Foursquare And Glancee Are Cool, But Here's Why I'm So Excited About Using Highlight At SXSW
The crowds and hype of South By Southwest make the massive Austin tech and media conference the perfect place for launching, well, any sort of app that needs crowds and hype to break out of tech circles and into the mainstream.
Context & Ripple Effects
SXSW has become the industry's de facto launchpad for apps that need a dense crowd to ignite: attendees were confronting Twitter saturation back in 2009, and 2010 brought the location-tagging smackdown that crowned Foursquare. Foursquare has since broadened beyond check-ins, extending to Android in September 2009.
The 2012 edition stages a three-way contest among ambient-location apps — Foursquare, Glancee, and Highlight — with TechCrunch's author betting on Highlight. The pick matters because whoever wins Austin inherits the press halo and the network effects that previous SXSW breakouts converted into mainstream traction.
First-order effects
- Highlight faces its make-or-break test in Austin: the same crowd density that makes it useful also exposes its friction points, which TechCrunch itself flagged by calling for a way to switch off 'friend of friend' notifications before the conference.
- Foursquare and Glancee must defend their SXSW mindshare against a rival whose passive discovery model is getting the buzz, rather than competing on check-in features.
Second-order effects
- Ambient location apps force every attendee into an explicit privacy-and-battery tradeoff, pushing background location tracking and notification defaults into mainstream consumer debate rather than early-adopter niche concerns.
- A strong Austin showing positions the winner for the next round of consumer-social funding and partnership attention, while the losers risk being remembered as 'cool but not the one' — the fate SXSW history has dealt runners-up before.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — Twitter in 2009, Foursquare in 2010, Highlight in 2012 — SXSW cements its role as a recurring proving ground where proximity-based social apps compete for breakout, and founders will keep timing launches to the Austin calendar.
- Passive, always-on location sharing becoming the default interaction model would shift the burden onto platforms and OS makers to give users granular controls over who sees them and when.
The trend: SXSW is consolidating as the annual ignition point where ambient-location social apps battle for the critical mass that turns a tech-circle novelty into a mainstream product.