Don't Believe the Foursquare Hype

For those who know me, I spend a lot of my time keeping up with online trends.  With so many new sites sprouting up seemingly overnight it’s not easy keeping up, that’s for sure.  The internet is littered with sites that have started with the hopes and dreams of budding web-preneurs looking to strike it rich, or become the next Facebook, Twitter, or Myspace.  Yet, the percentage of ideas that make it big are simply a fraction of all new startups; it requires a really catchy concept to grab the attention of users, and there needs to be a reason to keep the masses coming back.

One site that has recently garnered a lot of attention is Foursquare.  In short, it’s a social networking site that focuses not on status posts like Facebook and Twitter, but by telling Foursquare friends where you are.  Foursquare calls this a check-in and the aim of the website is to create a fun and interactive way to explore your city (or cities you visit).  To make it interesting, Foursquare rewards users with points, awards and badges for checking in at new places, and overall activity on the site.

While it’s still in its infancy, with membership estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands, Foursquare has caught the attention of a number of social media experts claiming it to be the next big thing.  Marketers are also watching the location-based social networking phenomenon closely, as the marketing possibilities are enormous, as described in this Forbes article. The possibility of presenting specific promotions for say, a steak sub combo, anytime you check-in at a subway location, or say, offering special loyalty offers to those that check-in more than three times at specific business, are very appealing.

For all of the marketing potential for businesses, the appeal for users isn’t nearly the same.  Having been on Foursquare since the first day it launched to the Vancouver market (it’s now available worldwide), @CDot and I quickly came to the conclusion that the site will have to do more to keep regular users interested in coming back and announcing where they go.  I’m sure this is why Foursquare tries hard to make itself like a game, with its rewards and the competitive nature behind being crowned (and dethroned) as mayor all designed to touch on basic human psychology.

Yet despite having a few nifty features, it still isn’t enough.  For all of the points one earns by checking in, they have little value as they don’t earn you anything except bragging rights.  Simply winning badges and occasionally being named the mayor of a certain establishment can all lose its appeal very quickly.  I already use Twitter quite extensively to share pictures and a few words about where I am and what I’m doing, and find the instant responses to my posts and pictures much more gratifying.  Most of the people I know on Foursquare are already connected to me through Twitter and Facebook.  Certainly it wouldn’t take much for Twitter and Facebook to enable a much more powerful location-specific function that would allow us to keep our accounts to a minimum, sharing with the people we already are connected to.

The fact that this new social networking category further pushes the envelope on personal privacy; in order to be successful at the Foursquare game, you have to be more open with your whereabouts, something that doesn’t always make sense (eg. Mark R. checked in at The Proctologist), or isn’t all that desirable.  Even scarier is the notion that someday marketers will be bombarding us with location-specific ads everywhere we check in, as if we’re not already inundated with ads everywhere we are in our everyday lives.

Whatever the case, it’s clear to me that Foursquare has a lot of maturing to do before it’s considered a top contender in the social networking arena.  They have to work with the early adopters; much like Twitter did, to establish the right features that will keep people coming back, while maintaining the right balance with future marketers to avoid alienating users.  The privacy issue seems to be the toughest hurdle in their battle to the top; finding the right mix of privacy settings while not losing the main functionality/benefits of the site.  With society growing more open with every new service launched, it’s not inconceivable that the location-based social networking won’t take off.  With what Foursquare offers right now though, I just don’t see it happening anytime soon.