B's Blog

This weekend I made a trip down to New York for a family wedding. We spent two nights in Brooklyn and made a quick trip into Manhattan on Saturday (I forgot to bring dress pants). I have long been pessimistic about the long term viability of location checkin in services like Foursquare and more recently have take a similar few on Facebook. As a person who works for a digital ad agency I’m certainly familiar with the platforms and the success they have had, but I still had my reservations.

Let’s start with Foursquare. When checkin services became all the rage I took on a personal quest to understand their value. I spent 3 months trying to remember to check into every place I went. I had multiple “Checkin apps”, Foursquare, Gowalla, Shopkick, Whrrl, Brightkite, Loops and SCVNGR, but after 90 days I pretty much stopped using all of them. The deals were average, the amount of time it took to checkin (even if I only checked in to one app) didn’t seem worth the reward and the few times I did get to a place with a cool reward it was undoubtably the time I forgot to pull out my phone and run through my checkin procedure.

Each app had their own gamification elements, but Foursquare was really the only platform where I had enough friends to make any type of game mechanic really valuable and even that lost my interest fairly quickly. If I wanted a game there were far more interesting apps on my iPhone that were built just for entertainment. People point to a variety of reasons on why these types of applications haven’t seem to make the jump to mainstream, some blame security concerns, others the fragmentation of the market, I personally had trouble redeeming almost every offer because the sales staff was usually unaware of how to handle the ‘deal’, but the reason most of these companies have either gone out of business or have seriously changed their long term product strategy is simple…to much work, to little reward.

Now my recently pessimism on Facebook is entirely different, instead of there being to few people and to little to warrant my time, there are way too many people and way to much information. This isn’t actually a new problem for online communities. Pretty much every online community ever invented has seen a meteoric rise followed by a slow painful decline. Remember, CompuServe? Prodigy? AOL, MySpace? they all suffered similar problems. When they started they were fresh, simple, innovative, not long afterward they were full of scam artists, cluttered with content, uncool and filled with advertising. To avoid being overwhelmed (or worse be labeled a follower not a trend setter) people fled to the newest service on the block. Facebook may never go away entirely, and I’m not suggesting they will go away anytime soon, but history certainly suggests there will be serious challenges on the road ahead.

So, what does all this have to do with my trip to NY? Well, my trip certainly confirmed one of my two previous held believes. This was a group of people mostly in their 30’s and 40’s who all carried some type of smartphone. No one I spoke to used checkin applications, some didn’t know exactly what they were, some had tried them and stopped. Facebook was a different story, people looking to connect after the wedding pointed each other to Facebook pages, photos were posted almost instantly of the event and even the groom’s 71 year old uncle said the best way to keep in touch with the groom was through Facebook. So although I still hold true to my belief that Facebook will face troubled times in the future, that future appears to be very distant.

None of this was overly suprising to me, but there was something that caught me off guard; Foursquare had become useful! Not as a checkin service, but as an exploring tool. A few weeks ago a colleague of mine had suggested I give Foursquare another shot. He to had stopped checking into every place he went, but had found real value in the apps ability to highlight hotspots, view menus, find friends and read reviews. I don’t spend a lot of time in NY, so this seemed like the perfect opportunity to give Foursquare one more try. I’m glad I did. 

After getting off the subway and quickly finding a Banana Republic that solved my pants problem, we need to find a jacket for my date. I opened up Foursquare and sure enough a Bloomingdales was just three blocks away. We took a walk and while she tried on jackets I began to look for a place for lunch. I pulled up a few different restaurants in the vicinity and began reading reviews and looking through the menus. We found a great spot, The Pan American, a few blocks away and decided to try it out. While we were waiting I decided to go back to my old habit and checkin, my reward? 50% of our lunch!

Now I understand that many of these features were available a while back in Foursquare, but regardless the main purpose of the application seems to have changed. They have improved the UI and the level of information available and made exploring a much more prominent part of the application. Time will tell if there is enough value to keep me coming back to the application, but for now I have to say my opinion of their future is much brighter.