I'm still astounded by this. They had a #&$%ing verb. That is the #&$%ing gold standard of presence. "I'm going to foursquare this." I actually heard real human beings say this.
If your app name has become a verb the last thing you ever want to do is refocus. If you want to go to a ratings app like they apparently did (because... uh... that's not a saturated space or anything?...) then you make another app and leave your wildly successful app alone.
1. You're left with an app that has stagnated in market share for a number of years (even dropped a bit)
2. Your brand has been marginalized by Facebook's vertical integration of your primary feature
3. You have some money left (investment, revenue, whatever - I don't know about Foursquares's finances, but they obviously have some money or they'd be gone)
Given the aforementioned, do you A) pretend like nothing happened and continue watching your brand fade into obscurity (e.g., MySpace), or B) try to reinvent (e.g., like MySpace did - their traffic topped 55M uniques/mo in 2014)?
Because of your #3, that means they had some time. Rather than torpedo something that was still a bit of a success, if no longer a moon shot, they could have innovated something new alongside the existing product. Either a compelling new feature or a separate product that was able to leverage their huge data set. Their users were delighted by the existing product, but they ignored their users in order to go with the torpedo route. Clearly they had never read anything by Paul Graham?
You have two options. One will leave you bankrupt within a year or two with probability 1.0 and one will leave you bankrupt within year or two with probability 0.8. Which would you chose?
Except if they had monetised in a way that isn't changing their entire app then they would have been more likely to stay successful.
This change was poorly thought out and probably wasn't going to be successful, same as if Twitter spun their micro-blogging to another app, it wouldn't end well.
What's your evidence for that? I could entirely believe they thought it through very carefully, knew that this was a likely outcome, and did it anyhow because it was the best chance they saw for success.
Remember, this is the third checkin app in this series. It started life as a student project. The first commercial version was Dodgeball [1], which was created, grown, and purchased by Google before the iPhone even existed. Google wasted the opportunity, so Crowley started Foursquare and did it again.
Personally, I suspect they discovered that the whole check-in dynamic was fading. E.g., it's something people did for a while out of novelty and they expected its true long-term audience to be small.
Once you take VC money, it's "go big or go home". A small, modestly profitable company is not something your investors are interested in; they would rather you gamble and lose. And Foursquare took $162 million [2] so they had to go very big indeed. The "success" period of the article's graph looks like VC-failure to me.
Winning back your penny at the penny slots isn't the result you're playing for, but it's a better result than losing the penny.
I don't know the details of the FourSquare pivot, and hindsight is 20/20, but if I had even a small chance at medium-to-long term profitability (good brand, loyal followers, but flat growth), and a minuscule chance at riches by burning down the building, I wouldn't light the match.
Which person are you projecting yourself onto here?
The CEO doesn't have that choice. He'll get replaced by the investors.
The VC investors don't have that choice. It's not their money they're working with. They've promised their investors, the limited partners, that they'll go after high risk, high reward scenarios. If they don't make those gambles, they won't get the capital needed to run.
The limited partners also don't generally have that choice with this money. They are people who manage large pools of cash, and part of what they need is long-term, high-reward investments, which are necessarily high risk. [1] They have other money in safe, low-return investments. This money is for go-big-or-go-home bets.
This is the devil's bargain people make when they take VC money. There are other ways to build businesses, but they aren't the kind that will let you spend $100m-2b before you get to break-even, which is apparently what it takes to build a social network.
IMHO - Dens is a romantic dude. He has just as many conceptual aspirations as he does commercial ones. Power users of 4sq. turn their worlds into farmville - mindlessly checking in everywhere they go (i.e. "home", "gym", "home" etc.). He wanted to disassociate the brand from that activity, and emphasize the utility of check ins (i.e. who else is here, how popular is that etc.).
Could he have done this in a more elegant way? Maybe. But either way, the data he has compiled to entice advertisers is already quite substantial. If he successfully rebrands 4sq. as a resource and swarm as a tool, he's done exactly what he wanted to do.. as opposed to something close/safer.
If you settle for barely breaking even, your investors will replace you with somebody who believes they can take your company and have a chance of making ridiculous money. They will do that even if it is a 20% of wild success and an 80% chance that you will drive away the millions of users.
Why? Because merely covering core operational costs doesn't do anything to pay back the investors who put in $160 million.
I'm having trouble understanding what you want to know here. Is this whole VC funding thing new to you?
Assuming so, the short answer is that the venture capital ecosystem is about investing in businesses before we know what kind of businesses they'll turn out to be. This was especially true for free-to-use social apps like Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare. Those only make sufficient money if their scale is very large. It's also hard to know what their true monetization opportunities are until they reach scale, which is why Twitter and Facebook didn't really bother with pursuing revenue until they were huge.
This worked out pretty well for the winners. But it has a known failure mode for the losers: things that might have been good small businesses end up getting totally destroyed in the rush for glory and riches.
mentions "stream[ing] hundreds of millions of daily application logs each day." These logs must be at least 0.5K w/ metadata (probably more), so we're talking about...what, 100GB/day of application logs? Alone?? You're not persisting those using cron + MySQL--they likely use Kafka/Kinesis, many threads/instances subscribing to topics, and a large, horizontally-scalable db or Redshift to manage them.
Note that I haven't even addressed querying those logs (I believe 4sq uses Hive, the case study mentions Tableau). That all costs money.
We also haven't mentioned reviews for their millions of locations, user auth, check-ins, app development (web/iOS/Android). Each of those is a problem for a company with a MM-level user base.
Do you have some kind of intimate knowledge of their monthly engineering costs?
EDIT: 4sq website says 2M legit businesses, 65M total places.
Ha. Hahaha. How many apps at that scale have you run? Foursquare is on AWS[0] and serves 40 million users. Their monthly spend there is probably at least in the 10-20k range. And this is before even considering that they had 135 employees at the time[1] and swank offices in a hip neighborhood in NY. Making all that back with "ads", especially when your platform is almost completely on mobile, is not a cakewalk.
they had 135 employees at the time[1] and swank offices in a hip neighborhood in NY. Making all that back with "ads", especially when your platform is almost completely on mobile, is not a cakewalk.
How about firing 120 employees and moving to a smaller office, just until you've figured out how to make money?
Or why the need to grow to 135 employees with a checkin app for two mobile platforms? What do they all do and how is that aligned with the product at hand?
When the parent comment is asking "how much does it REALLY cost to run the site", I don't see how them having to pay for swanky offices is much of a rebuttal.
Not really, because for a lot of NY tech companies the office is a significant selling point for potential employees, and they do community events there that raise the brand's clout. Nobody wants to go work in a basement in Harlem when they can do the same work for Facebook and have a skylight and yoga balls.
Given their location data and technology stack, I wouldn't be surprised if you've underestimated their spend by an order of magnitude (eg. $100-200k/month, ~$1.2-2.4M/year).
Yes, I think you're probably right. I noticed after the fact that they mentioned "hundreds of machines" and I was estimating more towards "dozens of machines".
More armchair quarterbacking. You don't just pick up and move to save a buck when you have a whole company running on AWS' specialized architecture. There's a lot of process and a lot of overhead that factor into that consideration. A lifelong Mac user, for example, couldn't seamlessly jump into Windows just because "it's cheaper".
Even if you ran on bare metal on colocation, I doubt you save more than 50%. That's time wasted that could be more fruitfully spent iterating on profitable ideas. Plus that's exactly why you took investment capital in the first place, so you didn't have to do all that fiddly stuff. It's always better to maximize revenue than to minimize costs. On that note, the cost of paying all those salaries is probably 10-50x the Amazon bill, but you can't really cheap out there either.
True, they should have made Swarm their new Yelp clone or whatever their curated travel guide strategy was, instead of gouging the flagship app that had popularized the check-in for 10s of millions of active users. It was such a departure and made no sense branding wise. I mean I guess they wanted to associate their company name with the money making version of their app (if this strategy worked out) but still... it was oddly done. A lot of bouncing back and forth between two apps (check in on swarm, look at tips on FS?!).
Right. They could have simply launched a new app that centralized the review data that they'd already gathered from 4sq and continued to populate this new app w/ the valuable data from 4sq, and then used the two apps to feed each other. That would have been cool and not irritated their most loyal users. Also, Brand extension almost never works: http://amzn.to/1D2J4c8
The leadership of Foursquare failed. They had a very popular product but couldn't make anything out of it; hence the pivot. They should have sold the company while the valuations were good. Now, the company is the Mayor of crushed expectations.
Is it really the leadership that failed? Their product was popular, but I can't see any way they could make money on it. I don't think that means the leadership was bad, I think it means the product was inherently un-monetizable.
That's a fair point, but I read the parent post as complaining that the leadership couldn't squeeze blood from a stone, not that they came up with a non-commercial product in the first place.
You could have monetised it the same way you monetise many other apps. With ads? I mean, Twitter's monetisation model isn't exactly genius either...
Why not give a coupon when checking into a place that is near others - making people stop by another place/shop to maybe purchase something? (lat/long based)
Lots of valuable data for mapping, local search, and the ad targeting that goes with it. Valuable to Google, Apple, Facebook and a few others. The failure was in growth, blame likely correctly laid on Facebook.
It's funny how everyone in this thread is saying they needed a monetisation strategy but no one has suggested one. Maybe there just isn't a business in check ins.
The app isn't the product. The points-of-interest database they built from their apps' users is the product. And that is what they're now selling to companies like Twitter.
Twitter's incorporation of the POI will give them much more "check-in" data than their own apps ever could.
Ah, yes, I've done broadcasting too. The app is not the product if it's free. But people mistake that: you still have to actually have an app people want, if you're going to make them the product.
The app doesn't matter anymore. Twitter is the app now (and whomever else they license their points-of-interest service to). Consumers of their service likely feed back check-in-equivalent data to foursquare, which allows them to do trending and bolsters their database further.
I lament the loss of the app too. Checking in and becoming the mayor was the fun of the old app, and Swarm just doesn't do it for me. At this point I use it mostly as a log of new places I've been to so I can visit them again in the future, particularly while traveling.
Pretty well. Actually very well. Meeting expenses with quite a bit of padding. That used to be the definition of success before the cult of "growth" took over everything.
That is not a graph of the Foursquare app's popularity. It's a graph of Google searches. It was in trouble before it split the apps.
Lots of searches are driven by news stories, including bad news stories. For example the marker D is a story about how Foursquare resorted to raising debt financing to avoid a down round. It's a mistake to label that "SUCCESS".
BTW, the first time I followed your link, Flickr redirected me to an ad for a Flickr app for an operating system I don’t use. You might want to find new hosting for your images.
> In attempt to placate frustrated users, Foursquare launched "Swarm," a separate check-in app with minimal features, removing most of what made the original Foursquare app great. "
This sentence is provably incorrect. FourSquare launched Swarm before their pivot, there were no 'frustrated users' at that time because their main app still did checkins. The article makes it sound like FourSquare were reacting to pissed of customers. They weren't - they foresee people who liked checkins and always accommodated them.
Not a frequent 4sq user but for me the app is more relevant now - it pops up useful nearby stuff that I might like as I wander around London, so far its suggestions are pretty good.
I find that distinction somewhat trivial, I would wager most users shared in my experience, and that was one day Foursquare just stopped doing what they wanted it to do. Regardless of whatever timeline Foursquare followed, there was still one day when it just stopped being what it had been up to that point.
I was about to come say this. That sentence is provably false - Foursquare took great pains to launch Swarm first and launched the other app months later. They also did extensive communication at each step of the way.
The article talks about 2 then 1, implying incorrectly that new 4sq was released, people got pissed off, then swarm was released.
I don't think anybody is arguing that it wasn't part of the pivot. I specifically am calling them out for implying 4sq was reacting to users who were pissed off with their new app, when their new app wasn't yet released.
I think you are confusing the initial statement. Foursquare perceived users as "frustrated" before Swarm because of the conflation of reviews and check-ins with in a single app. The pivot was to create a new app and separate the concerns.
I have not seen a single comment regarding, what I think is the true/inherent value of Foursquare. Everyone is pointing out that they failed to monetize...but, just look at all the other billion dollar acquisitions on start-ups/companies that have not monetized.
Anyhow...If I were to relate Foursquare and its value to any recent acquisition it would be to Waze. Waze does have some degree of ads, but going out on a limb, I would venture to guess they are pretty negligible. Others may argue that Waze has all this valuable crowd sourced traffic data, well I don't think that data has been or will be monetized either. So what is the value of Waze that justifies a >$1B acquisition? In my estimation, it is the same thing as Foursquare (if not now, at one point should have had), due to their user base and the nature of the app, by default both Waze and Foursquare are cartographers and there is real money/value in that, and I am surprised of >100 comments I didn't see one mentioning that.
Because of the cost involved, there are only a handful of true map makers in the World, and from what I can tell they are all Billion dollar + companies. Waze (and Foursquare) both found novel ways to propel themselves into the space...and on the backs of their users, not with the traditional investment of satellites/GPS technology. If anyone anywhere creates an App that has millions of users who are updating geocentric data in real time from their own users and not paying for this data...I wouldn't be to concerned with ads for its own sake, just losing my user base.
The funny thing is, I bet a graph of their profits would be totally different.
Companies like Yelp and Foursquare are actually in the blackmail business. They needed the users to achieve a massive amount of reviews. Now they just collect "protection money" from business to remove / prevent bad reviews and laugh all the way to the bank.
At least, that is the only way I can see their move making any kind of sense.
You need to talk to small business owners in any service industry that isn't restauranting. Those owners would consider the business practices of Yelp and (I guess) Foursquare thuggish.
Two years ago I sat in on a call with a Yelp rep with a former employer of mine (small business connected to the real estate industry). The Yelp rep said "Advertising through Yelp will almost instantly increase you rating." My employer asked "Does that mean you'll manually fix my score?" To which the rep responded, "Your rating will get better if you advertise with us."
That was 2 years ago. I know Yelp has gotten flack since then, and maybe they cleaned up. But that stink of being a thug doesn't wash off quickly, especially in the small business community.
See, this illustrates the fallacy of the "yelp extortion" argument: what the rep said was totally clear -- when you advertise, your rating gets better. It did not imply that your rating gets better because they'll change it. That was your leap to an unsupported conclusion.
Moreover, assuming that s/he did say what you're quoting, you have to put it in context: Yelp employs hundreds (if not thousands now) of telephone sales reps. They get paid crap, work in a call center, and have zero ability to influence anyone, anywhere. Sales people, when incentivized to say things for money, tend to walk as close to the ethical line as they can without going over. I haven't looked, but there probably is data showing that advertising increases your rating. It wouldn't surprise me.
Every time I've bothered to dig into these claims, it's a story like yours, where a business leapt to a conclusion because they thought they heard something that validated a rumor they read on the interwebz.
It's more like a school that sells school pride t-shirts saying, "children who purchase our t-shirts and wear them to school end up with better grades."
"What? No, not because the teachers favor them and inflate their grades, but because they end up with more school pride and do better in class!" Wink wink, nudge nudge.
What the Yelp rep said was not clear. The Yelp rep didn't answer the question my former employer had. She avoided it. Does that mean Yelp was/is up to something nefarious? No. But it has that appearance.
And that's the point. Yelp can, in fact, be doing absolutely nothing wrong as far as their data is concerned. But small business owners don't see that. All they see is aggressive Yelp sales agents, and a better rating if they advertise through Yelp.
It has 33 5-star reviews that are "unapproved", and eight 1-star promoted reviews that amount to a 2 star overall rating. I'd say that's an undeserved bad reputation. And no matter how many good reviews there are, the 1-star ratings are still the only ones weighing in.
The real kicker here is that to get to these 5 star Yelp reviews, you have to navigate a barely legible grey link at the bottom of the page. Purposefully hiding good reviews until the business pays for membership borders extortion to me.
Well, if you have few reviews the average is going to be skewed.
Now, Yelp is a marketing tool, it brings people in, if there's already an established customer base, it's irrelevant, same thing if it's a "Maltese Falcon specialist", the market between specialists and service buyers is so small that people don't even bother with a review.
And even that is skewed by the ones that reject everything, and the fake positive reviews (and people with no idea on what they're reviewing)
The average won't necessarily be systematically skewed but a couple of random (or not so random) reviews of a restaurant or a service means they're not worth much. (Obviously it's somewhat different when the reviewer is an "expert" critic but even then they're outliers.) Out where I live the restaurants, such as they are, don't get a lot of reviews on Yelp so the results don't mean a lot.
> not familiar with the platform...
> I've never seen a place with an undeserved good/bad reputation.
I'm glad that Yelp reviewers biases coincide with somebodies, but they don't coincide with mine. I basically ignore the star rating at this point.
Why? Customer service. Some restaurants have absolutely delicious food yet take pride in having poor poor customer service, and frequently lose points for that.
Guess what, Yelp?
I don't care about poor customer service. I have two questions about a restaurant: how good is the food, and how much does it cost?
For the 5-star rating system to be useful, I should be able to compare two restaurants and simply pick the one with the higher rating. Sadly that often leads to worse food.
So if I'm trying to use Yelp as anything more advanced than a restaurant directory, I end up reading each review, and then the reviewer's reviews of other places to get to know each reviewer's rating system, how they feel about restaurants I already know, and this inevitably takes far more time and effort than I care to.
"The number of complaints might not come as a surprise to those who have followed the numerous lawsuits and allegations of extorting money from businesses to remove negative reviews."
"For years, businesses have claimed that negative reviews pop-up on their Yelp pages after they’ve declined to purchase advertising with the company."
I heard a business owner complained that yelp was showing mostly bad reviews after he refused to pay. So that's only anecdotal evidence but there seems to be more of it out there.
It is also a very common accusation. It's almost a monthly recurring story that some business decline an ad sales person from yelp only to see their review plummeting.
This matches my real life observations. I personally stopped using both Foursquare and Swarm and I know a lot of people who did.
However, this graph does not mention the popularity of Swarm. It's likely that some Foursquare users switched to Swarm and uninstalled Foursquare entirely.
Exactly. Me and my friends also stopped using the app just after they remove all the gamifications and mayorship thing. It was super cool amongst friend to be a mayor of some place.
Same for me... I tried swarm just a few times but then I threw it away also, didn't like it the same way I liked foursquare. Nowadays I only checkin somewhere rarely using Facebook.
Why on earth did they think this was a good idea? Checkins were the point of foursquare. Mildly annoying to other people on your social media, but that also informed them of its existence.
They built something that, while wildly popular for a while, was impossible to monetize successfully. Checkins just don't represent any value to anyone (at least, not that Foursquare could get anyone to pay for).
The lesson here is that you can build something amazing and still fail if you can't turn it in to a business.
No excuse. If you have a timestamped record of people's interactions with physical businesses and can't find a way to monetize that, sell to one of the thousands of people who can connect those dots pretty easily. And how do you possibly convince yourself that moving into an already-saturated market like ratings is going to help?
If you have a timestamped record of people's interactions with physical businesses and can't find a way to monetize that, sell to one of the thousands of people who can connect those dots pretty easily.
If it's as easy as you believe they wouldn't have pivoted. Perhaps they know something you don't. Or perhaps there's still a massive opportunity there. I don't know.
And how do you possibly convince yourself that moving into an already-saturated market like ratings is going to help?
I suspect it's by being wildly successful for a while and believing that you can translate that success in to a market that you can monetize. Plenty of companies make the mistake of thinking success follows you around rather than a pivot being a step backwards as far as your brand goes. Foursquare mistakenly thought that people were fans of Foursquare the brand rather than being fans of the value that Foursquare gave them (eg social validation from having the most checkins). They thought they were a brand like Nike that people do follow from one product to another. They were wrong.
This kind of major decision would have been made with the full agreement of the board. They have some very impressive investors, including DFJ, Union Square, and A16Z. The theory that all of these people, people who collectively happened to have $160m on the line, just happened to miss easy monetization opportunities is implausible.
> I suspect it's by being wildly successful for a while and believing that you can translate that success in to a market that you can monetize
Not only that but in Foursquare leadership's case it was a matter of being wildly successful two times. Dennis had already sold the first version of Foursquare to Google.
Has anyone been able to successfully monetize check-ins? It seems that if it were that straight forward to monetize as you suggest, someone would have done this by now. Even Facebook's check-in system seems to have faded in popularity as far as I can tell.
Facebook checkins that I see on my wall are usually limited to "I want to brag about the good food I'm eating without Instagramming a picture of it, so I'll just check in at the restaurant". I don't think people trust Facebook enough to overtly give it access to more important location data, or I could just have too much faith in the average FB user.
Your friends don't really sound like a representative sample. Most people complain about Facebook on privacy but don't modify their behavior in any way.
There's a difference between modifying their current behavior and going out of their way to give FB more data without any real benefit. I don't think FB checkins have been super successful, have they?
I see plenty of them on my feed. I'm not sure that "success" has to be measured the same way in Facebook's case since they offer quite a few different things to do, and not just checkins.
How much was it because they removed the core usage (even a not money making one) ? Maybe a more gradual change, by adding new ideas without killing the legacy ? It's impressive how your business can go south that fast though.
Using Google Trends as an indicator of success or failure is pointless. Companies morph, they disrupt themselves and change their core business occasionally.
Your last bullet point is really the only one that matters.
I know my comments are repeating themselves, but if your business plan does not includes actual transactions that generate actual revenue, then you are not a business, you are a gamble.
The days of "Get traffic and it will all work out in the end" are over. Way over.
How do you know what Foursquare's business plan was? Foursquare raised a Series D. They didn't go into that pitch telling VCs that they're just getting traffic and they'll worry about monetization later.
Struggling to build a sustainable business model is not the same thing as not having a business model. Again, it's difficult.
They pivoted to become the location data powering major mobile apps (ex. Twitter). Dealing with small business to monetize is hard. You can't charge the consumer because you need the checkin and to get enough of a sales team on the ground in the SMB market is astronomical. If you ask me if they should bring back checkin to core 4sq app, not sure if it's fully relevant anymore. Their new ad platform pretty much just monitors you as you walk. So geoloc ads. I like it, and if they get enough SMB advertisers they can be a good acquisition target.
Yes! I can't believe that nobody else has made this point.
I am as disappointed in the pivot of the app as everyone else, but it's hardly the sign of impending death the post (and many of these comments) make it out to be. 4sq built up an incredible points-of-interest database, and that is their real product.
By providing that POI data to other providers -- most notably Twitter -- they get much of the same data that checkins in their own app gave them. And Twitter is massively more popular than the Foursquare/Swarm apps ever was or ever will be.
One of the biggest things people seem to miss is the discounts offered by business through Foursqaure if you checked in at the right time or X amount of times. How FSq didn't exploit that or at least leverage that successfully is beyond me. To me, that was one of the coolest features at the time. Check in at so-and-so restaurant, get a free this or that or $2 off. In addition, it made an easy way to see where other people were at downtown at the bars in college.
Removing check-ins was a strange move, given that it was what made Foursquare Foursquare. Personally, I didn't want to install Swarm in the same way that I didn't want to install Facebook Messenger. I had the same feeling of not trusting the reasoning behind splitting the functionality into two apps, and in Foursquare's case - Foursquare no longer did what I had bought into, and I was already in the habit of using Yelp for looking up reviews, so I stopped using it.
They took over $162 million in funding, and I'd bet that a lot of people had a lot of ideas on how to turn things around monetization-wise. They had to try something, but this pivot seemed pretty detached from understanding their users.
If Yahoo plays their cards right, they could become a hodgepodge of various features that other competing platforms -notably facebook- do much better and in a more integrated fashion.
Maybe they could also make a play in the Meerkat/Periscope space while they're at it.
I am one of the users who stopped using Foursquare when the new version was released but for different reason.
When I was about to check in on my visit to a nearby mall, it said in my feed,my friend was there too. I texted him if he wanted to catch up for a beer after shopping. When we met up and ended up realizing that he never checked in but still showed up on my list, I decided to stop using Foursquare atm. I never knew if it was a bug or intended feature.
Check-ins didn't bring any new customers into a business, so foursquare couldn't make any money on that feature.
I personally loved the check-in feature. With hundreds of millions in VC $, foursquare had to find another way to make money. They're on the way to building a really nice business with their reviews and ad-tech business.
I hope they didn't raise too much money before figuring it out.
Another non-scientific anecdote here. I attended a talk with maybe 150 attendees recently and the VC asked the audience who had ever used Foursquare. Then he asked who had used it in the past month.
Almost everyone had tried the product at some point, but very few were still actively using the product.
I am so happy about this, I've been waiting for some news on the subject for a while. I LOVED checking in to foursquare, the main reason was so I could, one day, use their API to visualise where I'd been the most/what time etc. I was GUTTED when they removed check-ins.
They didn't really remove checkins, they just moved them into a new app (Swarm).
There's still a checkin button in Foursquare that launches Swarm. Saying Foursquare got rid of checkins is like saying Facebook got rid of Messenger. They didn't, they just moved it to a new app.
It's true, they did (mostly) remove the gamification aspect of checkins. It was fun competing with my friends for getting the most points. Now, you just can compete for stuff like most restaurants, most night life spots, etc.
I would unfollow people on Twitter who constantly posted Foursquare checkins. Not because I wasn't interested in their whereabouts, but because clicking resulted in a boring, useless page.
Suppose wycats checks in at some interesting-sounding dive bar in the Mission. I want to click and see pics of the place and the menu and a map showing what's nearby.
(not implying wycats was a foursquare user just that he's a celebrity developer / trendsetter...)
What many are missing is that they transitioned from a consumer company to an infrastructure company. Their location database (and API) was just announced by Twitter as the backing for all location handling in tweets. That's a big freaking deal, especially given they already do that for Facebook.
If you read the FS CEO's comments about the Twitter thing, you'll notice he mentions they have basically focused on what their main value prop is: solving the difficult problem of accurate and quality locations.
The consumer apps are just something they "still do" but I certainly don't think they consider it their primary business model anymore.
> Foursquare's users felt betrayed that their reviews were
> used but what they once loved about the app was removed.
Well that's just a silly point of view. If you post something to a commercial entity, in general that thing is no longer yours. You gave it to them. No backsies.
Seriously, this is how it has worked for years. Don't feel "betrayed". You chose to use their service, and post reviews on it. On the web, if you don't pay for the hosting, it ain't yours.
That may be the logical point of view, but it's difficult to get that across to millions of people. Regardless of whether it is a justified feeling, some users felt betrayed, and their reaction was to stop using the app.
If you downgrade to 7.0.8 or beyond on iOS (guide here: http://www.cnet.com/uk/news/how-to-downgrade-iphone-apps/), you can still use the old combined app to check in AND explore local places. But since the split most of my friends have stopped using it anyway...
This is pretty much what I have observed in my social circle, and my own personal usage too.
Once they removed checkins and moved it to another app, most of the people were outraged and decided they didn't want another app. The few who did give the other app eventually stopped using it because none of their friends were using it any more.
It is like Google deciding they to discontinue search and concentrate on ads.
It's a "relative" scale. It's the difference between the highest point and the lowest point. The highest point being when Obama checked in on Foursquare. The lowest being ,well, when Foursquare started.
Certainly one of the dumbest moves I've seen by an app in a long time. I was a loyal checker-inner, though, and still use Swarm, although other people keep asking me "people still use Foursquare?"
I like the recommendations it can give me once I tell it what I like, also its "places I want to go to" type lists.
I'm surprised foursquare didn't go into payments, they have the venue data, merchant relationships, they could do what Reserve (from expa) is doing and radically improve the experience of dealing with any local business.
Booking a haircut, paying for your meal all taken care of by foursquare.
My wife and I too.. We had a record of our of travels from about 2010 until Swarm happened. All over the word, even desert outposts in Mongolia. We loved it. I used to use it to find places in off the beaten path towns. It was fun being the mayor of a little tea house in the middle of nowhere and it was fun stealing NYC mayoralships when much of the hipsters headed to South-by. Now, I just use Tripadvisor which isn't as fun. I'll still see faded Foursquare stickers on businesses (next to their LevelUp stickers..) Maybe if 4sq hadn't spent huge amounts of money on prime Soho office space and instead opened regional sales offices to get small businesses to do self-serve ads and promos, the perhaps that company would have had a chance.
Some feature ideas they should have tried: real time locations of friends/family (ala Google Latitude), integration with something like Angie's list, integration with something like gasbuddy.com, pull in data from Google Now (be like Google Now but I see it on a map).
I never understood how they could not make money. You have built a platform where people notify you exactly when and where they are about to spend money.
Loyalty program? Upselling? Competitor advertising or intelligence?
Since the iPhone introduced widgets, I've found it a lot easier to check-in using Swarm. I swipe down and click check-in. It already knows where I am. Before this, I rarely used Swarm.
Personally I use Foursquare most when I'm travelling or in new places. I complement it with TripAdvisor. Foursquare could do what TripAdvisor does better.
"Numbers represent search interest relative to the highest point on the chart. If at most 10% of searches for the given region and time frame were for "pizza," we'd consider this 100. This doesn't convey absolute search volume."
I feel foursquares removal of checkings was the same as facebooks removal of chat from the main Facebook mobile app. Now it's fragmented you need to use two tools from what previously required one tool.
If your app name has become a verb the last thing you ever want to do is refocus. If you want to go to a ratings app like they apparently did (because... uh... that's not a saturated space or anything?...) then you make another app and leave your wildly successful app alone.