On the face of it, everything seems to be going well for Foursquare. They’ve just signed up their 1millionth member, and inked a break-through deal with the Wall Street Journal that will see editorially reviewed locations in New York high-lighted, for those in the vicinity, with tips and badges. For anyone who lives in New York, Foursquare is about to get quite fun, quite quickly (if you don’t know what Foursquare is, our very own Ciaran Norris wrote a Point of View on it when it first caught the industry eye here in London around 3 months ago; it’s well worth a read).
But I have a problem with Foursquare.
Building a social profile is a bit like building a sand castle. If you don’t attend to it frequently, it shows. The level to which a user has to contribute to their own profile depends on the foundation network – the beach, if you will. Twitter users, for instance, can put in very little energy to extract a great amount of information. Facebook is a little more balanced, and LinkedIn is just about even: you get out what you put in.
Foursquare is dependent on users logging in with regularity, adding locations, leaving tips and fighting for Mayor badges. All Foursquare users pretty much have to be Super-Users to get a look in. It’s a tough world out there, especially when the world is occupied by people who cheat by adding ridiculous locations like, “1 metre from the edge of Platform 18, Clapham Junction Railway Station, London” just to get points.
Or people, like me, who add, “London, England” as a location and then giggle when they become “The Major of London, England”.
Things are different in New York. Badges have been purposely designed, and will continue to be with the new Wall Street Journal partnership, to reward people for logging in at specific places. For instance, if you log in to Foursquare when you’re off Manhatten Island, you can win the ‘Out of Town’ badge. Well, I logged in to my Foursquare account when I was in a different country and didn’t win this. The inability to progress beyond the gates of mediocrity is a frustrating predicament and logging in on the same routine day after day, earning the same points and not winning and badges can be a tiresome habit.
So, while the prospect of incorporating editorial recommendations into a location-based app, alongside those tips left by the people you ‘know and trust’ (although of course this isn’t always the case) is relatively exciting, in London, it’s not yet exciting enough.
The idea feels more relevant to a brand like Time Out, who are doing a brilliant location-based tie-up with Smirnoff at the moment. The trouble is that, despite being superior to Foursquare’s London-based offering, the Time Out app has no buzz. It’s not cool. This saddens me.
It seems that today, unless an app (when I refer to apps I mean anything that accesses tailored information from the Cloud) has Social Pedigree – insomuch as it has evolved, or is perceived to have evolved, according to the actions of a growing userbase that was once, literally, a hand-full of people – then its deemend not to be worthy of social attention. People don’t spread it and it ends up costing more to develop than it returns. Time Out’s Smirnoff ‘Be There’ app is tailor-made for the kind of people that like Foursquare, but it’s highly unlikely it’ll take off.
The key here is ‘reward’. The map you see on Foursquare should, in theory, be a rich meadow of tips, discounts, vouchers and insights, rewarding those who use the service just like the Time Out app does now. User-generated content can only go so far, and realistically in this territory it’s not going to go far enough, fast enough.
The question is: do Londoners, and the rest of the world, have the patience to wait until it does?
London map by cod gabriel on flickr
