Like I mentioned in the last post on the subject, ‘Location’ is back in a social avatar. A few days back, Foursquare celebrated its first year of existence, and now has more than 500000 users, 1.4 million venues, and $1.35 million in VC funding. I celebrated it with only my fourth mayorship. 😉 But there are a few more reasons why I decided to do a post. Both Foursquare and Gowalla had been launched at SXSW last year, and this year, location based services (LBS from now) are expected to be the talking point, much like Twitter 3 years back. 🙂
In my last post, I had mentioned the specific competition in the space – Loopt, MyTown, Gowalla, Yelp, developments happening there, as well as the tie ups that Foursquare has managed with HBO, Warner, Zagat. Since Foursquare is arguably the poster child of LBS, and since there haven’t been any dramatic game changing developments from other players, I’ll focus on Foursquare and a couple of players you would know from earlier.
Foursquare recently announced that it was launching a few business tools, which include basic statistics like total check ins, unique visitors, sharing to Twitter/ Facebook, gender split, time breakdown etc. More importantly, it gives business establishments real time information that can help them plan promotions, take care of customer complaints, keep track of customer loyalty etc. There’s also a page where staff can interact with customers. Though these might seem basic now, more detailing is bound to happen very soon, which will perhaps allow quick polls on menu items, service, allow optimisation that will cut things like waiting time etc. Indeed, Starbucks, which has been very active in the ‘social’ space, is now linking Foursquare to its rewards program, for instance, allowing users to earn a ‘Barista’ badge when they check in to 5 separate Starbucks outlets.
According to Alexa, India contributes to 2.4% of Foursquare’s traffic, and is the 8th largest contributor. Maybe not the surest of sources, but its an indicator nevertheless. With rapidly increasing mobile penetration, net access costs are likely to come down, and this could mean good news for players like Foursquare. Imagine the implications on the CCD controversy if the Foursquare implementation had been done. 🙂
(Interesting Read in context : Why “Where Are You Doing It?” Trumps “What Are You Doing?”)
But wait, there have been other developments too. Twitter, still my favourite service out there, has turned on geo location. The API has been around for a while now, but it wasn’t really anything that anyone seemed to be taking an interest in. The first time I saw the implementation, was on a tweet from LBhat. Check out that tiny pin at the end, and you’ll see where he tweeted from. With the kind of development that happens with Twitter’s open API, there are bound to be some interesting apps very soon. Not to mention that Foursquare is already integrated with Twitter. (All this reminds me of an app called CitySense that I wrote about almost a couple of years back)
Meanwhile, it has also been pretty clear that Facebook would make a play for local very soon. There was speculation recently that Facebook was showing an interest in Loopt, but nothing has been confirmed yet. What has been revealed is that it will unveil its location based features in April at its developer conference, f8. (location is shown on a Google Map 😉 ) Facebook has been pushing its mobile interface a lot recently, check out your logout page, or the ads on the right side of your home page telling you how many friends are using it. The article states that its more a play for local advertising (against Google) than against services like Foursquare. Business pages + location features for users + tools built from API will be interesting. But it will also be interesting to see what they do about privacy. Something that remains a challenge for Google too, especially when Buzz and Latitude are integrated.
Meanwhile, there are other interesting players emerging. Check out Miso, a Foursquare style app for TV and movies, RateItAll, that now wants to help businesses build their own Foursquare, Pelago’s Whrrl, which tries to connect social networking with real social activity – real places where ‘regulars’ meet up. Location based services are interesting because they integrate the real and virtual worlds. When I look at these and other interesting developments like say, Google Street View (have you seen Hong Kong yet?!), and Augmented Reality experiments, the ‘Internet of Things‘ I think we haven’t even scratched the surface of the possibilities.
until next time, now for vocation based services 😉
Update: Just read that we now have a check in Aggregator – Rummble. Read about it here.