Posts tagged social

There is much talk about the developments happening at Facebook HQ thanks to CNET report saying that Foursquare’s competition is imminent and that too in a few weeks time. We all know by now that foursquare has been leading the Geo-Location based race and has already taken the cake away from GoWalla by adding innovative checkin rewards feature which has been accepted by major players such as Pizza Hut, Starbucks Coffee etc. 

Also reports suggest that facebook walked off from acquisition talks of foursquare after the owners of the Geo-Social-App asked for 25% more on top of US$ 120 million. Am clueless on how that valuation was reached? 

So is Foursquare now intimidated by Facebook’s own roll out plans? I don’t think they should be and this is why:

1. Foursquare is growing at a rapid pace which is more than good for a new start-up. (don’t worry about facebook’s 500 million)
2. The relationship & ease of working with Foursquare is all that is needed to be sorted out, this will make brands more comfortable. (facebook yet has no clue on what direction to take)
3. Early adopters have already created innovative solutions based on Foursquare’s API and have been seeing success pushing the same to their consumers. 
4. More impressive is the fact that majority of foursquare based promotions don’t even need a special app.. they can be pushed via other Social Networks and Medias. 
5. Its estimated that 90% of Foursquare users are via Facebook, I think this is due to the facebook connect feature & don’t see a reason why this figure will go down… unless facebook themselves has another competition. Which also seems possible given the zest of some developers. 
6. Foursquare will have loyalists as long as people gain from using the service… I’ve made this point before in my Gowalla vs Foursquare experiment. So unless facebook has something radically different, don’t even be bothered.
7. And my last point, Google’s continued failure at making their own Location based services popular should serve as an example. Foursquare has the advantage of being a small company which gives it a lot of flexibility… the larger corporations aren’t so. Hence they either try to acquire (easy way out) or simply duplicate the service.

Now lets see what happens… I’m definitely interested in facebook’s roll out of location based features… but for now I don’t see it as a threat to foursquare unlike other social media bloggers. 

Remember the Mantra: “Competition is always Good”. Go foursquare! 

frakyeahsocialmedia:

lookingforawesome:

I started this experiment to see how comfortable I was using either of the services mentioned here… both are Geo-Location based Social Networks built upon the idea that one should discover places around a city or a neighborhood. The timing couldn’t be perfect as I was also traveling out of my home town (Pune) to Bangalore & Delhi. Being the founder of foursquare Pune and having evangelized heavily to venues in my town, the responsibility here was huge and it was no surprise seeing the responses on my twitter timeline when I started pushing Gowalla checkins. 

There have been many comparisons between these two services and frankly you might have just said “there we go again” upon seeing this post. But the importance to me was not all those tech filled comparisons on why foursquare or gowalla were better but, the simple fact - which is easier to live with at the end of the day?

So here it is… it’s foursquare (No surprise).

But let me explain..

• Gowalla has an awesome User Interface… miles ahead of foursquare & is responsive too. I did not get failed checkins whenever I used the former, latter keeps going down as much as twitter does its failwhale. 
• Gowalla’s only weakness is also its strenght… its completely GPS based. So if for some reason, the GPS decides to tell you that you are not where you are (funny).. you cannot checkin. 
• Foursquare on the other hand is more user friendly.. but the whole process of checkins is pain in the ass especially when you have Non-Foursquare friends hanging around & waiting for you to start or be a part of the conversation. Oops!
• In the end Foursquare has an edge over Gowalla… where the Mayorship specials & checkin specials are concerned. None of the cities I travelled too had any of these, but I know that Pune has and it makes foursquare that much more valuable. 

So foursquare is more comfortable to live with as it offers rewards, offers great tips from members, tells you where your friends are and lets you compete for mayorships… the trick is for the venues now to adopt this or we’re gonna see some changes coming in from other competing Social Networks as well. 

Also what foursquare needs is to add more “experience” to the user interaction. Gowalla does this with trips and sadly as the service is hardly used by anyone.. other than foreigners who visit India… this is not a big deal yet. But please foursquare, am sure you can come up with something here? 

Hmm… End of Story. Would be glad to see your comments on this. 

Infographic.. ever imagined why so many applications were being developed or who was leading & where? Check this out:

Via: MBA Online