, Foursquare launched the first business initiative of its kind, Foursquare for Business, which gives shops and businesses and oportunity to feature special offers to Foursquare users who check-in nearby and get data based on the location-based campaigns (Source). So here is a business model that really pays off – for the consumer and the business!
If you believe the hype, Foursquare is the new Twitter. It already took the South by Southwest Conference in Austin by storm. Right now, Foursquare is available in 21 cities, mostly in the US. Do we believe it will be successful? I would go with Mike Schramms argumentation that “it’s an app for the barhopping crowd; in fact, that’s kind of what kept Dodgeball from getting any bigger than it did: it was mostly confined to a group of New Yorkers who knew the trendiest places to go, and wanted to know when their friends were there (Source).”
But sure, Foursquare’s potential goes well beyond that. First, it can be a useful tool for city travellers, assuming that members of Foursquare can search for venues in other cities except their own. And its success will be largely determined by its integration with other social networking services. People have their friends on Facebook and they update their status from there, why use another service that basically does the same for you? And social gameplay within Facebook is already huge, so the question is if people really accept a different platform and see an added value from it. As for the German market, Foursquare will have severe competition from location-based social media service Aka-Aki, who claim to have 250.000 members (Source).
Still, I think the gameplay features have a lot of potential, if they are better and easier communicated. Being the mayor of my favourite spot could spark a lot of competition amongst my friends, and I know a lot of nightlife people for whom the night out is a bore if they do not change locations at least three times. Could get a bit out of hand and result in virtual peer pressure, but hey, that’s so Web 3.0!
Tags: Dennis Crowley, Foursquare, location-based service, Social Media, social networking