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Comment by gdilla | Hacker News Reader

I was so puzzled why a company like Foursquare, which if they didn't invent the check-in, brought it to our lives, and associated their brand with it, completely removed it from their flagship eponymous app and put in a new one called Swarm (which also has its own major annoyances). Shouldn't have this been the other way around? Foursquare is associated with checkins. Now you're trying to transform "Foursquare" into a smarter Yelp? I'm sure it can be a competitive service, but confusing your 100MM strong user base with these changes isn't going to help.

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> I was so puzzled why a company like Foursquare, which if they didn't invent the check-in, brought it to our lives, and associated their brand with it, completely removed it from their flagship eponymous app

It's because check-ins don't work. After the novelty wears off, nobody wants to check in. Nobody. Like those stupid plastic awareness bracelets, check-ins were a fad that flared briefly and is now completely, 100% over.

So if you're a company whose entire product identity was based on check-ins, you have two choices:

1) Come up with something, anything else that can be plausibly jammed into your app, and run with that; or

2) Go out of business.

Unsurprisingly they went with #1, even if from the perspective of retaining some shred of dignity #2 would have been the better choice.

I didn't mean to imply it's a bad strategy to take on local personalized search, but the implementation to date is so confusing. If I open up Foursquare now to check in, it bounces me to Swarm. If I use Swarm to check in and want to see tips on a venue, it bounces me back to Foursquare. This is insanity.

I know a ton of people in the Bay Area that actively check-in. Please speak for your own experience.

You may not be aware of this, but the Bay Area is not exactly a representative sample of Mass Market Behavior.

But that doesn't really matter, because we can resolve the dispute with a simple question: if check-ins were a mass-market thing, would Foursquare (and everyone else who tried them, like Facebook) be running away from them?

The answer is no, obviously. If they worked, companies would be piling in, not checking out. But they don't, so they are.

> the Bay Area is not exactly a representative sample of Mass Market Behavior.

No, it's not. But neither is

> After the novelty wears off, nobody wants to check in. Nobody. Like those stupid plastic awareness bracelets, check-ins were a fad that flared briefly and is now completely, 100% over.

Well, if people in the Bay Area do it then clearly everyone does.

</Hacker News>

> > After the novelty wears off, nobody wants to check in. Nobody. Like those stupid plastic awareness bracelets, check-ins were a fad that flared briefly and is now completely, 100% over.

There is such a thing as exaggeration to make a point. I'm pretty sure the author is aware that there are more than literally zero people checking in with Foursquare. As is everyone.

On a similar note, I could list the reasons why checking in is, in fact, nothing like "those stupid plastic awareness bracelets". But that would be a waste of everyone's time.

How many times does someone get to explicitly state absolutes before reasonable readers stop inferring that they are exaggerating? If the statement was "nobody wants to check in anymore," that's pretty clearly an exaggeration. But that statement said "nobody" twice, and "completely," and "100%." If someone had wanted to literally claim that zero people check in, how would they do that?

They would say "Literally no people want to check in." Because that's what "literally" means. (Literally!)

But since my use of hyperbole (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperbole) clearly touched some deep vein with you, how about this:

"An insignificant number of people, too small to provide a VC-backed startup with even a minimally acceptable exit, want to check in anymore."

Feel free to mentally substitute this version for my earlier, more-fun-to-read-while-still-making-the-same-point version whenever you browse this thread.

You're welcome.

Thanks for linking me to the Wikipedia article on hyperbole. I have 100% never heard of that concept. Also I wanted to thank you for something, because you already said "you're welcome" and I don't want to leave you hanging.

>They would say "Literally no people want to check in." Because that's what "literally" means. (Literally!)

"Literally" also had a second meaning of "figuratively" for the last century or two. So your attempt is, once again, ambiguous.

I'd actually like to see your argument - I can see the possible benefit to business owners if their customers use Foursquare, but I've never been able to figure out why anyone would want to use Foursquare in the first place. What benefit does the user get out of checking in everywhere he goes?

I've been actively checking into places for around 4 years. Several of my friends do as well.

Anecdotes don't make for a good business model.

Foursquare checking in and fighting for the mayorship of places is a thing in Rio.

Do you mean "people", or you know, bay area / technical types?

'Coz there's a huge difference (inasmuch as the Valley might want to forget this).

The personalized search is a good thing. I have to agree and that is something I like, if I am in a different city.

But the problem, 4sq currently piss off those people who like to check-in. Most of the people I know, don't like Swarm and either have not made the move or stopped using Swarm. I myself, also almost stopped using Swarm. Because they reduced and modified the gaming aspect so that is no fun anymore.

The problem here is, if those people with the check-ins are going missing from the platform, because of those issues. Then the people fulling the database and as such the recommendation engine are going lost. That is long term problem.

The thing is, there was no need to separate it. They could have implemented the personal search the same way as they do it now. They even could have changed to hide or show the Check-in depending on how I have signed in.

I think gdilla's point isn't that the splitting of checkins is a bad idea, it's that they should have spun out a new app with this new stuff, and kept the check-in game in the original app.

There's a lot of merit to this IMO. Foursquare the brand is completely and 100% associated with checking in to places. It seems silly to break the checkin feature into a completely new app, under a completely new brand, while trying to convince everyone that Foursquare is no longer Foursquare but is stilled called Foursquare.

IMO the better move was to keep Foursquare around but launch a separately-branded app for the discoverability.

Theoretically, you are right. But SMBs have heard of Foursquare and this is invaluable for them as this is how they are going to make money in the end. As for consumers - you are right for the single digit millions who check in from time to time, but for others? Foursquare is an app that was not for them, but they know it was about local and they did not mind it. The hard part is going to convince them that this new app is more interesting and better than Yelp, Sosh or others.

Anecdotally I've actually had to explain to multiple people that they should use Foursquare (I find the discoverability features actually excellent) - and been met by the "but that's the check-in app" response.

The number of active people checking in is certainly low, but general mass-market awareness of their (former?) line of business is quite high.

So on top of convincing people your discoverability features are great, you have to first convince them that your app isn't what they already think it is. Personally I think this is very poor branding.

Where did you find that the check-in rate is low? The only numbers I could find state that it's in the millions per day.

Millions compared to what? Their historical peak check-in rate? Number of active users? Number of total users?

Everything I've seen anecdotally points to Foursquare having a small core of highly active users (people who check in multiple times a day), with a very, very, very long tail of infrequent/never users.

I have no inside information on this, but I'm also willing to bet that their current daily check-in rate is lower than what it was at their peak. The whole checkin phenomenon came and went, and while it's not gone entirely, it's simply no longer relevant to the mass market. "Millions" of checkins a day is, frankly, very low for a consumer tech product that has existed for 5 years and taken $160mm in funding.

With IFTT and the like, check-ins can be made useful. When I check in to a food place, a note goes to my walking tracking wristband app. I also back them up to spreadsheets, etc. etc.

But check-ins are very much still a thing here in Rio. Of course, I only do check-ins at interesting places anymore (who has the time to fill up their meals in My Fitness Pal or whatever), and so do the four friends I have on Foursquare. It's a more intimate thing.

When I check in to a food place, a note goes to my walking tracking wristband app. I also back them up to spreadsheets, etc. etc.

I'm not convinced that's ever going to be mass-market behaviour, though.

"It's because check-ins don't work. After the novelty wears off, nobody wants to check in. Nobody. Like those stupid plastic awareness bracelets, check-ins were a fad that flared briefly and is now completely, 100% over."

Let's look at the upside of all of this though. And this is an important lesson which shows in part why it's not good to be to smart and know to much. Someone who knew better would know not to even try doing a foursquare type app. To much friction, little reward (long term) and "check-ins don't work". Someone who doesn't goes ahead and gives it a try, builds a company, and now pivots to something else which may very well work. Which kind of dovetails with the VC model. Don't try to hard to think what will work just make a bunch of bets on a team and keep your fingers crossed that something good will happen along the way to failure.

Ah yes, the "spray and pray" approach to business.

That's the point. Everyone thinks of them as a "useless check-in app"; they decided they had to do something drastic for people to take notice of their (awesome) location discovery platform.

Foursquare has huge brand recognition, and it would take a long time to build that up for their new app (which will be the way 4Sq makes money going forward).

EDIT: Put the word useless inside the quotes rather than outside — I like 4sq!

Check-ins have been valuable to them in so far as data and intelligence. It hasn't been valuable to them as something to monetize off of enough to satisfy investors. Hence the pivot in the hopes of more Yelp like ad revenue. But I wouldn't say check-ins are useless - they do help users in various ways when applied right.

Oh sorry, I should have included "useless" in quotes. I personally love Foursqare checkins -- I love seeing which of my friends have checked in at places I'm considering, I love having a history of where I've been, etc.

But the article itself states that the Foursquare name is associated with checkins. I don't argue with splitting it in two, but I'm confused about why they made checkins 'Swarm' and are trying to transition the checkin-associated name of Foursquare.

It's interesting and I agree with you about their huge brand recognition. Unfortunately, they have a lot of negativity around the brand. Just look at the comments here around "horrible vanity app" etc. I wonder if they shouldn't have left Foursquare as the Check In app and had the "Swarm" equivalent be the new search and recommendation engine. They could have gotten most folks to move I suspect and not have to deal with all the negativity around the Foursquare app. Personally I love a pivot so I hope they're successful either way. I've started using it for discovery when traveling and think it has legs.

> Now you're trying to transform "Foursquare" into a smarter Yelp? I'm sure it can be a competitive service, but confusing your 100MM strong user base with these changes isn't going to help.

This is how I've been using Foursquare for the last two years and have found it to be a more enjoyable experience. The like it or don't like it review model just works better for me, not to mention the reviews on Foursquare are not nearly as painful as ones on Yelp. I think they could have done it without creating such a jarring experience, but I feel they waited too long and now are trying to force it too much.

if their ultimate monetization strategy is the smarter yelp stuff, then building on the foursquare app makes more sense (trying to reacquire all those users would be costly)

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