We're heading west!
In the past year, we had a major growth spurt: from about 100,000 to over 4.5 million users; from a single phone platform to six; from 50-person foursquare flashmobs to 1,000 person epic swarms; and we now have thousands of developers building on the the foursquare API.
Context & Ripple Effects
Foursquare's 2010 has been a compounding curve: it passed one million check-ins a week in February, with the rate doubling in a single month, then added 100,000 new users in ten days by March. Today's post closes the year's loop with the totals behind that acceleration — roughly 45 times the user base, six phone platforms instead of one, swarms a thousand strong, and thousands of developers now building on the API.
The 'heading west' framing matters because it signals the company is no longer treating this as a New York consumer-app story: at 4.5 million users and a large third-party developer base, the next constraints are talent and partnerships, which sit heavily on the West Coast.
First-order effects
- Scaling becomes Foursquare's immediate operational problem — serving 4.5 million users across six phone platforms means infrastructure and headcount decisions land right now, and the move west is the visible piece of that buildout.
- With thousands of developers building on the foursquare API, the service's uptime, rate limits, and API terms have become a direct dependency for a third-party app ecosystem, not just internal plumbing.
Second-order effects
- At this scale the aggregated check-in stream becomes a dataset other companies want access to, forcing Foursquare to decide who pays, who builds freely, and where the permission boundary sits around location data contributed by users.
- Brand and media interest follows the user curve — the same flashmob-to-swarm growth that made headlines all year turns venue-level activity into something advertisers and publishers will bid to reach.
Third-order effects
- If developer adoption keeps pace with user growth, Foursquare's durable position shifts from check-in app to location-data platform, with its economics resting on what it eventually charges others to build on top of its data — an untested question as of late 2010.
The trend: Consumer check-in apps are scaling into location-data platforms, where the developer API rather than the app itself becomes the lasting asset.