I'd love to hear the conversation at foursquare right now. I wonder if they're happy for their competitors, or maybe sad? Perhaps concerned that the check-in novelty is really dying off?
I don't mean this as a dig, but if you think one of your competitors getting bought by the predominant, and deep-pocketed, social media site is "irrelevant" something seems strangely amiss.
My guess is that you might have not seen them as a competitor, which would certainly be understandable. But this would still have ripple effect that is, IMO, somewhat worth more than casual dismissal.
I dislike your lack of humility and modesty in this discussion. You may be correct in your A point, but "just hiring a couple of engineers/designers/product folks" remark makes it sound like you guys are some elite squad, and FB is picking up some stragglers to join their team.
I can see why you've taken this attitude though, since commenters here are attacking Foursquare and making you seem like you lost to Gowalla+FB, but there is really no need to say these things in HN.
Oh, I think that the team at gowalla is great, and I have mad respect for them. But in terms of facebook's overall hiring this is a relatively small deal. Don't really know how many folks FB hires a year but I'm guessing hundreds?
Sorry if I was curt. Just trying to be clear and concise.
Fwiw, you were perfectly clear. Anytime someone says "Facebook/Google/Awesome-Tech-Company-of-the-decade bought them as a talent acquisition", the obvious implication (and compliment) is that the talent is really talent. Don't know where this confusion is coming from.
It's a tricky connotation based on context, but I read it as sometimes more positive than others. It does imply that the talent in question is quite talented, and worth paying significant money to acquire, but it also sort of implies that the product/company wasn't in itself particularly great or interesting to the acquirer.
Just to play the devils advocate a bit: Sometimes you need to forge ahead without any fear or concern for what Facebook is doing or does.
There are millions of people, like myself, who will never have a Facebook account - or at least will use services that are not fuly coupled to FB.
I think, while one should certainly keep track of what facebook does - one should never not do something/change their behavior simply because of facebook
The fact that foursquare was beating Gowalla 100:1 is proof that you don't have to have a better, more fun-to-use, better designed product in order to win in the market.
My love affair with Gowalla was prematurely extinguished when they pivoted to local guides, but I hope that this acquisition means that they'll bring some of their original magic to Facebook.
my reaction was the exact opposite. I hate being with friends constantly checking in everywhere on their phones when I want to hang out with them, but still like writing reviews & helping others find good places to go. The gowalla pivot seemed to work towards that.
Foursquare always had a better design. Hear me out:
Design is about 2 things: how it looks and how it works. Gowalla always had a prettier coat of paint, pretty interactions. But what mattered more was the design of the game - becoming mayor on Foursquare was easier to grasp and get addicted to than dropping the original Gowalla teddy bears.
Foursquare also beat feet to win the hearts and minds of small business owners - I've lost count of the number of bar and restaurant owners excitedly telling us about how the Foursquare rep came in to talk to them, pointing out the sign on the wall where the "Mayor goes," arguing with regulars over who's the Mayor this week, who cheated to become the Mayor last week, and so on.
We've travelled a lot, and this happens coast to coast in big cities and small.
I've always really dug Gowalla (when I check in, typically only around an event like SXSW, it's what I've used), but when real people are talking about you in real life (an initially slow, but snowballing and very effective advertising model), all over the country--you end up winning.
More than that you get free stuff if you checkin. I think this is the draw more than anything else. And this is the reason why foursquare solves a business need.
I'm not here to convince anyone of anything. You asked a question, and I answered. Just trying to be helpful.
To answer your question about who our competitor is, it's the same as it's always been (and always will be): the back button. Our job, as pg says, is to build something people want. We started by building checkins and attracted millions of users doing that, now we're moving on to building the best social city guide we possibly can as well as starting to explore interesting new ways for local merchants to communicate with their customers.
It's not about beating someone else. It's about building something useful enough that people will pay attention at all. That's what startups are really about.
foursquare's competitor is other mobile 'time wasters'. I mean that in a good way, not bad way. so facebook, twitter, instagram, etc are all competitors.
if you want to talk about check-ins.. check-ins are commodity, i'm sure foursquare knows this. noone says "hmm.. what app to check in??? hmm what competitors to try?" they go "hmm.. what's interesting and fun way to show off and impress others while i'm here in this restaurant? facebook? foursquare? foodspotting?"
Most people tend to agree that it is not good to have NO competitors.
I believe this is primarily when you're starting out. You're trying to decide if there's a market at all and having competitors lends some credence to that.
Once you already have the traffic that FourSquare does, I don't think it matters anymore. One case where it might be different is if there were some paradigm shift where there were a whole bunch of similar companies for a long time and all of them had dropped out of a dying game while a single company was holding on -- but that's not going on here.
