
Foursquare's Dennis Crowley can't stop believing - steven
https://medium.com/backchannel/dennis-crowley-takes-another-stab-at-explaining-foursquare-a04894b7874b
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exstudent2
> A mixture. One of my proudest moments at Foursquare was March 2011 at South
> By Southwest. In my keynote there, I described it as if we just pulled a Mr.
> Miyagi on you guys. You think that you’re checking in to get points and
> badges — and meanwhile we just made an awesome personalized local search
> engine for you! You think that you’re washing a car but you’re really
> learning karate! This is what we wanted to do all along. From that moment,
> Foursquare was about search and recommendations — a smarter search engine
> that learns about where you go. But by that point, people were so into the
> game stuff that they either couldn’t see or didn’t see it.

This is so incredibly arrogant. It's not that people couldn't see it or didn't
see it, it's that they didn't _want_ it. The game features made 4sq unique and
fun. People don't want a "personalized local search engine" because there
aren't millions of restaurants and bars around where they're at right now.
It's just not that big of a problem to find a place to eat and yes, while they
do an ok job helping out if you are looking for that, so does Yelp.

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k-mcgrady
I disagree. I don't know anyone who thought that gaming stuff was fun. It was
silly and a waste of time. Foursquare now is great at recommendations -
something people actually need. I don't think it was necessary to rip the
checkins out of it and into Swarm but I think the people who actually found
that fun and a vocal minority.

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exstudent2
My anecdotes are the complete opposite of yours :)

My friends loved checking in and earning badges and none of them think the
recommendations are great.

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k-mcgrady
:) Strange. I don't understand why they split the app. If they kept it
together all our friends could have been happy.

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slowernet
Some background on their rationale: [https://medium.com/@noah_weiss/the-lego-
block-exercise-4c7d6...](https://medium.com/@noah_weiss/the-lego-block-
exercise-4c7d60eeb38f)

~~~
exstudent2
It reads like they keep wanting to back the product into their theories
regardless of if there's a market for it or if their existing user base wanted
those changes. My personal feeling was they discovered that the gamification
angle was successful but the market wasn't huge so they got pressured into a
change in direction to a (theoretically) larger market by their investors. All
of these interviews and pontifications seem like justification for that move.
It doesn't seem to have worked out well.

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smrtinsert
That office makes me shudder. I feel like I live in a palace in my cube.

~~~
kzhahou
All the modern "People Operations" research by Google, Facebook, and others,
has concluded that the garment industry a hundred years ago had it exactly
right:

[http://ursulinemagazine.com/wp-
content/uploads/2013/11/jfco_...](http://ursulinemagazine.com/wp-
content/uploads/2013/11/jfco_1-18-1_3feb456327.jpg)

~~~
cpncrunch
What research is that? All the research coming out recently has been saying
that open plan offices are bad for productivity.

[http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/12/30/g...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/12/30/google-
got-it-wrong-the-open-office-trend-is-destroying-the-workplace/)

There's a big difference between a manual worker and a software developer.

~~~
k-mcgrady
I think - and hope - the parent is being sarcastic.

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kzhahou
I wasn't kidding about Google and Facebook. Facebook has been "open plan"
since forever, with rows of monitors on long tables, and Google has talked
publicly about their research on optimal collaboration environments, which
concludes that you need to pack engineers densely so they'll share ideas (and
then have some common public space as well).

Unfortunately I just spent 5 minutes trying to dig up the original articles,
without luck.

~~~
k-mcgrady
Oh yeah, sorry I didn't mean to dismiss that part as sarcasm. I've seen those
articles too.

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mhomde
If I were Foursquare I'd admit defeat, drop Swarm, do a big push to relaunch
Foursquare with a new app (if nothing else just to get people interested
again) and think really hard about a killer feature to lure people back into
the app.

One aspect that's really underplayed I think they could go with as a
complement is diary and life tracking. It could be very interesting to have as
an experience where you could relive where you've been and done.

~~~
blahwoop
you mean what Timehop does?

~~~
mhomde
Timehop is pretty limited in its scope, I'd do a fullblown diary & life
tracker

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hobarrera
The split between foursquare and swarm was awful. It was rather useless, and
all my friends that used foursquare dropped it at that moment.

I myself dropped it because the new version required me to install Google Play
Services/Framework - something I had no interest in doing.

I currently don't know _anybody_ who uses foursquare. The "game" part faded,
and the "finding a place" part moved over to Yelp.

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data_spy
I'm counting them out, data from 5 years ago isn't all that useful

~~~
danso
Yeah...It's been less than a year since I've left New York but even then, so
many places have closed down/opened up...and this is completely independent of
the downtrend in user-supplied data to Foursquare.

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eldude
I can't help but feel that releasing Swarm was akin to giving someone a
lateral "promotion" within an org to remove them from a space you don't want
them in any longer, like Milton being moved into the basement in Office Space.
They wanted to pivot, but with check-in so core to their identity, they had to
move it to the basement so the rest of the core app could flourish.

Does anyone here actively use Swarm or any other Ambient Social Network? Why &
what is your take? Like the various other Ambient Social Networking apps that
came before it (Highlight, Sonar, Banjo), it would seem to suffer from a
severe chicken and egg problem.

~~~
nmcfarl
I use swarm, and the reason I use it is timehop.

The ambient social networking is a side benefit, that ramped up following my
adoption of foursquare, and is slowly tailing off as everyone drops swarm.
It's nice as a source of real time recommendations from people you trust, and
as a source of small talk, however it's not that important to me. But tracking
myself from a year ago is generally rewarding.

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jgalt212
It's hard not to hate on foursquare at this point. I mean how much press and
mind share have they squandered that could have been better used by other
start ups trying to get over the hump.

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untog
I'm not counting FourSquare out yet, just because of the strength of the data
they have. Of course, that makes them a very tempting acquisition target, and
I expect it'll happen sooner or later.

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EpicEng
Their data is getting more and more stale by the day. They rely on users for
that data, so as the users go, so does the relevant data.

