Foursquare Shifts Focus From Present Tense to Future
Dennis Crowley with Robert Scoble at the Where 2.0 conference — Foursquare has grown to almost 10 million users by connecting them to where they are now, in the present. But the company sees a much brighter future in focusing …
Context & Ripple Effects
Foursquare's arc into April 2011 has been one of scale outpacing its core mechanic: after Mashable's November 2010 look at where the company was headed, the service has grown to nearly 10 million users and logged more than 400 million check-ins over the past year — volume far beyond what badges and mayorships alone were designed to exploit.
At Where 2.0 this week, Dennis Crowley frames the pivot for Robert Scoble's audience: the present-tense check-in was the on-ramp, but the asset worth building on is the accumulated record of where people go. The strategic shift itself is confirmed by the company; the question the announcement leaves open is how quickly prediction replaces broadcast as the product's center.
First-order effects
- Foursquare's own roadmap reorders around prediction: the 400-million-check-in dataset shifts from powering game mechanics to anticipating where users will go next, making the check-in a means of training models rather than the product's endpoint.
- Crowley is staking the company's positioning at Where 2.0 on this reframing — telling developers and press that 'present tense' was phase one, which resets expectations for every feature Foursquare ships next.
Second-order effects
- Rival check-in services that copied the badge-and-mayor playbook inherit a devalued mechanic: if Foursquare makes passive prediction the standard, they must either match the data advantage or differentiate on the social-broadcast layer Foursquare is deemphasizing.
- Local merchants and potential ad partners gain a new surface — a recommendation engine that knows where users are headed can place offers before arrival, unlike check-in deals that require the user to act first.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, location services compete on accumulated behavioral data rather than active user gestures, structurally advantaging incumbents with years of check-in history over any new entrant starting from zero.
- The shift also foreshadows a privacy reckoning: a company whose value comes from predicting movement will eventually have to negotiate with users and regulators over how much of that movement history it may monetize.
The trend: Location-based services are evolving from real-time check-in games into predictive recommendation engines, where the durable asset is the historical movement data each check-in accumulates.