Thoughts on FourSquare and Gowalla
Nowadays everybody tweets, instagrams and checks in to FourSquare or Gowalla and there’s not a lot of blogging going on. That’s a bit of a shame because I like reading real, long form content. Most tweets are so mundane I wonder why the “authors” even posted them. Thanks to Twitter’s easy follow/unfollow mechanism you can filter out the stupid tweeters; but not the stupid tweets. Say there’s a person who posts interesting content but also feels the need to check in IN HIS OWN HOUSE on FourSquare everyday. Apart from being ultra-handy for thieves and robbers — who can then just check Twitter to see if Person X’s house is available to be robbed — it’s downright annoying. What’s the value of this “location based tweet”?
If I arrive at a conference I could potentially check in to FourSquare to find out who else I know is there (or I could just take a look around…). Gowalla is doing some interesting things with travel paths (see: this article) where the app remembers that you checked in at SFO and NY airport six hours apart, thus meaning that you are travelling. The website lays out a visual plan of where you were. Kind of like what iPhoto does when you import a lot of GPS-tagged photos: afterwards you can generate a map of your walk around a city. One can only conclude that Gowalla doesn’t know what their value is yet, but they’re in a good position with lots of venture capital, so why not experiment?
Gowalla promotes itself with “check in at place X and reap the rewards”. I, for one, haven’t seen any real life Gowalla or FourSquare based promotion so far. I’ve read a few articles where the major of a certain place would receive a discount on his drinks but that’s all. The idea is good: you come at some place a lot, you receive discounts.
However, this idea already exists in many forms. There’s the customer card where you receive a discount after having spent X amount of cash at the store/shop/café, or after paying 10 times. There’s the social act which is getting to know the patron so he gives you a little extra coffee every time you come. I don’t get how checking in to Gowalla ten times would overrule any of these. However we twist and turn the story there will never be a situation where EVERYONE chooses to use location-based apps because not everyone feels the need to a) buy an iPhone or other smartphone b) share their whereabouts with the world all the time c) Go on their smartphone when they could just be enjoying their coffee in the sun.
I mean, don’t we have to handle computers enough already doing our jobs? You and I might not think so but the majority of people might do. However, anyone can keep a customer card in their pocket and anyone can just get to know the shopkeeper/patron/owner of the business. So how are FourSquare and Gowalla going to overrule these customs? They’re not going to.
To conclude, I don’t know what the value of FourSquare and Gowalla is. All I know is that the “just checked in at XXX” tweets are annoying; that I don’t want the whole internet to know where I am; and that VCs are looking for new darlings but not finding anything. (Quora, anyone?)
(If you want to comment, please do so in English. Thanks!)
6 reacties op “Thoughts on FourSquare and Gowalla”
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My thoughts exactly.
I don’t agree completely. It would take a whole evening to explain the reasoning (you’re right, long form content still rules).
But here’s two nuggets as food for thought.
1. You don’t like mundane tweets? Well, most of humanity do like them - they’re called ’smalltalk’. It’s the lubricant of society.
You’ll learn that through this small talk, we get to know each other, we learn the context of each other.
If you only want to have meaningful, deep-thought conversations, you’re missing out on a most pleasurable aspect of being human. It’s only robots and Mr. Spock who do not see the value in the so-called idle chat.
2. “I, for one, haven’t seen any real life Gowalla or FourSquare based promotion so far.”
You’re making the mistake to take yourself and your own (limited) observations as the centre of the universe.
I have seen *lots* of 4square promotions. Yes, in Ghent, in Flanders.
3. “I don’t get how checking in to Gowalla ten times would overrule any of these.”
Checking in is not just a solipsistic act - it’s not just an interaction between you (customer) and patron (seller). The added value is that you broadcast this act (in one way or another) to your network - thus providing extra value to the seller.
This means a repeat checkin has more value for a seller than a repeat visit.
(On a sidenote, this is the future of marketing - a shift from company->consumer to consumer->consumer.)
I have to agree with Bart, I’ve seen a number of promotions in Bxl as well. When I was in the land of Oz in November, especially in Sydney and Melbourne, it was promotions galore!
And again, point 3 of Bart is very valid. How annoying is it to comment late! Other intelligent (apart from the fact Bart has issues counting three nuggets) people say everything you want to say yourself ;-)
I do feel your pain when some of my contacts deem it necessary to share all their check-ins on twitter, even the rather irrelevant ones. But what the heck…
Personally, I could care less about people checking in every half hour on services like Gowalla or Foursquare. Nor do I have an issue with the fact that people like to take a lot of photos. But what I do have a problem with is this growing need for some people to have it all blasted out to Twitter.
Leave the updates on the service itself and allow your followers to follow or not follow you in a more selective way (or at least selectively push some updates to Twitter). If I want to know where you are all the time, I’ll follow you on Gowalla. When I want to see your photography I’ll subscribe to your Flickr RSS feed or friend you on Instagram. But at least I get a choice this way.
Autodumping *everything* on Twitter (or Facebook for that matter) makes it impossible for others to selectively root out the stuff they aren’t interested in.
But hey, everyone’s free to use these services as they see fit (regardless of how I or others feel about it) :)
I agree that small talk is necessary to get to know each other but that doesn’t mean I want automated tweets in my Twitter stream. I could go to FourSquare if I wanted to know that. Duplicate content (e.g. seeing content in your feed reader and on Flickr; having to mark DMs as read on your desktop AND your laptop AND your phone) is another subject on it’s own. We’re going to need better filters in the future. The current Twitter apps with filters are nowhere as good as the official Twitter app. So official Twitter team, if you read this, please add filters!
I haven’t seen any promotions yet, of course there are FourSquare promotions in the world. In my post I was trying to find reasons to use FourSquare or Gowalla [for myself]. I haven’t seen any of these promotions, so the promo aspect is useless [for me]. No, the universe doesn’t center around me, but my choises are based on the universe that centers around me. You see?
(3) Agree it provides value to the seller, business exposure = good.
Side thought: customer cards, socializing and FSQ/Gowalla based discounts can all happily live next to each other, one doesn’t exclude the other.
I feel your pain when you say ‘duplicate content’. I can live with gowalla and foursquare check-ins (but I disabled the push notifications), and I like to see every now and then in my twitter feed where some of the people I follow hang out. However, this doesn’t mean that I’m interested in the fact someone came home. What I do like about the gowalla/foursquare is the fact that I can check what’s around me, I have discovered restaurants are pubs that I didn’t know about thanks to these apps.
I do hate the fact that gowalla/instagram/… makes it possible to publish to flickr, twitter, tumblr, facebook, etc… Because this gives me duplicate content all over, thus leading to more irrelevant stuff in my twitter timeline, flickr overview, tumblr dashboard, etc…
But I don’t think this leads to less long-content-blogposts. I think that facebook, twitter, etc… made most blogs superfluous. I also blame people of getting lazy (myself included). I have dozens of unpublished content on my blog waiting to be finished and published and by the time I want to finish them, the content is mostly aged and sometimes already history.
I love reading long insightful articles where people share knowledge that can only be achieved by experience or by reading them on a blog of someone who experienced and shared something.