I love in all of these posts they claim Foursquare has 10 million users. There is no way the amount of active users is anywhere close to that. So many people I know sign up, check in once or twice, and never use it again.
That said, I still give Facebook credit for doing it.
The definition of active is so obtuse and varies wildly from company to company that it doesnt even matter :).
From Facebook's Statistics Site
More than 500 million active users
50% of our active users log on to Facebook in any given day
Most tech companies report registered users; Facebook being the notable exception. When Twitter says they have 200M users or Skype says they have 650M users, they're reporting registered, not active, users. That Foursquare only reports registered users is in line with what most of the rest of the industry does.
sure it makes the company look better, but its also nice to avoid the arguments over "what is an active user"
"in line with what most of the rest of the industry does" doesn't make it any better of a metric.
It sucks a little, but I'm not sure what to do about it.
-harryh, engineering lead @ foursquare