I realized yesterday that Foursquare has the right strategy to win the location-based race taking hold in the mainstream space of the social web.
I’ve personally become addicted to the point system on Foursquare. It’s actually kind of silly. Aside from being one more tool that boosts online visibility, winning at Foursquare doesn’t really mean anything at all. It does, however, make me feel good to see my name ranked in the top 10 players in Columbus each week. Aside from a nice, little, warm and fuzzy feeling, the ranking really means nothing at all.
I still find myself driven by the stats and, with that, “checking in” has become habitual. I check in at home, work and just about everywhere. I find myself on the hunt for unclaimed spots just to get some bonus points. I recently unlocked my Super Mayor badge for holding 10 Mayorships (if you’ve been to a place more than anyone else, they crown you “The Mayor” of that place) at one time. Groovy.
My own patterns in playing the game remind me of former obsessions with games like Super Contra, Wolfenstein, Doom and even Mario Cart. I used to stay up all hours of the night trying to beat the machine and unlock the next levels. There was no reward there either, just a little entertainment and a small sense of self actualization.
My adoption of Foursquare over other location-based apps like BrightKite and Gowalla has been bred by the virtual and meaningless competition.
It’s All Fun and Games…
Founder Dennis Crowley states on his website that Foursquare is “… a service that mixes social, locative and gaming elements to encourage people explore the cities in which they live.” Can you find the most important word in that sentence?
“Encourage.”
Dennis and his team realized the importance of the gaming aspect of the social web. If you look closely, you will start to realize that entire social web is really one great big video game. Brogan and Smith highlight this idea throughout Trust Agents. Some of us play the social web game all the time. We’re addicted to the game. And the more we play, the more we see and the more skills we develop as players.
In Foursquare, the point totals are crucial to driving adoption. But this time, I’m not referencing user adoption. In the location-based arena, humans are really the secondary audience. The real factor in what will determine the winner of the location-based race will be which application on-boards the highest number of locations.
Each business that is added to the system takes a location-based application one step closer to market dominance. That dominance ultimately creates the potential for revenue streams coming from those business that have been added to the system. You and I have learned that successful social web business models focus on building adoption first. Generating revenue is typically realized once a critical mass has been reached. This has been the pattern with social networks like Facebook, Twitter and even YouTube (via acquisition by Google).
The moral of the story is this: focus on building the network (whether it’s humans or locations) and with enough of a following and a decent business sense, the money will come.
One-Upping Wikipedia
Remember Wikipedia? It’s become the dominant reference database of our era and obliterated competition like Webster and Brittanica. Much like the present-day location-based apps, Wikipedia was built by it’s users. The model worked because it empowered you and I to build the system over time. Wikipedia launched in 2003, taking a considerable amount of time to make it what it is today. In the web world, seven years to critical mass has become way too long.
My gut tells me Dennis Crowley has found (and is exploiting) the missing component of Wikipedia’s model with his application. The competitive aspect of Foursquare is creating mavens and power users. And these individuals are driving on-boarding at a much faster rate than Wikipedia could have ever experienced. The first location-based application to capture the largest majority of the map will ultimately win in the long-term. Right now, it looks to me like Foursquare has designed a formula to make that happen.
Do you use Foursquare? What do you think? When was the last time you checked in?
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