
Dear Foursquare, Gowalla: Please Let’s Stop Pretending This Is Fun - ssclafani
http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/13/foursquare-gowalla-stop-pretending-fun/
======
acgourley
This article bothers me. The author says that we should check in downtown and
announce that we're hungry or need a gift somewhere "and then sit back and
watch the discounts roll in."

1) I'm a little tired of tech bloggers stating their own opinion on what a
company should be doing as fact. A a little more humility here would be
appreciated; they would be high priced consultants if their ideas were so
golden.

2) If someone wants food, they're going to pull that information down on a
service like yelp. That's a much more appropriate context for offers to be
exposed, too. If tons of appealing offers have not surfaced in sites like
yelp, why would they appear in LBS services? *

* I'm not saying LBS can't monetize, but the issue is more likely that the local deal / advertising market is not there yet, not that the LBS companies need to hire techcrunch writers for ideas.

~~~
doron
I somewhat support this point of view, from admittedly selfish interests. I
dont support advertising schemes online that dont give me (the consumer)
something. i.e i expect online advertising to create a system where if I
choose to click, I am rewarded with a discount,or some such, otherwise they
just impede on my time (and on my phone, its not trivial, ads take longer time
to download any content)

Many useful sites and services seem to completely rely on advertising as
opposed to the service they actually provide, this is all well and good, but
as long as advertising is the same mode of operation it used to be offline
(and what did change between offline and online? metrics, nothing much else) i
agree with you that I dont think LBS can monetize until the advertising market
creates another alternative.

The concept of online advertising is generally a two way, service provider and
ad provider, it would be better if it will be a three way, rewarding the
consumer as well.

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mattmanser
While the article is pretty good, I really didn't like this:

 _if you’re competing with Facebook in social networking and your name isn’t
Twitter or Google, I’m sorry, but I don’t like your chances_

Basically, he's saying we should all give up now and go home.

Sod his world view that established players are king.

~~~
patio11
Twitter has done some _amazing_ Jedi mind tricks to convince the media that it
has a place in that sentence.

~~~
tonystubblebine
What's the trick? Twitter is useful for the media and Facebook is not. I think
it's that simple. You can now write a news article where every quote is pulled
from twitter. Nobody is doing that with facebook.

~~~
antareus
Useful? Why would I care what xXNinjaGuy2938Xx's opinion on foreign policy is?
Twitter strikes me as a very anti-intellectual medium because of the 140
character limitation. How do you convey a nuanced, complex opinion in such a
fashion?

~~~
alexknight
"How do you convey a nuanced, complex opinion in such a fashion?"

\- You don't... that's what a long form writing is form, i.e a blog. Brevity
is the sole of wit.

~~~
rfrey
_Brevity is the sole of wit_

Originally, "soul" of wit. But I think I like yours better.

------
nir
Actually most people don't find it much fun, and don't use these apps. TC, NY
Times & the rest of the hypeosphere are those pretending these products have
any impact.

~~~
nickbw
I think this is the salient point for startups. Painfully contrived "fun" can
be a short-term win. Tech press and early adopters like it ... but only
because they like being clever enough to appreciate it.

"Look at that, it gave me a badge! Normal people will eat this up!"

But then normal people fail to eat it up, and traffic goes nowhere.

Three possible ways to avoid needing contrived "fun":

1\. Be immediately useful. E.g., save people money, or provide excellent
search results. This is pretty straight-forward, but tends to require either
amazing engineering skills or an actual business model.

2\. Be a social obligation. Facebook is home to plenty of third party apps
that are desperately projecting contrived fun, but FB itself is rather somber.
It doesn't have to be anything else.

3\. Actually be fun. This is subtle, difficult, and maddeningly subjective.

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grandalf
It took me a while to realize what Gowalla was after seeing some bizarre
tweets about it for a few months. When I finally clicked on one of the URLs
there was no map, no pictures, only a useless placeholder page for the
business. What a waste of time it was clicking on that link... it offered
nothing to someone who wasn't already familiar with the business... in essence
it was a 100% regrettable click.

Why would Gowalla encourage people to tweet useless links to their
friends/follwers?

~~~
jkaljundi
That's the reason why Facebook Places is available only in the US and coming
to a few selected countries later. They want to populate the database in
advance. Same reason for Yelp to take the country by country approach, to make
sure it's useful.

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tkanet
In just a year or so, we will see the same story about the coupons' madness.
How valuable is it to get 10% out of a coffee ? if groupon and daily deal
makers do not change the mechanic and move to the next(?) level, it will end
up as pure spam. Coupon fatigue just like checkin fatigue

Foursquare, Gowalla ...are simply missing an opportunity to move to that next
level of guinuinely discovering places. They havent (yet) found a deeper
motivation for checking in (than badges for younger gamers). I recently read a
book mapping some modern places (in european cities) with their forgotton
history. You could walk to some restaurant in Paris and discover (from the
book) that some historical event happened here. Historical view as well as
many other angles are possible and could drive attention for mass markets
...and that looks like a guenuine discovery.

I dont believe "check in and get coupons" is really enough

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chadp
about time someone in the press admitted to these LBS' (current) uselessness.

Potential for being big businesses (which is exciting for the companies) but
personally useless for me at the moment.

~~~
byoung2
I agree...I was a big fan of FourSquare at first, but now that the wow factor
has worn off, I don't see the point anymore. Now if being the mayor gave me
coupons or discounts, then I'd have more of an incentive to check in more
often at more places.

~~~
pavs
What was the wow factor of foursquare?

~~~
matwood
Maybe the same novelty that any other achievement based game like system
provides?

~~~
antareus
And the achievements give you...what? A tiny shot of dopamine?

It is hard to be enamored with tech these days when you see what people fall
for.

~~~
matwood
They don't provide anything but I was responding to someone who asked what the
wow facto was. There really isn't any wow factor, but for some reason people
are suckers for achievements. Just look at pretty much any video game today
for additional examples.

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vacanti
The real reason why Groupon is growing faster than Foursquare is because
Groupon can and is aggressively buying users at $5 to $10. Foursquare can't.

~~~
samtp
Do you know they pay $5 to $10 per customer or is it a guess? just curious

~~~
bmr
In their early days, they were paying affiliates $2 per email submit.

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RBr
It's always scary when a sumo sized company like Facebook enters your space.
However, there are two things that this article doesn't consider:

1) People like new, shiny and cool. Facebook won't be new, shiny or cool
forever. Sure, neither will Foursquare or Gowalla, but you get the idea. Out
sumo the sumo and you'll win the next round.

2) Foursqure and Gowalla are interesting social networks, but they're social
networks in the loosest form of the term. First and foremost, their
functionality is based around engagement and motivation. Users "get something"
for "doing something". This was somewhat revolutionary on the web and we
haven't even scratched the surface of this.

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SriniK
Deja vu all over again. Most of them said same thing about facebook twitter
and linkedin. Look where they are now. Agreed foursquare/gowalla need to
provide real value for checkins.

I can only sympathize with entrepreneurs on 'what if google did it' and now
'facebook did it'. Till yesterday location services were awesome and now that
facebook entered in the space it is bad? Give me a break.

~~~
kin
I can't entirely agree that there is deja vu. When Facebook and LinkedIn came
out, there was an immediate market not to mention Facebook's incredible
growth, something Foursquare/Gowalla don't have.

When Twitter first came out there was no initial growth and out of nowhere it
boomed, which I blame on media and as of now there is no monetary value in
Twitter (though technically it's there with all of the information on trends
and social impact that can be visualized through Tweets and Twitter as a
general Marketing/PR tool).

Foursquare/Gowalla on the other hand, don't offer entirely different from FB
Places other than a 'fun' aspect that FB can easily mimic. Till yesterday
location services were not awesome. No one really used it. It's inconvenient
to use. I don't use it and only 1% of my friends do. Now that FB entered the
space yes it is bad because it's even more difficult for people to break out
of the shell lest they come up with something to offer.

If it were me, I would throw in a "want to check-in" feature. That way you can
express a desire to go somewhere and amass a party to go with you instead of
checking in and have people say "oh, that place is cool".

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davidamcclain
Is there any chance that there's bit of a chicken/egg scenario going on here?

Maybe we won't see many coupons for LBS until they have a large enough slice
of the retailer's demographic (or just a large enough % of the population) and
few people will sign up to use these services if they don't have these
coupons.

Facebook on the other hand is a different beast. A massively larger user base
and greater brand recognition with companies. How many ads do you see on TV
where the URL on the screen is to facebook.com/some-household-brand.
Businesses are already savvy to the fact that a great proportion of their
customer's traffic is on Facebook. Seems like a small jump to move your
coupons from your Facebook page to your location/"Place" on Facebook. Gowalla
and Foursquare don't have their foot in the door like Facebook does.

~~~
acgourley
While FB is on a great trajectory in this space, as of right now I would guess
Yelp serves more page views to people looking for information about
restaurants. They have some deals but its not extremely compelling.

Two possibilities: Yelp is missing a big opportunity or that opportunity is an
illusion; every restaurant doesn't want to offer coupons freely online.

I realize you didn't specifically say restaurants, but if it isn't happening
in that extremely competitive industry, why would it happen anywhere else?

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sdizdar
I think these check in services are still in infancy - and neither foursquare
nor gowalla fix real-world problems.

For example, my wife and I went for dinner yesterday. We ended up at Pier
39th. Which restaurant to chose? What are the specials? Which ones are open?
Any coupons? Prices (meaning actual prices in $$)? Menu? We tried Yelp! - fail
(there are ~10 restaurant in Pier 39 but Yelp! was tell us to walk 1 mile). We
tried Foursquare - useless.

BTW, I'm experimenting something on <http://wall.si> but I still don't have
clue how to do it right.

~~~
fmkamchatka
Why not have a walk, look at the menus and the atmosphere and let your guts
decide?

~~~
pyre
Maybe their guts were telling them, "Food. Here. Now."

------
callmeed
Was thinking last night: do any of these LBSs have a solid dating component?

It seems to me that some dating-specific features (find and flirt with nearby
singles but also maintain privacy) could help increase adoption.

~~~
lennysan
<http://www.assistedserendipity.com/>

~~~
callmeed
That's on the right track, but I'm not sure piggybacking one of the networks
will work–almost as if they need to do it and promote themselves ... maybe
even work out deals with the venues ... if a lady checks in at a bar, she gets
a free drink–if a dude checks in, he gets to meet ladies ... just thinking out
loud.

Or maybe everyone who is single can wear a shirt with a QR code on it :)

~~~
antareus
I've been thinking about this for awhile. Current dating sites make it easy to
meet lots of people, but then there's the issue of how well you actually mesh
in real life. Thus, some sort of hybrid approach might be better.

I'm imagining some sort of OkCupid/augmented reality mashup. I think there
might be something to some level of algorithmic matching, but it doesn't mean
much until you actually meet the person. Matching systems can, for instance,
prevent people with totally incompatible different values systems from even
wasting time with each other. Augmented reality would let you pick someone out
of a crowd (via the inevitable smartphone) and pull up their profile. It could
even provide the "similar users" ability among people that were present if you
happen to meet your type, but they're not physically attractive to you.

Lots of work can be done here. I'm trying to get the number of awkward first
dates down, and I believe it to be possible if we meld the best aspects of
online and offline personas.

~~~
rhizome
OKCupid seems to have been making changes that would allow something like that
to become a factor in their compatibility ratings. Their "Special Blend"
ranking algorithm is multivariate secret sauce, and it's easy to imagine them
offering the option of sorting on proximity.

------
andrewhillman
I just don't think these services will go past the early adoption crowd. I
love "social" but telling people where I am worries me. I just think robbers
and such will take advantage at some point.

~~~
tomotomo
I believe they already have.

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tomotomo
People are slowly realizing location-based + game mechanics is not an
automatic win. A lot of people still caught up in the initial hype but for
those still betting long on 4sq, I can think of 7 or so ways FourSquare-LBS
will play out and only one of them is good for FourSquare:
<http://www.saigonist.com/content/future-foursquare>

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philfreo
Just looked at Shopkick for the first time and was pretty impressed. I bet
they'll do really well.

<http://shopkick.com/>

~~~
philfreo
Wow, why all the downvotes? They were mentioned in the article and my comment
was genuine.

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va_coder
"they’re not giving us any good reason to use them."

I've been avoiding traffic tickets by using trapster on my iphone.

------
robryan
Interestingly one of the big cinema chains in Australia uses bluetooth to send
deals to phones when people are at the cinema. Seems to be a decent way to
bypass location based stuff altogether, of course you have to authorize the
bluetooth connection to your phone.

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phlux
In addition to LBS, I am not so sure Isee the value of gamification, which has
taken a lot of attention these days - specifically badging.

Companies that showcased at disrupt showed badging as a feature, and the
panels seemed to like companies that did so - even so far as to suggest
badging to those who didnt have it.

Reddit has badging, but it is transparent to the use of the site (it is not a
goal of using the site). This, to me, works well - but for any site to think
that they will garner interest/drive traffic due to badging seems naive.

~~~
robryan
Can't say badging has ever motivated me outside of gaming and even then some
are just highly repetitive to keep you playing. In something like WoW some of
the badges actually require you to complete new sections of content and can be
fun to acquire.

~~~
phlux
>In something like WoW...

Yes, but that _is_ a game... badging (or gamification) of activities that are
a stretch to be called games... that's what I find odd.

I will not decry these sites/services outright, simply because I have been on
the internet since its inception and therefore cannot claim to be able to
predict how newly adopting generations will use it.

I personally don't see the value of gamification - but there certainly is the
genius site that will make the next killer with it. I don't feel they exist
yet. The idea is in its infancy and will be say, 3 generations of companies
will we all go "holy shit - that is _so_ obvious!"

------
ry0ohki
Beerby (<http://beerby.com>) is the only thing that makes checking into places
fun.

