Now you can play Foursquare anywhere
Attention, suburbanites: You, too, can be the mayor of your local Home Depot. — That's because New York-based mobile location-sharing service Foursquare has made a subtle but big improvement. It's no longer restricted to a list of cities …
Context & Ripple Effects
Foursquare spent late 2009 widening its footprint before opening its map: the service launched an Android client in September to sit alongside its iPhone app, then raised a $1.35 million seed round from Union Square Ventures and O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures. The move mattered because a November TechCrunch piece warned that Facebook was poised to dominate geo, raising the cost of Foursquare staying a boutique, city-by-city product.
Dropping the restricted city list is Foursquare's answer on both fronts: it converts the check-in game from a curated-metro novelty into something usable in any suburb or small town, exactly where rival platforms would have national reach from day one.
First-order effects
- Users outside the covered cities — the suburbanites the headline addresses — can now check in anywhere and compete for mayorships of venues like Home Depot that were previously unreachable.
- Foursquare's growth constraint flips from how fast it can add cities to how fast users adopt it, since every new market is live immediately rather than gated by a launch list.
Second-order effects
- Local merchants beyond the major metros become addressable for mayorship-style rewards and promotions, extending the merchant-facing pitch that powered Foursquare's city launches into unmanaged territory.
- If Facebook moves on geo as its critics expect, it will face a Foursquare whose venue data and user base are no longer confined to a handful of dense urban markets.
Third-order effects
- Location-sharing shifts from being a feature of select cities to table-stakes national coverage, making comprehensive place databases and check-in volume — not launch-city exclusivity — the competitive moat in consumer geo.
The trend: Check-in services are racing to scale from curated metro lists to everywhere-availability before large social platforms make geography a mainstream feature rather than a niche game.