Foursquare Merges with Factual
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But alas, Foursquare simply had no way of making money. The often quoted 'How Not to Die' by pg seems especially relevant to foursquare. Compare the company they started out as, to the company they are now. They may not have 'died', but they sure as hell aren't the same company, product, or userbase. They figured how to not die by pulling a Ship of Theseus, replacing fun with features, features with ads, replacing ads with 'tools'.
Is there a way for social media to stay fun and profitable? I guess Instagram is probably the closest thing to staying fun, though for some reason I never latched on to Instagram. Perhaps it's focus on vanity never really resonated with me. When I think of goofy fun, I don't think of Instagram - Instagram is for the beautiful and that's not what I think of myself as.
Reading the line 'Foursquare is No. 1 when it comes to attribution and ad effectiveness, when it comes to app developer tools' is so the opposite of what I considered Foursquare to be when I used it.
Their revenue is 100 MM/year. [1]
You may not (like me) like their pivot then, or business focus, but they do run a successful business.
I think there is a _lot_ to be done in the field. As with anything these days it would most likely require a large effort with sizable investment, but I think it's an area that's grossly overlooked.
Making the coins utterly useless irritates me, though, and I'm kind of surprised they dropped the whole notion of partnering with businesses to offer specials to regular customers they had in the pre-Swarm days. While I presume they pivoted into selling location data because the partnerships just didn't make them enough money, I'd hope the partnerships weren't losing them money, and I think they really drove usage.
This is kinda the deep down reason I still use it. I sort of passively compete with the friends that use it, especially when I'm traveling, since I get to check into a ton of new stuff. The list of friends that use it is _very_ static. It's been the same group for _years_ now, w/o a single new person (and I don't think anyone's dropped). We're not close friends either. All in all, it's a fascinating experience in that regard.
A dozen or so members of my family use Swarm just as a casual "look where I am"/"look what I'm eating" thing, but I just cannot fathom what they were thinking with the evolution of the coins thing. Currently, the only thing you can do with coins is buy multipliers that... get you more coins? Wait, what's the point again?
I've had the same thought. I'm a software engineer in my 30s and I still use it religiously. I have a few friends who still use it, too. They are a high school teacher in his 30s, a project manager in her 30s, an attorney in her 40s, and an audio engineer in his 30s.
This, exactly this, is one of the reasons I founded VC3 (https://vc3.club). If you're interested in discussing these topics in a purely intellectual way, we would love to have you join us.
I did submit an application but I'm confused now. Did you found VC3 to discuss how to build fun and profitable social media sites or is VC3 the fun and profitable social media site. Because it says on the site that it's free and not for profit?
The community on HN is awesome for getting really nitpicky, but the audience for discussing these sorts of problems is only a small slice of the larger HN audience. I started VC3 as a community formed around a specific purpose (discussing "building meaningful community") specifically to try to build more engaging and valuable discussion, and I personally think that a smaller, closed forum of enthusiastic individuals is a better way to do that than a public general-topic forum.
There's a question in our FAQ [0] that goes into this in even more detail. Look for the header "Why is VC3 its own site?"
I think Twitter gets pretty close. Sure they have ads (which are unobtrusive for the most part), a bot problem, a bullying problem, an anachronism problem - but that doesn't change the fact that an average user always finds some fun and interesting content on their feed if they're following a curated list of people.
I'm impressed they've been able to keep the experience light on "features" and have kept their core user experience consistent since their perception.
But I'm curious if another path was ever available. My gut feeling is that many (not all) of these products probably had perfectly serviceable business models available to them if they were content to just be a fairly unsexy utility with low margins. But the focus on establishing a platform monopoly and/or being a billion dollar unicorn has pushed them all towards these societally maladaptive ways approaches that kind of put people off the whole thing.
I don't have the numbers to back any of that up, though, and I'm not sure anyone does aside from the VC people. But they, understandably, have no incentive to let someone stay in the 7 or 8-figure revenue range when they can push them to add an extra comma instead.
Now it seems it's just going to double/triple-down on the data mining part, and there's no clear indication of what value this adds to the user.
The only thing I really use Swarm for is to keep a little calendar-integrated diary of places I've been (with an IFTTT), but I can do all this myself much simpler and with less data mining. So long, 4SQ.
Putting aside the nature of their current business, I really admire 4SQ ability to pivot and re-invent itself several times, while keeping beloved functionality like the check-in (even if it’s through another app).
This is a company that by all measures should have died in any of those past struggles. They even had a couple of down rounds. And somehow they managed to overcome all those dead-ends.
Very few startups have done that, and I can’t think of a single one that did it at 4SQ’s scale.
The user is no longer the people checking-in. The user are the firms capable of writing large checks to buy insight into market trends before anyone else sees them.
I started using Foursquare the day it launched over a decade ago, and still check in to every single place I go... and I don't know why. It might literally be the only habit I actually have. I love having a log of everything I've done over the past decade, it's amazing. It's also so great to see where people I know have been in random countries or cities. It makes the world feel a lot smaller.
I was glad they found a way to monetize it with data, and I really really hope Swarm never goes away :) Great job Dennis and team!
I like using that to find out where I've been overseas.
(And, not really the point, but I trust Swarm with my data more than Google, even though I know Google already has it...)
As more efforts continue (by Apple, Firefox and others) to crack down on that sort of thing the proportion of reality represented by the data such companies hope to sell gets smaller and smaller.
It’s increasingly not “people shop here” but “people with bad privacy settings on their device shop here.”
Games are popular for a while, then they're not, for no real reason. One year everyone is playing it, the next year no one is, or just an odd collection of dedicated fans. Occasionally you have games that hold on for decades, like bridge or World of Warcraft or Settlers of Catan, but it's just a longer scale rather than true permanence.
I remember one called Whrrl. It was run by a company called Pelago in Seattle, and IIRC was funded by T-Mobile money. I visited its offices a few times. They got cheap office space high up in what was formerly the Washington Mutual Tower when WaMu ate itself.
IIRC I think Google Maps might have added a check-in feature... it was a crazy time.
After a couple weeks, I'm much more confident that my location data isn't leaking all over the place.
There's a system-wide setting to disable app access to BT and wifi location data.
I imagine the data from both of them, standalone is quickly becoming flawed/inaccurate. From Foursquare's perspective, less users means less data coming in, and you need a LOT of data for location insights to be meaningful.
https://www.factual.com/company/partners/
Since Foursquare seems to be caring less about their consumer-facing products I'm guessing they'll shift more towards a collection + analytics style product? Where they integrate with other popular apps instead of collecting their own data.
But I'm just speculating.
For a while, Foursquare also had the most reliable review data – or at least its users tastes better aligned with mine. It was refreshing to get useful content about a restaurant without reading through paragraphs of self-indulgent drivel on Yelp. But after the launch of Swarm, the reviews more or less rotted over time.
The founders of Foursquare got to take a lot of money off the table in a relatively early round, ($8M each? Series C?), which is something I'd love to get the present perspective on from investors and employees who were there along the way.
Gil is also responsible for bringing Google to LA when they bought his previous company Applied Semantics so he had a lot of cultural imprint on that office as well.
It's nice that they gave you a job but I hope you've moved on to something that contributes to society.
Brick and mortar has so few tools to compete comparatively. The big guys even buy our data from equifax/transunion to improve marketing efforts.
Compare that to needing to have some app installed on your phone, tracking you 24/7.
You are talking about a group of people using freeware in exchange for their data.
No need to disable the functionality as it’s entirely opt in.
I remember liking it and then they turned into something(s) else and I'm pretty sure I remember not really understanding what they were supposed to be and I sort of gave up / couldn't figure out why it got so much media talking head attention after that and then ... I don't think I heard anything about it again.
The whole process of "Do a neat thing that isn't really profitable (or at least not a unicorn profitable), then pivot into something else / away from users." thing happens time and again.
Honestly I think I try / don't install as many apps anymore because of such things.
I was an avid foursquare user when it first came out. Going to a place your friends hadn't been felt like you were an explorer charting new territory. I used it for years until check-ins were split off. Swarm felt like it was built to be neglected. Like Netflix with Qwikster, they wanted to focus on another area of their business to secure their future and the existing users were a distraction/liability. But given that either pursuit is nothing without engagement, and they had more location-based engagement than anybody, I don't understand the decision making in throwing all that away.
I thought they still had a pretty good differentiator making an effort to make recommendations in the main app based on your specific food tastes etc. Too bad they were a bit half hearted focusing on it.
The only somewhat objective info about it was that he didn't have a defined role in the company anymore.
But seriously, Foursquare pivoted away from consumers and went down the data broker path many, many years ago. 2011 maybe?
As much as I despise both of these companies and their business models, the merger makes a ton of sense.
Foursquare is great when you're away/on trips/in a foreign city - to look up places to visit, get recommendations, make planning lists etc. Proven useful for me for many years.
So how exactly are they getting possession of the location data? Or is that not even their biggest source of revenue?
Just genuinely curious.
Foursquare is essentially a service for other apps at this point- They are a library embedded into many apps. Foursquare is likely on your phone somewhere. The app owner gets a whole lot of location data "for free", and Foursquare gets is own copy. They give you analytics on the data fed to them- the details were not laid out to me, but its not hard to fill in the blanks here- how many people walked into your store that day- how many people walked into your store after you covered that zipcode in an ad campaign, etc, what is the shape of your traffic in terms of people coming in from 9-10am, vs 10am-11am (helping them refine their staffing) etc... None of this couldn't be built themselves, but its already built and refined, and more refined.
On the flip side, there are some very lucrative uses for this data in aggregate. I am a hedge fund, and I want to know how many people are walking into a Macy's, or Chipotle after its dust-up, or even an entire mall (to get some edge on the owner's health). Right now it would probably be very interesting to look at someone like Home Depot's foot traffic- they are "essential"- but is anyone going? Combine this with some data like Yodlee (for e-commerce- they sell gift card data) and you can get a quite accurate model for where their revenue is going to land. Hedge funds are willing to pay a lot of money for this type of data.
This was the state of affairs 3 years ago, things may have evolved since then.
From my naive point of view, most people have their phones on standby in their pockets with GPS turned off most of the time while they go shopping. And even if it is turned on they are probably using Whatsapp or Insta. So, in a real life scenario, what circumstances would have to come together for Foursquare to successfully collect data?