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Suppose wycats checks in at some interesting-sounding dive bar in the Mission. I want to click and see pics of the place and the menu and a map showing what's nearby.
(not implying wycats was a foursquare user just that he's a celebrity developer / trendsetter...)
It looks more like a long and steady decline that has slowed somewhat since releasing Swarm. https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=swarm%20app%2C%20fou... Note that you should sum the two together to be fair, meaning they haven't declined much since a year ago.
I'm still astounded by this. They had a #&$%ing verb . That is the #&$%ing gold standard of presence. "I'm going to foursquare this." I actually heard real human beings say this. If your app name has become a verb the last thing you ever want to do is refocus . If you want to go to a ratings app like they apparently did (because... uh... that's not a saturated space or anything?...) then you make another app and leav…
> wildly successful app Foursquare didn't agree. They didn't pivot just because it's the cool thing to do.
The funny thing is, I bet a graph of their profits would be totally different. Companies like Yelp and Foursquare are actually in the blackmail business. They needed the users to achieve a massive amount of reviews. Now they just collect "protection money" from business to remove / prevent bad reviews and laugh all the way to the bank. At least, that is the only way I can see their move making any kind of sense.
I hope you have some kind of evidence for that, because it's a pretty serious accusation to throw around.
I personally loved the check-in feature. With hundreds of millions in VC $, foursquare had to find another way to make money. They're on the way to building a really nice business with their reviews and ad-tech business.
I hope they didn't raise too much money before figuring it out.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
was impossible to monetize successfully No excuse. If you have a timestamped record of people's interactions with physical businesses and can't find a way to monetize that, sell to one of the thousands of people who can connect those dots pretty easily. And how do you possibly convince yourself that moving into an already-saturated market like ratings is going to help?
Has anyone been able to successfully monetize check-ins? It seems that if it were that straight forward to monetize as you suggest, someone would have done this by now. Even Facebook's check-in system seems to have faded in popularity as far as I can tell.