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Foursquare managed to do this by migrating the original functionality to Swarm and pivoting the flagship product to something more monetizable. Arguably it sav
by dotBen 10y ago
Foursquare managed to do this by migrating the original functionality to Swarm and pivoting the flagship product to something more monetizable.
Arguably it saved the company from going under while still enabling the original functionality for those who wanted to use it.
FWIW I'm not a sportsball fan either, but you can't argue that those of us with MS-DOS and Fidonet are in the minority. Sport is a super-majority content area that is very brand and advertiser friendly.
- marssaxman 10y agoDid they actually manage that transition, though? I haven't heard anyone talk about Foursquare in years. My entire social circle effectively ran itself via Dodgeball when that was active; many of us remembered it fondly enough to give Foursquare a try, after Dodgeball's founders came back out of Google purgatory. It quickly became obvious that they really just wanted to become a cheap Yelp knockoff, though, and we all left. I don't remember hearing anyone propose a group migration to Swarm at the time, and I certainly haven't heard anyone talk about it since. Checkin-based spontaneous social organization just... doesn't happen anymore, so far as I can see. Shame, because I really enjoyed it. If a new service came along which looked like it wasn't going to be evil, I might sign up and try to get my friends on board - but I wouldn't trust the foursquare people at this point.
- dotBen 10y agoI just looked at my cell phone and there's a notification of 9 friends checking in on Swarm - most of them early fellow-dodgeball users. YMMV but most of my friends who were hardcore users switched over to Swarm upon the pivot. The migration was automatic btw - Foursquare told you in the app that checkins were no longer supported and offered easy install of Swarm with the same login credentials.