Like Facebook and Twitter before it, location-based service Foursquare looks to have broken through the backlash phase — “What the heck is this thing?” — to be poised both for significant growth and to introduce new concepts the telecom industry would do well to understand — and fast. What turned into important communications innovations from both Twitter (basically SMS broadcasts) and Facebook (personal news streams, friend aggregation, etc.) faced massive telecom industry skepticism in their early days. Today, however, both services have dramatically changed how people communicate, not to mention how they use both wireline and mobile networks.
Foursquare’s main innovation — the location check-in — seems rudimentary compared to tracking a user’s location via GPS, Wi-Fi triangulation or other more technical means. But early users — and increasingly mainstream users — seem to like the idea of manually broadcasting their location to their friends and the world, not to mention winning badges and being named “mayor” for showing up.
This week saw a range of developments demonstrating why the telecom industry — in particular those interested in mobile communications — must pay attention to Foursquare (and its brethren):
- The venture capital firm led by Web pioneer Marc Andreessen is reportedly leading a large new round of funding for the company.
- Twitter launched its geolocation offering, dubbed Twitter Places, including integration with Foursquare. Both the new service and the integration will mean that “tweets” will increasingly have a location attached to them, often delivered via a service like Foursquare.
- “Add to Foursquare” buttons are starting to show up on sites like The Wall Street Journal, which should only further drive its popularity.
- More and more, retail brands — like Starbucks — are cutting deals with Foursquare to incent users to check in from their business locations. More examples: Dominos is offering free pizzas, Six Flags amusement park line cut-ins, and TV channels such as CNN, Bravo, MTV and VH1 are trying to turn their shows into virtual places, all via integration with Foursquare.
- Finally, in one of the more interesting takes on Foursquare we’ve read recently, Phil Wolff at Skype Journal envisioned a business Foursquare:
I can’t wait for an enterprise version, the better to check in with colleagues, clients, suppliers and partners. The location-based workplace is here, waiting to be updated, searchable, social and easy to navigate. LBS check-ins should do wonders for triggering face-to-face work conversations, adding people virtually to f2f conversations and plain, old space-shifting virtual conversations.
Connected Planet’s take,
Rich Karpinski:
Resistance (and count me among the resisters) is apparently futile. Foursquare is everywhere these days. What makes it most interesting is that while it is a location-based business at heart, the tweaks the company made to standard LBS models have made it really cook: the check-ins, the badges and the mayor-ships. Straight LBS was interesting; LBS with a fun twist took off. The immediate lesson learned is that once again it won’t likely be telecom operators or technology providers that truly innovate in mobile services. Rather it will be an entrepreneur with a bold idea and a burning desire to make it work for large numbers of users who will rule the day.
That said, what can (must) the telecom industry learn from Foursquare? A few things come to mind. First off, immediately embrace and support the concept of the “check-in.” Mobile operators should deliver location APIs specifically tuned for enabling check-ins, including the ability not just to place a user at a street location, but to a more fine-grained spot as well — for instance, the business at that location. Also, think about ways that existing telecom offerings could drive Foursquare-style services. For instance, could SMS become a major conduit into Foursquare the way it is into Twitter today (and the way Twitter is trying to explicitly link itself to Foursquare, as we saw above)? All it would take is some smart integration between SMS and network location APIs and servers.
And what about the idea of the business Foursquare? This seems especially intriguing. We all know that MySpace and Facebook begat LinkedIn and unified communications/social collaboration tools. It seems unlikely that business people would want to blast their location willy-nilly to the world. But certainly they’d be open to selectively letting the world know where they are — in the office, in a staff meeting, at a trade show — via a check-in procedure integrated into their existing UC tools.
The LBS revolution is starting, and thanks to Foursquare and services like Gowalla, the new Twitter Places and others, it’s not exactly what the telecom industry expected. Big deal. Like social networking before it, get on board (even if only as an enabler) or get out of the way — and fast.
That’s our take on this. Let us know what you think in the comments section below: