Dear Foursquare, Gowalla: Please Let’s Stop Pretending This Is Fun
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
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.
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.
Without the game aspect I think actually physically checking in at a location loses appeal as it's not needed for the deals.
I can't understand why you want the blogger to keep his ideas to himself, though. I appreciate these types of articles because, quite frankly, I'm tired of hearing only about the latest round of funding XYZ location-based "game" company raised. It's healthy to question fundamental things like the usefulness of these services.
You'd be surprised to see how many "high priced consultants" have sank companies. Or how many bloggers have had better ideas...
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.
dailybooth is trying similar tricks
I personally use it when I'm curious what certain people think about an event I'm watching. It's fun sometimes knowing in real time what someone who's opinion you actually care about, thinks about an event you just witnessed.
NBA players are on it, some cool geeks and bloggers...maybe you're just not the intended audience.
That said, I do think twitter's importance is overstated.
There's the old saying that goes something like "Nobody ever went broke by underestimating the intelligence of the American people." Less cynically, nobody wants to be intellectual all the time, or we would see peer reviewed blogs with internal citations all over the place.
>How do you convey a nuanced, complex opinion in such a fashion?
You can always post a link to a blog post.
- You don't... that's what a long form writing is form, i.e a blog. Brevity is the sole of wit.
Originally, "soul" of wit. But I think I like yours better.
You can always write multiple tweets on the topic. Also it forces you to think about the essence of what you want to say. (122 chars)
Still, the chance of being acquired for your talent in the social networking space seems pretty high to me...
"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.
Why would Gowalla encourage people to tweet useless links to their friends/follwers?
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
Potential for being big businesses (which is exciting for the companies) but personally useless for me at the moment.
It is hard to be enamored with tech these days when you see what people fall for.
The mayorships and badges were fun at first, too.
Ultimately, though, I decided it wasn't providing enough value for the effort I was putting into it, and stopped cold turkey.
Seems to be the direction they're headed in. I've noticed more restaurants in my area having their location tagged with something like "show this to your server for a free appetizer" and the like recently.
SCVNGR actually seems to have the most prominent tools for this kind of thing and does the best job up playing up the game aspect by throwing in some fun challenges, but just doesn't have the user base to be relevant, unfortunately.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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?
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.
It seems to me that some dating-specific features (find and flirt with nearby singles but also maintain privacy) could help increase adoption.
Or maybe everyone who is single can wear a shirt with a QR code on it :)
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.
I had an idea about an anonymous dating app per se with focus on women ... no idea how feasible it is but here it goes:
men and women check in to an event or at a club or wherever .. men cannot see details about women beyond a certain basic demographic (age interests etc.) .. men "poke" the women they find interesting, women get the alert, they get to see all dets about the guy and if they think he's interesting, poke back to reveal their details and/or a message. they can take it from there .. ofcourse, this has to catch on for people to really have pick and choose from potential matches ..
now if anyone wants to work on this idea, feel free to .. or hit me up to work on it in detail hah ..
I've been avoiding traffic tickets by using trapster on my iphone.
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.
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!"