Foursquare’s Dennis Crowley Can’t Stop Believing | Hacker News Reader

Foursquare’s Dennis Crowley Can’t Stop Believing

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33 pointsprostoalex8 comments

Previously discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9433580

Having read this I'm substantially more convinced that Dennis Crowley knows what he's doing. The only bit Foursquare has really messed up was the split into two apps, but it's not something that they can't fix. Swarm being an app that feeds data into the main Foursquare app is a hard setup to make work (users might use one or the other, and not both), but Facebook has made it work with Messenger and the main Facebook app.

Foursquare has a lot of data. As a bonus, they've also realised that the company is very likely viable just living off other people wanting that data. If they can use that data well, I wouldn't be surprised if Foursquare turns into a serious competitor for Yelp (or even TripAdvisor, etc). If anyone wanted to try and usurp Yelp, it'll be Foursquare, not Facebook or Google or Apple.

Google, with their map products used on phones, websites and via their web search, is in a far better position to supplant yelp/trip advisor etc, because they have much more data than someone like foursquare; they have visits, searches, route requests worldwide and also the POI data which they are encouraging people to use and enter for them.

Foursquare has a substantial amount of 3 of those 4 data sources - and with Swarm, the potential to continuously improve those data sources quicker than Google has been able to.

Route requests probably aren't that interesting to someone trying to supplant Yelp - if you were trying to supplant TripAdvisor you might want travel bookings, but that's a case of connecting to the users email account (with their permission) and grabbing the lovely JSON encoded tickets and booking details.

They are in that position, yet Maps is still unusable without the mandatory two clicks every time to "Return to classic" and Google Reviews is but a stunted afterthought. Plenty of time for competitors to grow while waiting for Google's interface design to come out of that coma.

Foursquare may have a lot of data, but isn't that data getting stale? I mean, a lot of the location/check-in data is from the particular demographic of user who played the mayor game, and many of those users don't play anymore (or nearly not as much).

On the other hand, Google and Apple don't need you to install anything additionally on your phone and they know where you are and when you're there.

When a founder can't explain what his own company does, it's a bad sign.

It seems success has gone to their heads. Jerking your users around is a very bad idea. Building an expectation that your app does one thing and then pulling the rug out destroys trust when trust is the most valuable asset you have. These guys seem to think they are so awesome that they can do this and get away with it. Their conviction that Foursquare must build the app that only they can envison or it will never get built is nonsense. Someone else will come along and build it. They might not build precisely the same thing, but play fast and free with the trust of your userbase and someone will eat your lunch.

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