Foursquare Notches 100,000 New Users In 10 Days
Foursquare's SXSW push has paid off. The company just tweeted that it gained 100,000 new users in the last ten days. — That suggests that Foursquare has around 600,000 users now. (The NYT reported Foursquare has 500,000 users on Monday.)
Context & Ripple Effects
Foursquare entered SXSW week with real momentum behind it: back on February 5 it had passed one million check-ins a week, with the rate doubling in the previous month. The festival itself was framed as a head-to-head with rival Gowalla for the location-tagging crown, and the company had been broadening its reach beyond the tech crowd — including its first television commercial, aired on Bravo in late February.
The ten-day surge announced via tweet puts total users at roughly 600,000, up from the 500,000 figure the New York Times cited on Monday — meaning the festival alone drove something like a fifth of Foursquare's entire user base. That said, the growth lands against a live privacy backlash: February's "Please Rob Me" controversy forced Foursquare to publicly defend its check-in model, so each new wave of mainstream users arrives alongside heightened scrutiny of public location sharing.
First-order effects
- Foursquare exits SXSW with roughly 600,000 users and clear bragging rights over Gowalla in their festival-long duel for the top location-tagging service.
- The Bravo commercial plus the SXSW spike show Foursquare's funnel now runs through mainstream media and events, not just the early-adopter tech scene that powered its first year.
Second-order effects
- Gowalla, which contested Foursquare directly at SXSW, faces pressure to counter with its own user-acquisition push or cede the category's default position.
- Brands and media companies watching the Bravo experiment now have evidence that location services can absorb mass-audience exposure, opening a marketing-spend channel beyond app-install ads.
Third-order effects
- If event-driven spikes keep compounding, location check-in networks consolidate into a winner-take-most consumer category where the SXSW-class battleground decides who owns the venue-merchant relationships.
- Scaling public location sharing to hundreds of thousands of mainstream users keeps privacy questions like the Please Rob Me episode from going away — the larger the base, the more likely regulators and platforms treat broadcast check-ins as a consumer-protection issue rather than an edge case.
The trend: Location-based social networking is crossing from early-adopter novelty to mainstream consumer habit, with festival-scale adoption bursts and broadcast-media experiments marking the transition — and privacy friction growing alongside it.