153 karma · joined September 13, 2011
Customer feedback only gets you so far. Often times people don't know what they want or what the core problem they're having is.
New visitors are unlikely to sign up before even viewing the site. You may want to popup that modal on the 2nd or 3rd page view.
Foursquare answers a basic question: what around me is worth doing? (Mainly that is eating for me). Popping up explore this morning gives me a list of interesting coffee shops and breakfast places in my neighborhood. It's truely an awesome feature.
One mistake I think Foursquare made was that their MVP and/or product guidance was too minimal. A lot of my friends have abandoned the product because they didn't see enough initial value. I felt the same thing at first. "I checked-in, now what?" Their social features are only good if you have friends on the service, that are active, AND live in the same area. Their explore, radar, and lists features are awesome, but they came a bit too late and their website is only now catching up to the mobile experience. I also think they still have work to do on the social aspect.
Foursquare is optimized for densely populated urban areas (They are based in NYC), so I'm not sure if it'll reach critical mass like Facebook/Twitter, however, those are still substantial markets. I see it doing very well in Europe.
The results may be a lot different when compiling with just -O2 -ffast-math.