By JULIE WERNAU / CHICAGO TRIBUNE / Published: Wednesday, December 2, 2009
CHICAGO | David Kadavy steps into a local coffee and tea shop and clicks "check in" on his iPhone's Foursquare application.
His phone tells him six other people have also checked in, and it provides tiny pictures of them. The Foursquare application automatically updates his Twitter account - his 1,035 followers now know where to find him along with those half-dozen others.
The bearded 30-year-old Kadavy, a freelance Web designer and foodie (he has a "tweet what you eat" site) is playing an increasingly popular game that experts believe has a shot at turning social media into a money-making enterprise.
Playing Foursquare involves exploring restaurants, pubs and coffee shops in major metro areas. The payoff for playing can range from special deals or freebies at eating and drinking establishments to scoring points, Boy Scout-like badges and "mayorships," essentially bragging rights for hanging out at particular locations.
"Foursquare, the thing that's unique about it is that it has the opportunity to monetize restaurants, locations and activities that people would do - a little bit better than Facebook or Twitter does," said Michael J. Lis, owner of Speck Media, a Chicago marketing firm.
Foursquare's users have been increasing by 45 to 50 percent each month, according to the New York-based company. It boasts 100,000 users internationally.
Foursquare is among a handful of upstart companies that have tapped into the combination of social media and a user's geographic location along with the fact that mobile phone game players seem increasingly open to meeting up with people they get to know online. Some tech bloggers call Foursquare the next Twitter, but Foursquare bills itself as a complement to Twitter - a way to take the connections and personas people create online and move those experiences into the real world.
Keeping users entertained will be its ongoing challenge, according to Flurry, a mobile applications analytics company in San Francisco. It classifies Foursquare in its "location based social network" category.
"To keep users engaged, the company running the service has to frequently add new features, devising new ways to allow users to interact and remain entertained," said Peter Farago, Flurry's vice president of marketing.
Flurry estimates that out of every 100 new users, fewer than 10 will remain active on these systems two months later. The reason: There are fewer opportunities to launch the application than say, Facebook, because users have to actually be somewhere in real life in order to have a reason to use it.
A year ago Foursquare, which 33-year-old co-founder Dennis Crowley named after the classic playground game, was little more than an idea sketched out on his table.
But it has emerged in only eight months as the hottest of its kind, surpassing competitors Gowalla.com (stamp your digital passport and earn rewards at the places that you visit), Brightkite.com (discover what's happening in your neighborhood) and Loopt.com (pinch, tap and drag an interactive map to find your friends and what they're doing), according to Compete.com, which estimates site traffic based on the daily browsing activity of over 2 million U.S. Internet users.
Crowley co-founded Foursquare in March with Naveen Selvadurai, the developer of such iPhone apps as WWJD, a sort of magic 8 ball where users ask Jesus what he would do, and Drunk Dialer, which challenges users to dial when the numbers move around.
EARNING BADGES
Foursquare users can earn badges for accomplishing different "feats." Each time they do, users unlock a badge. Users also compete to have more points than their friends: 5 points for the first time a user checks in somewhere new, zero points for a duplicate check-in within the same week and travel bonus points for each subsequent check-in after 4 p.m. to reward bar-hopping.
Here is a sampling of badges that can be earned.
Newbie: First check-in
Bender: Checking in four nights in a row
Crunked: Checking in to four or more venues in one night
Local: Checking in at the same venue three times in one week
Super User: Checking in 30 times in one month
0 comments:
Post a Comment