Forget Facebook, should Foursquare be worried when Twitter gets location?
We are just back from our holidays and I really thought that with Foursquare and a ton of MAXROAM credit that we were going to find all these little off the beaten track places or these amazing places to eat suggested by my 791 friends a number of which live are or are from the cities, London, Amsterdam and Paris we were visiting.
We landed at 10.22am on the 7th of August and I checked in at Costa Coffee in Gatwick Airport awaiting instant help. Five days and 40 check-ins later, we left London without a comment, not a “buy a sandwich here” or ” you can’t miss this” although Twitter suggested a ton of places to visit including nice invites to visit companies in London.
Arrived into Paris
Again three days and 18 check-ins later, not a hint no suggestions, no directions, no one interested in directing our hard earned cash into their premises. although again lots of hints from twitter most of it excellent.
We Moved onto Amsterdam next and again tons of hints/leads from Twitter including the fantastic Amsterdam Zoo (don’t miss it,seriously) not a squeak from Foursquare, nothing, nobody even inviting us in for a smoke or a herring breakfast.
Two weeks moving around Europe, 97 check-ins, intensive Foursquare usage and nothing, not a blip, not an invite, not a hello, not a coffee invite, this for me is one of the real issues around location (besides its amazing opportunity to sell stuff when it comes) it appears no one is that interested in Europe in the current Foursquare model,we can check-in but it brings us no value.
I dont always agree with Niall but I think this post is worth a read ” Why Foursquare is overhyped” he makes some excellent points
I’d love a world where I could see 8 to 10 real friends and family checking in to different locations but that just isn’t going to happen any time soon as they have mostly all just discovered Facebook and think Twitter is a step too far,
With the advent of location on Facebook will we see the an improvement on the above? I dont think so
With the advent (shortly) of location on Twitter will we see an improvement on the above? absolutely
What do you think?
Have Twitter not had location for over 6 months now already? I know it’s not great and needs work but I just don’t get their offering. YET!
If anybody is going to crack it then it’s Facebook. I know all of us online people will be trying it out left right and center but the question is will the normal Joes on Facebook care? I think they will but it’ll take a long time, years possibly especially given the fact that it is only on iPhones and touch sites at the moment.
I really do hope it does start to take off though because it’s a marketers wet dream if it does work, the possibilities are endless if it gets embraced by the masses.
What really excites me is what Zynga could do in this space. There is no doubt they will enter it soon enough and those are the lads who will really make a killing.
On and by the way WTF do you mean you don’t agree with everything I say?? I’m fecking disgusted
There you go again, Facebook, facebook, facebook
you have my heart broken
I didn’t agree with Niall disregarding FourSquare until I realised that my fondness wasn’t for 4Sq itself, but the idea of general location-based awesomeness itself, and I didn’t mind really who made that a reality.
I’m excited for proper location awesomeness though
it’s because the medium is not as important as the people who make what they call a social graph. And more importantly what glues them together.
IMO the right question, or perhaps assumptions, to keep in mind when building such a thing is “why I follow, am friend with or whatever type of connection” anybody? This could give some context for the graph you will be building.
alas, in your example above, foursquare is something centered around locations whereas twitter is closer to people with the same interests as you. As opposed friending, a word meaning FB devalued.
2 cents, of course
Twitter: shanekny
22nd August, 2010 at 12:33 pm
we really need federated protocols and services for location-based “checkins”.
I agree, mostly.
Foursquare is playing catchup. It isn’t in the mainstream yet but could play a big role in the travel & tourism sector. I’ll get back to that but let me explain by what I mean by mainstream.
If you watch TV, Sky Sports/News, BBC shows and so on they read out viewers tweets and mention Twitter a couple of times. Poor aul Foursquare doesn’t get a look in. People haven’t got their head around what Foursquare is. I myself couldn’t care less if I’m mayor of such-and-such.
Listening to RTE Radio 1 in the small hours I was amazed to the ‘DJ’ invite his listeners to contact him on Facebook! Facebook serves a purpose for me – it’s a great social network. I use it to stay in touch with real friends and family. Because it’s personal I nail down security and don’t connect with all the friend requests I receive. This is why I agree with you that Twitter with location would be more powerful than Facebook. On Twitter I’m less strict with whom I follow and connect with – it’s a collection of friends, colleagues and people with similar interests all around the world. I have great conversations, help people out and value their interactions but the majority I don’t have them on Facebook. So by that very nature Twitter provides a wider net so yes adding location will be more powerful than Facebook and location. The only thing that may dilute the power is the amount of (noise)/spam that it could generate. Currently I’m finding it increasingly difficult to ‘filter’ tweets. I’m not sure I want more noise.
Now, let’s get back to Foursquare – If Foursquare could break into the mainstream and figure out its business model (forget about points/badges/mayors) it could serve a real purpose while generating revenue! When a user check-in they are declaring “Hey! I’m here right now! Where is good!? Got anything for me!? “. The difference is the user is in control and it’s easier (and potentially more rewarding) for businesses to react to the check-in. I’m not ruling Foursquare out just yet. It just needs to focus.
I just deleted my Foursquare account yesterday. I opened it to see what the system was like, and to help a friend of mine test it for his business. After a full month of checking in, and only seeing 2 offers and 2 messages in that time, I gave up. Maybe it has value in the US, but here, it offers nothing.
Not even a stalker
I have to agree, you get such a useful and quick response from a quick “I’m in x, looking for y” on twitter that I think they can create the location based market. Foursquare certainly didn’t.
Location based services are interesting solution looking for a problem. I never used any of 4SQ, Gowalla, etc, so I am not an expert on the features. However, being a marketing researcher, here are my 2 cents.
Let us look at the fundamental question. Who would care about where someone checked in? If your answer is not “no one”, then you might have said that your friends/family would be the ones to care. If we compare Twitter and Facebook, the latter has contacts that you are more closer to and hence by definition they should care more about it. In fact, people already post such messages on FB to update their friends. My wife just posted about our recent Boston Trip on FB and there were lot of responses.
So, if I were to pick up one service that is going to add value to the location information that is generated, it will be Facebook (sorry to disappoint you Pat).
Looks like Twitter is becoming not just location, but place-aware http://www.socialmedia.biz/2010/08/22/twitter-is-place-and-location-aware/
Interesting geo-location times to come!
Can’t agree with Niall’s point that twitter have added any form of location based service that is likely to indicate their strategy on this.
That said my Facebook network is a much better map of my friends than my Twitter network and that’s crucial. I think there are two distinct cases we’re talking about and they perhaps map to different solutions.
1. Finding out where my friends are, who’s out where, who’s nearby – Facebook would seem best positioned to do this.
2. I’m in this city, what’s good here? what’s on this week? – Twitter would seem better cause these recommendation discussion already are going on there. Also my twitter network has a much wider geographical spread than Facebook.
Regardless it will be interesting to see how it plays out, and I would be reluctant to completely write off Foursquare so early in the race when they obviously have a wider plan and strategy than we’ve seen so far.
When Twitter first started, they had location on it. You entered L: and the place name, they put it on a map. Remember Twittervision?
So, coming now to auto-aware location tweets is welcome, but not revolutionary. Like all the other services, some of us will use one or the other, or use several for different type of reporting. More the merrier.
Location-based services haven’t yet fulfilled their promise of augmented serendipity over discounted cups of coffee. But yes, the service I think could come closest is Twitter. Sure – it has a smaller population than Facebook but it feels more frenetic, its twitizens are more amenable to near-chance meetings.
Personally I’d rather accidentally-on-purpose bump into or be bumped into one of my twitter friends than my facebook friends, but this preference will be different for everyone.
One thing is for sure – 4sq is toast. They haven’t taken an aggressive top-down approach to driving user-growth through affiliation with retailers/chains so the Discount incentive is non-existent (in Europe at least – did they really expect users to educate retailers? WTF!) and they don’t have a population to match Twitter or Facebook, so any bottom-up effort is now dead in the water.