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Foursquare: An Ads Business With a Dying Product Hook

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Re: Foursquare: An Ads Business With a Dying Product Hook

#11
post #4

i wanna know how to hack facebook account kindly plz help me sir ???

use SendGrid to impersonate that person's significant other.

In the email, tell them you need to know their password and that your email changed to something and they need to email it there.

TaDa!

Re: Foursquare: An Ads Business With a Dying Product Hook

#12
post #7

I largely agree with the OP. This reminds me of Loopt. If I were Foursquare, I would use the metadata (reviews, checkins, etc) to build a Yellow Pages site that's powered by 4sq users gestures. But I'd leave monitization out of the consumer app entirely, and just focus on making it great and popular. Internet yellow pages is crazy boring, stupidly profitable, and waiting for disruption. Google Places and Yelp are cur…

i've been a long time foursquare hater, I never understood why anyone would want to "check-in". That being said I have used their explore feature for restaurants in NYC for about a year, and find it vastly superior to yelp.

Why? Tips.

When i look up a place on foursquare I immediately know "what to order" at a given place, I often will look up a place at foursquare while I am sitting there deciding what to order. The question will be how can they sustain the same level of content generation if their main hook is fading.

Re: Foursquare: An Ads Business With a Dying Product Hook

#13

I'm curious what others think about this. I'm a fan of Foursquare and their team and hope I am wrong about this. I'm also confident they will still have a large exit. That being said, without a product hook that's very engaging, I think it's hard to build a local ads business, which is what I think Foursquare sees as its revenue stream. Do people see Foursquare differently, as say, an ecommerce company? Do they even…

I agree completely with your post. I've never been compelled to use Foursquare, but have observed friends who were into the original check-in idea gradually pull away because of the force-feeding.

B2C is hard to monetize, period. The Groupon collapse sort of shut one possible revenue door for Foursquare. Twitter can pull off ads because it has a big brand draw that Foursquare just doesn't.

I respect the team, but I don't envy their position.

Re: Foursquare: An Ads Business With a Dying Product Hook

#14
post #7

I largely agree with the OP. This reminds me of Loopt. If I were Foursquare, I would use the metadata (reviews, checkins, etc) to build a Yellow Pages site that's powered by 4sq users gestures. But I'd leave monitization out of the consumer app entirely, and just focus on making it great and popular. Internet yellow pages is crazy boring, stupidly profitable, and waiting for disruption. Google Places and Yelp are cur…

i've been a long time foursquare hater, I never understood why anyone would want to "check-in". That being said I have used their explore feature for restaurants in NYC for about a year, and find it vastly superior to yelp. Why? Tips. When i look up a place on foursquare I immediately know "what to order" at a given place, I often will look up a place at foursquare while I am sitting there deciding what to order. The…

Can you explain what you mean? The current Yelp app has both Reviews and Tips.

Re: Foursquare: An Ads Business With a Dying Product Hook

#15
The pastry example is really important. You can't just serve ads to people, they have to be targeted toward the users' interests. Perhaps they're based on your check-in history, but this won't convert well to sporadic users.

I don't know how the majority of Foursquare users use the service, but my friends and I pretty much only use it to check-in - at a place that we had pre-determined. There is no discovery or opportunity for an ad to capture my attention or push me toward a promoted business. If I'm going to get a burger I don't care about your pastry ad. But there's no way for Foursquare to get this information. Not without disrupting the check-in experience.

As has been suggested, I don't see how Foursquare can grow their ad network with this kind of usage. How can they convince businesses to sign on?

Re: Foursquare: An Ads Business With a Dying Product Hook

#16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i've been a long time foursquare hater, I never understood why anyone would want to "check-in". That being said I have used their explore feature for restaurants in NYC for about a year, and find it vastly superior to yelp. Why? Tips. When i look up a place on foursquare I immediately know "what to order" at a given place, I often will look up a place at foursquare while I am sitting there deciding what to order. The…

Can you explain what you mean? The current Yelp app has both Reviews and Tips.

combo of a lot of things, yelp's UI always seems 2 years old, feels bloated, and generally takes me longer to do anything. I use yelp on the web, foursquare on the go.

Re: Foursquare: An Ads Business With a Dying Product Hook

#17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i've been a long time foursquare hater, I never understood why anyone would want to "check-in". That being said I have used their explore feature for restaurants in NYC for about a year, and find it vastly superior to yelp. Why? Tips. When i look up a place on foursquare I immediately know "what to order" at a given place, I often will look up a place at foursquare while I am sitting there deciding what to order. The…

Can you explain what you mean? The current Yelp app has both Reviews and Tips.

For me, Yelp has been completely ruined by what amounts to YouTube comments.

"The server was totally rude. She put lemon in my diet coke when I asked TWICE not to do that. It was the worst experience of my life."

Foursquare seems to have less batshit insane people on it. They actually do helpful things like post the wireless password.

Re: Foursquare: An Ads Business With a Dying Product Hook

#18
post #7

I largely agree with the OP. This reminds me of Loopt. If I were Foursquare, I would use the metadata (reviews, checkins, etc) to build a Yellow Pages site that's powered by 4sq users gestures. But I'd leave monitization out of the consumer app entirely, and just focus on making it great and popular. Internet yellow pages is crazy boring, stupidly profitable, and waiting for disruption. Google Places and Yelp are cur…

That is sort of what Google's Niantic Labs is doing with Field Trip, though with more a discovering cool places angle than finding local businesses: http://www.fieldtripper.com/

Field Trip uses data from bunch of different sources, but also utilizes Ingress players as sort of "location scouts".

Or at least that is what it looks like, with the focus on gathering new portals at points of interest.

Re: Foursquare: An Ads Business With a Dying Product Hook

#20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain what you mean? The current Yelp app has both Reviews and Tips.

For me, Yelp has been completely ruined by what amounts to YouTube comments. "The server was totally rude. She put lemon in my diet coke when I asked TWICE not to do that. It was the worst experience of my life." Foursquare seems to have less batshit insane people on it. They actually do helpful things like post the wireless password.

whoever captures more of the market gets those insane people too.
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