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Graph of Foursquare's Popularity After Removing Check-Ins

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Re: Graph of Foursquare's Popularity After Removing Check-Ins

#91

Post by bandrami »

alanmoo wrote: post #87
bandrami wrote: post #9

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…

"Oh, I'll TiVo that!" And how are they doing?

Pretty well. Actually very well. Meeting expenses with quite a bit of padding. That used to be the definition of success before the cult of "growth" took over everything.

Re: Graph of Foursquare's Popularity After Removing Check-Ins

#93

Post by emodendroket »

_asummers wrote: post #53
mtbcoder wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Facebook checkins that I see on my wall are usually limited to "I want to brag about the good food I'm eating without Instagramming a picture of it, so I'll just check in at the restaurant". I don't think people trust Facebook enough to overtly give it access to more important location data, or I could just have too much faith in the average FB user.

Your friends don't really sound like a representative sample. Most people complain about Facebook on privacy but don't modify their behavior in any way.

Re: Graph of Foursquare's Popularity After Removing Check-Ins

#94

Post by emodendroket »

bandrami wrote: post #15
onion2k wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They built something that, while wildly popular for a while, was impossible to monetize successfully. Checkins just don't represent any value to anyone (at least, not that Foursquare could get anyone to pay for). The lesson here is that you can build something amazing and still fail if you can't turn it in to a business.

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?

If I wanted that data, why would I pay instead of looking at it for free?

Re: Graph of Foursquare's Popularity After Removing Check-Ins

#95

Post by bandrami »

roel_v wrote: post #19
bandrami wrote: post #9

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…

"If your app name has become a verb the last thing you ever want to do is refocus." What? If you don't make money, you will go bankrupt . You can be a verb all you want, if it doesn't make money, it doesn't matter .

Ah, you fell for it too.

How much does it actually cost to run the foursquare that millions of users liked?

Hint: not very much.

If you can't make that "not very much" back from ads, you should sell to someone who can.

Re: Graph of Foursquare's Popularity After Removing Check-Ins

#96

Post by joeshaw »

bandrami wrote: post #9

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…

The app isn't the product. The points-of-interest database they built from their apps' users is the product. And that is what they're now selling to companies like Twitter.

Twitter's incorporation of the POI will give them much more "check-in" data than their own apps ever could.

https://medium.com/@dens/six-years-in-a-few-thoughts-on-four...

Re: Graph of Foursquare's Popularity After Removing Check-Ins

#97

Post by jedanbik »

emodendroket wrote: post #94
bandrami wrote: post #15

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?

If I wanted that data, why would I pay instead of looking at it for free?

I think because you'd want a stream of user info for your machine learning application.

Re: Graph of Foursquare's Popularity After Removing Check-Ins

#98

Post by bandrami »

joeshaw wrote: post #96
bandrami wrote: post #9

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…

The app isn't the product. The points-of-interest database they built from their apps' users is the product. And that is what they're now selling to companies like Twitter. Twitter's incorporation of the POI will give them much more "check-in" data than their own apps ever could. https://medium.com/@dens/six-years-in-a-few-thoughts-on-four...

Ah, yes, I've done broadcasting too. The app is not the product if it's free. But people mistake that: you still have to actually have an app people want, if you're going to make them the product.

Re: Graph of Foursquare's Popularity After Removing Check-Ins

#99

Post by DannoHung »

emodendroket wrote: post #94
bandrami wrote: post #15

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?

If I wanted that data, why would I pay instead of looking at it for free?

No API, have to be logged in to view, then implement anti-scraping measures.

Re: Graph of Foursquare's Popularity After Removing Check-Ins

#100

Post by wpietri »

josephmx wrote: post #33
dagw wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have two options. One will leave you bankrupt within a year or two with probability 1.0 and one will leave you bankrupt within year or two with probability 0.8. Which would you chose?

Except if they had monetised in a way that isn't changing their entire app then they would have been more likely to stay successful. This change was poorly thought out and probably wasn't going to be successful, same as if Twitter spun their micro-blogging to another app, it wouldn't end well.

> This change was poorly thought out

What's your evidence for that? I could entirely believe they thought it through very carefully, knew that this was a likely outcome, and did it anyhow because it was the best chance they saw for success.

Remember, this is the third checkin app in this series. It started life as a student project. The first commercial version was Dodgeball [1], which was created, grown, and purchased by Google before the iPhone even existed. Google wasted the opportunity, so Crowley started Foursquare and did it again.

Personally, I suspect they discovered that the whole check-in dynamic was fading. E.g., it's something people did for a while out of novelty and they expected its true long-term audience to be small.

Once you take VC money, it's "go big or go home". A small, modestly profitable company is not something your investors are interested in; they would rather you gamble and lose. And Foursquare took $162 million [2] so they had to go very big indeed. The "success" period of the article's graph looks like VC-failure to me.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodgeball_%28service%29

[2] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/foursquare

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