Tag Archives: Foursquare

Foursquare: We don’t need no stinking badges!

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No doubt I am swatting a hornet’s nest with this post as many of my digerati friends sing hymns to Foursquare. But a little heresy is good for friendships so…

Foursquare is the shiny object of summer 2010 (Twitter, 2009′s hype queen, has aged out of contention). The hype cycle of Foursquare (and Twitter before it) is reminding me of SecondLife. Remember SecondLife? Among geeks it was the future. Among brands it was going to be a great new advertising frontier.

Among most of the population it was more effort than it was worth.

The buzz died down, a small groups of loyalists kept banking Linden dollars while the social media mouthpieces followed the hype machine to the next shiny object. Of course, they carried their prophecies with them to plug and play in the next Great Leap Forward.

Today Foursquare is enjoying that same level of guru evangelism. Advertisers are again talking about how its evolving to become a great marketing tool. Bloggers await the day Foursquare logs 1MM check-ins in 24 hours. Social media marketing consultants are barely capable of keeping the drool at bay as they discuss GPS-aware coupons and throwing out swag at branded flashmobs.

Don’t believe the hype.
Meanwhile there was a high pitch frequency above the din of Foursquare worship. This post about Foursquare struck me as interesting. It seems that Foursquare, like the iPad, isn’t a clear hit among geeks – traditionally the earliest adopters of all things digital. In an early Mashable poll – which is by its nature going to be social media geek-heavy in composition – Foursquare still splits about 50-50 pro-con among respondents.

Poll on 5/22 - an even split

Poll as of 6/3 - Still an even split.

I’ve been tinkering with Foursquare for about six months now. I am admittedly a casual user and have no ambitions other than to experiment with it a little. On the one hand there’s a small rush at being the Mayor of a location. There’s also some simple, competitive fun in ousting a mayor to become one. There’s even some curiosity when one spars back and forth with a stranger for mayoral status. I can imagine it would provide some sporting fun too to joust with co-workers over mayoral status for a floor, office, department, etc. So yes, there is some novelty with Foursquare which will probably continue to push new signups in the near term.

There are also the badges which I suppose could give a rise to some people. My guess is though that the people who use Foursquare badges as bragging rights fit into one of a select few categories.

  1. Media people trying to be bleeding edge
  2. Internet geeks transacting in their subculture’s inherently unsocial social structures
  3. College kids with Beer Pong Champion ambitions
  4. Bargain hunters trying to win a free ice cream cone at a local creamery

Mind you, these are all communities and they are all marketing targets, but they do not represent the great masses and marketers would be wise to note this.

Atlas shrugged (after tweeting, updating status and checking in)
Let’s now approach the issue of social media burden. While a foreign concept to geekerati, people with lives outside technology and media do find keeping up with this stuff a little bit of a nuisance. Witness the often-discussed disparity between the number of Twitter accounts and the number of active Twitter accounts. There’s a sense of obligation to keep up with social media. First it was Facebook. Then I had to add Twitter responsibilities. Now I need to keep up with Foursquare too? Really? At some point, there is burn out on all this stuff.

Worse, with Foursquare every quick stop or leisurely hang-out becomes encumbered with a responsibility to check in. Instead of just getting an iced coffee, I am obligated to ‘check in’ at Starbucks too. Out to dinner with a friend? You might be that person who, with a living human across the table from you, is staring down at a little screen broadcasting your location into the ether. That’s not ‘social’ by any definition.

This isn’t to say Foursquare won’t be a successful business (apparently Yahoo! trying to land its for $125MM). Second Life is frankly successful despite falling way short of its hype. Twitter too is successful, though I would offer its value is drawn from its impact on news media more so than its role as a powerful media property from an advertiser’s or programmer’s perspective. However any valuation applied to Foursquare should not be mistaken as a validation that it is in some way a paradigm-shifting mass movement. A lot of money could be pumped into Foursquare marketing programs that will miss the mark because executives don’t realize Foursquare is a niche play for a very specific type of person.

As the novelty of checking in or being a mayor wears off for many people (there isn’t much of a benefit beyond a short-lived ego stroke), so too will the desire to login in the first place. And if you don’t live in a dense urban area, there’s even less reason to bother sticking with it. Like all those immobile avatars in SecondLife and dormant accounts on Twitter, my sense is FourSquare will enjoy a rush of curious first timers and then settle down to become yet another enclave of geeks and media people.

Twitter Purge and Foursquare Surge

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Even as my friends were adding followers left and right, I never did the auto-follow thing or go follower fishing. Some of my friends wound up with thousands of followers. I’ve held steady at about 130 (coincidentally the average number of friends people have on Facebook). I did, however, uploaded my address book to see who I knew was on Twitter. While my profession skews my contacts toward the media, technology and internet industries I like most people have a diverse base of friends and acquaintances from all walks of life. Whereas I knew all these folks, I figured I would follow most of them just to feel out the Twitter experience and see how people I knew used it. Call it an involuntary focus group.

Well today I went through the list of people I follow (mind you, it is a modest list by most measures) and decided to do some house cleaning. It’s a personality flaw of mine. I keep my desk really neat and organized too and kept my CDs in alphabetical order back when I listened to CDs. So I went through my Twitter followers list and began purging names. I chose to unfollow people who didn’t Tweet or whose accounts had been dormant for months (plus some celebrities and publications that weren’t interesting me any more). It was an insightful exercise I might recommend to people now and then. Here’s what I discovered:

+/-25% of the folks I followed weren’t Tweeting at all.

Another 20-25% had Tweeted at some point, but that was a year or at least 6+ months ago.

Most of those actively using their Twitter accounts (weekly at least) were either celebrities/brands or people in the internet/tech/media/marketing space.

The few people outside the internet/tech/media/marketing space who were tweeting regularly weren’t really ‘using’ the technology for much more than the banal type of comments popular in Facebook status windows. You know, the kinds of tweets Twitter is mocked for -”Have a gr8 mocha @starbucks. Need caffeine now.”

[Question: Why are these types of comments mocked if Tweeted but if you run it through Foursquare, suddenly that Starbucks coffee update makes you cool?]

All this got me thinking about ‘following’ and the utility of it (for regular people, not marketing/media types).

‘Following’ doesn’t guarantee following along. Do you follow me?
The curious thing about digital platforms is that they can easily gather ballast. It costs someone nothing to accept a friend/follow someone/become a fan. Over time you can have an account full. If it gets big enough, it becomes a hassle to administrate and so people just let it go, and grow. At some point having all those ‘friends’ or  ’followers’ becomes almost meaningless given the realities of how much information any of use can focus on.

[Question: Why do we not hold social media and our friends and followers to the same rules of attention we apply to brand messages? If there's too much clutter out there to notice advertising why do we assume we can focus on and recall the dispatches of 500 Facebook friends?]

Of course a Twitterer’s intent may not be to focus on what’s being communicated to his by the people he follows but rather to build a network of followers broadcast out to (as most internet/tech/media/marketing people seem to). In that case, why does no one seem to acknowledge that if they’re following 500 people but not really noticing much of what any of them say (save a select few ‘real friends’) it probably goes without saying that having 500 people following you means most of those people aren’t really noticing much either (unless you’re a ‘real friend’ to them).

As I was doing my clean-up, I was thinking back to this passed summer when the Twitter hype machine was in full swing. The name and blue bird showed up everywhere. Everyone yammered about the inevitable seismic paradigm shift Twitter was ushering in. Such is the hysteria we go through cyclically with these new technologies.

Now, months later, it all seems to have settled down – in the media, in my Twitter account and even in conversations among media people. I’ve noticed far fewer people tweet about Twitter these days (thankfully). The utility of Twitter seems to be selecting for certain groups of people and certain uses. It’s not the broadly relevant social media phenomenon everyone was talking about last summer. Is this surprising? For the last 30 years media has tended to fragment us, not create mass audience. Even Facebook is more a large collection of small fragmented groups than a 400MM-strong mass audience. Just as Second Life has its set of core users, so now does Twitter. For that group it may be a paradigm shift, but  for most people, no. (In which case, is it really by definition a ‘paradigm shift‘?)

As I type, Foursquare is now beginning its ascent up the hype machine. It’s hip, cool, all my early adopter friends are become the mayor of their local laundromat. Brands are hot on the heels trying to figure out GPS-enabled couponing and promotions. And inevitably people are talking about paradigm shifts again.

Soon though, Foursquare’s name will burn through its novelty value like Twitter and Second Life. It will move from headlines to bodycopy. It will become a part of our daily lives, with its hardcore users and a lot of account ballast inflating numbers and giving an artificial sense of ubiquity and broad utility. What will be trumpted as the next mass sensation will in fact be another fragmenting niche media play. So yes, Foursquare may well be the next Twitter.

At least with Foursquare though,  when I feel compelled to tell people I’m getting a latte I can hold my head up high instead of being picked on by Twitter users for wasting my precious 140 characters on the trivialities of my life.

My market-busting fBook Fantasy

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Having just put out a post on the cyclical nature of walled communities (see prior post), I was intrigued by another conversation from the Groundswell blog which introduces the concept of the ‘splinternet‘. (There is another more recent post here.) Check the comments on the splinternet postings, they’re as interesting as the article itself. Apparently, like the viability of the iPad, there’s a lot of conflicting opinions out there.

My take is that like watching the stock market daily or even weekly, watching the hype around Kindles and iPads can make it feel like everything is fragmenting and we’re all doomed to have to support a multitude of platforms, standards and devices. Wasn’t this supposed to be the age of ‘convergent media’?

Well, like stocks, there is short term volatility in the media environment too. But just as the market over time has made gains despite short-term volatility (especially if you didn’t freak out in 2008 and dump your holdings), so has the concept of open standards dominated the Internet. As if to underscore this, Google just announced its dropping support for IE6. Ask any developer and you’ll be told IE6 is a compliance nightmare. This is another block coming out of Microsoft’s crumbling garden wall. Over the years Internet Explorer has reluctantly been dragged like a stubborn child to accept the W3C compliance standards. The reason was simple, people started getting fed up with the IE experience and switched to Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Safari – all more broadly embracing of open standards.

Powered by the people.
Anyhow, all this talk of market dominance in music, books, TV, etc. got me thinking. The big reality is that businesses must necessarily follow the market. They tend to be slow to do so often waiting until many customers/viewers/people have fled. Today, the devices to play digital content (PCs, PDAs, smart phones and now, possibly, tablets) and to a lesser extent pipeline owners (ISPs and 3G networks) seem to be controlling the markets. Or are they?

The ability for a device or pipeline to define the dynamics of a business arrangement largely boils down to the size of the audience that device or pipeline delivers. Remember not too long ago when the iPhone first came out, its app store was full of gimmicks and half-baked cheapie apps. Only when enough people started using the iPhone (and enough buzz started flying around to make it safe to predict even more would soon buy one) did corporations begin hiring developers to build apps for it. It was the audience that grabbed the interest of the corporations and catapulted iPhone app development from a fringe hobby to a serious business.

Well, Apple says its iPhone/iPod touch market is 75MM people. Sizeable to be sure. In terms of delivering an audience, however, Facebook has 350MM users, or 450% of Apple’s. That’s massive. Suspend reality for a moment and imagine if Facebook built a hardware device. A tablet say (to capture the current hype, though personally I’d make it a bit smaller and more portable). I’ll call it the ‘fBook’.

Dream with me…
Certainly Facebook could afford to get into the hardware business with their current capital and resources. Certainly innovation is baked into their culture enough to do it well. If Facebook matched the basic lures driving Apple’s iPhone/iPod success – sexy touch screen navigation (in fact a parity technology), a robust community of developers (already existent), and a fast processor (also available on the market) they’d have a formidable device on just that.  Then, throw in a few bones for the people bitching about the iPad – like a camera and multitasking.

Now take this fBook device and give it a few killer features you can’t get through the other devices. Features that tie directly to the Facebook network and your Facebook friends. How about free video conferencing and calling to other FB members? And hell, why not strike up a deal and throw in Meetup and Foursquare-like functionality built in and integrated into Facebooks database of 350mm folks. Integrate Facebook Connect as well, of course.

Now, put a bow on it and offer the device at 20% less than Apple’s iPad to the first 100MM Facebook users who buy it. Then 15% off to the next 100MM. And 10% to everyone else on FB. Don’t just sell it online either. Rollout temporary ‘flash stores’ in big cities. Throw block parties, form lines, obstruct traffic – make it a media event centered around people coming together. You know, community and connectivity – core brand values of Facebook.

Oh, and one more thing, add a $19.99 data plan through a carrier (delivering 350MM new customers would probably get Sprint’s or Verizon’s attention). This would cover the data infrastructure but also allow Facebook (the basic Web browser version) to remain free. If bandwidth was an issue, create a $29.99 plan for people who want the video conferencing and higher throughput features. Even at a fraction of the 350MM users carriers could afford upgrade their networks (mmmmm, GGGGGG66666666).

That fBook could deliver four times Apple’s audience. Or, put another way, if just 1 in 4 Facebook users took to the device it would still be bigger than Apple. That’s exactly the carrot they’d dangle in front of publishers, movie studios, TV networks, and record labels. Then Facebook would drop the big bomb, ‘We don’t want exclusivity from you Mr. Publisher. And we won’t offer it to you either.’ My Facebook would be all about open standards. The fBook would accept all formats and let the users decide where they buy their books and movies and music from. It would be left to the publishers to set the prices as long as Facebook gets $x.xx on each sale. And of course Facebook would offer its publisher-partners easy, ready access to the fStore.

For publishers not locked exclusively into iTunes of Kindle, this is access to millions of new users and the freedom to set their own pricing models to compete with each other. To those who are locked in, it’s reason to start complaining about those contracts. Who wants to turn down access to potentially 350MM people?

Okay, when I say wake up, you’ll return to February, 2010.

Wake up.

Admittedly the above was a dream. But there are three points I am trying to make:

1. Bring an audience and you bring a chance to define the terms – regardless of the heritage of your business sector. If you’re Twitter or Facebook and you’ve been focused on building a user base instead of sweating revenue, this suddenly begins to open some interesting doors. (You  should also at this time thank your investors for taking that not insignificant risk.)

2. All walled gardens can be toppled. Device development might be divergent (we all carry more hardware now than ten years ago) and pipelines may be parity but all content is converging into basic bits and bytes. Technologically speaking there’s no reason a device can’t play it all. Corporate wall-building is the only barrier.

3. Open is a very powerful market tool. Open is disruptive. Open is desireable. Delivering an open alternative to walled gardens puts immense pressure on those gardens. It also makes them look monopolistic, greedy and inflexible. Oh, and it gives the consumer a really great, useful, product with some shelf life.

Those are strong competitive wedges and reasons why I think the Splinternet is temporary and that Open will continue to be the driving factor that forces innovation, prevents lasting monopolies and generally results in a better marketplace for all.