Winnipeg Free Press - December 3/09
Foursquare: The Next Big Thing?
Tired of reading about how Twitter is changing the social networking landscape? Get ready for a new media obsession: the fledgling location-based friend-finder/city guide/mobile game Foursquare. With 100,000 users in 100 cities after its March launch in a handful of urban areas, Foursquare is one of the fastest-growing virtual communities. Capitalizing on the fact that more and more cellphones have GPS location functionality, Foursquare lets users “check in” at locations such as restaurants, bars, museums, gyms, sporting events, coffee shops and concerts, and earn points towards badges (the game), but also see who else is nearby (the friend-finder part).
Eventually, as more people use the service and rate the places they check in at, it will become a crowd-sourced city guide.
Obviously Foursquare is tiny when compared with giants such as MySpace, Twitter and Facebook, but it is experiencing rapid growth every month. Foursquare reports that between 30 and 60 per cent of new users stick with the service after signing up.
While Facebook is about people you know/used to know and Twitter is about people you want to discover more about, because of some of the privacy concerns that go along with sharing your location, Foursquare networks tend to be fairly exclusive and are based around relationships you have right now.
“On Twitter, there are more than 3,000 people that follow me, and Facebook is more of a business community now,” said Annie Heckenberger, 36, in a recent interview in the New York Times. “Foursquare is more of the people that I actually hang out with and want to socialize with.”
This is where Foursquare is at a distinct advantage, despite being the new kid on the block. You might not want everyone from your boss to your mother-in-law to your Grade 3 crush to know you are skipping out of work early to grab drinks at a local watering hole, but you’ll probably going to want to let your Foursquare friends know where you are.
While some technology bloggers and early adopters have been quick to call Foursquare the next Twitter, the site is more a complement to Twitter than a direct competitor. Your Twitter feed is easily tied into your Foursquare account.
Although there are other geo-based services like Loopt and Google Latitude, Foursquare seems to be getting more attention from users because of the interaction between mobile gaming and location-based social networking.
The site’s crowd-sourced opinions are also important. There might be a time where the opinions of Foursquare users carry some weight.
“Like Twitter and Facebook, Foursquare taps into our inner exhibitionist self — a malady of the post-Internet era. It allows everyone to be a Ruth Reichl, the legendary food critic— an arbiter of taste,” writes Om Malik in his recent article Why I Love Foursquare. “With a narcissistic quotient that is higher than a genius’s IQ, it’s only a matter of time before it’s discovered by everyone from dithering fashion editors to pro athletes and pop stars. When that happens, yet another tech pop phenomenon will be born.”
Initially rolled out in Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal, Calgary-, Edmonton- and Ottawa-centric versions of Foursquare came online a couple of weeks ago.
No word yet from the company on when Winnipeg will be added, but if the folks at Destination Winnipeg were smart, they would be actively lobbying to get the city included in the next round of rollouts. Not only would it help Winnipeg’s cool factor, Foursquare can be used as an inexpensive marketing and promotion tool for local businesses. It would also be a perfect tie-in for the recently launched Culture on Every Corner campaign. The site’s possibilities are endless.
Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition December 3, 2009 E3
