FourSquare: fun while it lasted.

Posted by on Mar 22, 2010 in Personal, Professional

Did I REALLY seriously check in almost a thousand times?

VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA, CANADA – March 22, 2010 – FourSquare, it’s been real.

I started using FourSquare right from its inception. It was fun: seeing where my friends were, letting them see my travels as well. It was tied into my first forays to my new job in Canada, and I realized “hey, I can create ’99 between Vancouver and White Rock’ as a location, and check in there! I can check in at (and become mayor of) the George Massey Tunnel! How goofy is that?” As I amassed mayorships and acquired badges, I found myself checking in everywhere.

But as time has gone on and I realize how exhausted I am from workload and weekly travel between Seattle and Vancouver, I had an epiphany today: I no longer care about FourSquare.

Don’t get me wrong: I think the geo-social Web is a thing of beauty and I have used Latitude to hook up with friends and BrightKite to post photos along my journeys. But today, as I wearily got in the elevator to walk home, and thought, “wow, I haven’t checked in today,” 978 checkins and at one point 35 mayorships later, I’ve realized that I no longer care.

I will likely pseudo-stalk my friends for a while longer until their interest wanes as well, but for now, I’m done with the checkins. And it’s probably timely, since the wide variety of absolute strangers sending friend requests from all over the US are probably spammers or bots. That’s when you know the party’s over—when the assholes arrive.

What about you? Are you locationed out yet?

UPDATE, DECEMBER 12, 2010 – So, perhaps three weeks after this post, I started getting requests from clients on geo-marketing, and questions about Foursquare. And sure enough, for a retailers’ campaign, clients were getting curious and enthusiastic about Foursquare offers. So I decided perhaps I was a bit premature in dumping the service.

Rather than using it primarily for checkins, I also started using Foursquare as a way to see where my coworkers and friends were hanging out. And sure enough, before I knew it…

I still don’t allow strangers to follow me on Foursquare – and so many of the daily friend requests I get on Foursquare are ignored.

  • http://oneorganizedbusiness.com/ Alaia Williams

    Once people who are in other states start friending me on Foursquare, it becomes a little less fun. I use it to know about the local places my friends go, and so that people can see what kind of places I check out. It becomes less relevant for me when someone in Kentucky is telling me about their local hangout. I’ve got Twitter for that…

  • http://oneorganizedbusiness.com/ Alaia Williams

    Once people who are in other states start friending me on Foursquare, it becomes a little less fun. I use it to know about the local places my friends go, and so that people can see what kind of places I check out. It becomes less relevant for me when someone in Kentucky is telling me about their local hangout. I've got Twitter for that…

  • Geoff Henshaw

    Foursquare may be dead but the thinking behind it will live on.

    Foursquare has yet to solidify a competitive advantage.

    Asides from a basic ‘friend’ system, Foursquare’s social features have always been pretty limited, to your point Eric, compared to a service like Brightkite.
    What did give Foursquare a brief competitive advantage was the points and merit badges for ‘checking in’ at a variety of locations. It’s here that the app shined: these rewards give users an incentive to check-in frequently. Now this could be seen as a necessity especially given the fact that the iPhone can’t automatically update your location as you travel. That said I found the wore off pretty quickly and it sounds like I’m not the only one. One might argue that the partnerships with the New York Times and Huffington post might give them an advantage but I’m not sure how sustainable those would be – I’m pretty sure if something better comes along Foursquare might not have a leg to stand on, speaking of which…

    Now it looks like Facebook could potentially eat Foursquare’s lunch with this month’s announcement of “Locations API” and “Deals”. And from my layman’s perspective isn’t it logical to just use one app to do three things versus two? I suspect that the folks at Foursquare are hoping for a call from Google right now…

    What I see for Foursquare.

    The principles that originally made Foursquare so appealing from a marketer’s perspective will of course live on. Mobile, location based apps are very, very attractive – especially from a retail perspective.

    What I’ve learned is that rather then fall in love with an application, understand the strategy behind it and align it with your own. This way if that application fails you can pick the next one that has the most potential to stick