
Foursquare’s Dennis Crowley Can’t Stop Believing - prostoalex
https://medium.com/backchannel/dennis-crowley-takes-another-stab-at-explaining-foursquare-a04894b7874b?sectionName=recommended
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danso
Previously discussed here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9433580](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9433580)

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thomasfoster96
Having read this I'm substantially more convinced that Dennis Crowley knows
what he's doing. The only bit Foursquare has really messed up was the split
into two apps, but it's not something that they can't fix. Swarm being an app
that feeds data into the main Foursquare app is a hard setup to make work
(users might use one or the other, and not both), but Facebook has made it
work with Messenger and the main Facebook app.

Foursquare has a _lot_ of data. As a bonus, they've also realised that the
company is very likely viable just living off other people wanting that data.
If they can use that data well, I wouldn't be surprised if Foursquare turns
into a serious competitor for Yelp (or even TripAdvisor, etc). If anyone
wanted to try and usurp Yelp, it'll be Foursquare, not Facebook or Google or
Apple.

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grey-area
Google, with their map products used on phones, websites and via their web
search, is in a far better position to supplant yelp/trip advisor etc, because
they have much more data than someone like foursquare; they have visits,
searches, route requests worldwide and also the POI data which they are
encouraging people to use and enter for them.

~~~
thomasfoster96
Foursquare has a substantial amount of 3 of those 4 data sources - and with
Swarm, the potential to continuously improve those data sources quicker than
Google has been able to.

Route requests probably aren't that interesting to someone trying to supplant
Yelp - if you were trying to supplant TripAdvisor you might want travel
bookings, but that's a case of connecting to the users email account (with
their permission) and grabbing the lovely JSON encoded tickets and booking
details.

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stegman
When a founder can't explain what his own company does, it's a bad sign.

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jcoffland
It seems success has gone to their heads. Jerking your users around is a very
bad idea. Building an expectation that your app does one thing and then
pulling the rug out destroys trust when trust is the most valuable asset you
have. These guys seem to think they are so awesome that they can do this and
get away with it. Their conviction that Foursquare must build the app that
only they can envison or it will never get built is nonsense. Someone else
will come along and build it. They might not build precisely the same thing,
but play fast and free with the trust of your userbase and someone will eat
your lunch.

