B) Facebook isn't buying the product (they don't care about the product). They're just hiring a couple of engineers/designers/product folks.
I can see why you've taken this attitude though, since commenters here are attacking Foursquare and making you seem like you lost to Gowalla+FB, but there is really no need to say these things in HN.
Sorry if I was curt. Just trying to be clear and concise.
which I thought was abrasive.
There are millions of people, like myself, who will never have a Facebook account - or at least will use services that are not fuly coupled to FB.
I think, while one should certainly keep track of what facebook does - one should never not do something/change their behavior simply because of facebook
Why would you expect him to lavish complements on a competitor that lost by a wide margin?
My love affair with Gowalla was prematurely extinguished when they pivoted to local guides, but I hope that this acquisition means that they'll bring some of their original magic to Facebook.
Coat of paint and nice UI doesn't always win.
We've travelled a lot, and this happens coast to coast in big cities and small.
I've always really dug Gowalla (when I check in, typically only around an event like SXSW, it's what I've used), but when real people are talking about you in real life (an initially slow, but snowballing and very effective advertising model), all over the country--you end up winning.
Go walls was in some ways a kind of straw an against Foursquare. You had someone to be "100:1" against. Now who is your competitor?
I would not call this inconsequential because it can also be interpreted as the non-viability of check-in sites as a distinct business.
I appreciate you engaging in the conversation but you haven't convinced me that this acquisition is in anyway irrellevant to Foursquare.
To answer your question about who our competitor is, it's the same as it's always been (and always will be): the back button. Our job, as pg says, is to build something people want. We started by building checkins and attracted millions of users doing that, now we're moving on to building the best social city guide we possibly can as well as starting to explore interesting new ways for local merchants to communicate with their customers.
It's not about beating someone else. It's about building something useful enough that people will pay attention at all. That's what startups are really about.
if you want to talk about check-ins.. check-ins are commodity, i'm sure foursquare knows this. noone says "hmm.. what app to check in??? hmm what competitors to try?" they go "hmm.. what's interesting and fun way to show off and impress others while i'm here in this restaurant? facebook? foursquare? foodspotting?"
I believe this is primarily when you're starting out. You're trying to decide if there's a market at all and having competitors lends some credence to that.
Once you already have the traffic that FourSquare does, I don't think it matters anymore. One case where it might be different is if there were some paradigm shift where there were a whole bunch of similar companies for a long time and all of them had dropped out of a dying game while a single company was holding on -- but that's not going on here.
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Exhibit A: Simon Cowell Exhibit B: Donald Trump Exhibit C: RMS