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Graph of Foursquare's Popularity After Removing Check-Ins
- pjc50 11y agoWhy on earth did they think this was a good idea? Checkins were the point of foursquare. Mildly annoying to other people on your social media, but that also informed them of its existence.
- hackerboos 11y ago> Why on earth did they think this was a good idea? Because they pivoted with poor knowledge of their users wants/needs/requirements.
- Mahn 11y agoI guess they saw themselves losing steam and figured they should try something risky.
- raverbashing 11y agoNo kidding "Open 4sq, tries to check-in, remembers it's on Swarm now, eventually gives up" They killed the reflex (also we may discuss on some more global trends, twitter usage by early adopters dwindling, etc)
- onion2k 11y agoThey built something that, while wildly popular for a while, was impossible to monetize successfully. Checkins just don't represent any value to anyone (at least, not that Foursquare could get anyone to pay for). The lesson here is that you can build something amazing and still fail if you can't turn it in to a business.
- bandrami 11y agowas impossible to monetize successfully No excuse. If you have a timestamped record of people's interactions with physical businesses and can't find a way to monetize that, sell to one of the thousands of people who can connect those dots pretty easily. And how do you possibly convince yourself that moving into an already-saturated market like ratings is going to help?
- mtbcoder 11y agoHas anyone been able to successfully monetize check-ins? It seems that if it were that straight forward to monetize as you suggest, someone would have done this by now. Even Facebook's check-in system seems to have faded in popularity as far as I can tell.
- DonHopkins 11y agoHotels.
- _asummers 11y agoFacebook checkins that I see on my wall are usually limited to "I want to brag about the good food I'm eating without Instagramming a picture of it, so I'll just check in at the restaurant". I don't think people trust Facebook enough to overtly give it access to more important location data, or I could just have too much faith in the average FB user.
- emodendroket 11y agoYour friends don't really sound like a representative sample. Most people complain about Facebook on privacy but don't modify their behavior in any way.
- jdminhbg 11y agoThere's a difference between modifying their current behavior and going out of their way to give FB more data without any real benefit. I don't think FB checkins have been super successful, have they?
- emodendroket 11y agoI see plenty of them on my feed. I'm not sure that "success" has to be measured the same way in Facebook's case since they offer quite a few different things to do, and not just checkins.
- agumonkey 11y agoHow much was it because they removed the core usage (even a not money making one) ? Maybe a more gradual change, by adding new ideas without killing the legacy ? It's impressive how your business can go south that fast though.
- esolyt 11y agoThis matches my real life observations. I personally stopped using both Foursquare and Swarm and I know a lot of people who did. However, this graph does not mention the popularity of Swarm. It's likely that some Foursquare users switched to Swarm and uninstalled Foursquare entirely.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- Shihan 11y agoSame for me... I tried swarm just a few times but then I threw it away also, didn't like it the same way I liked foursquare. Nowadays I only checkin somewhere rarely using Facebook.
- BilalBudhani 11y agoExactly. Me and my friends also stopped using the app just after they remove all the gamifications and mayorship thing. It was super cool amongst friend to be a mayor of some place.
- damon_c 11y agoQuietly becoming mayor of the building where your friend lives... good times on Foursquare (3 years ago)!
- agd 11y agoIt's kind of hard to make sense of that graph without a vertical axis scale. I can't even tell if it starts at 0. Is there a version with scale?
- comboy 11y agoExactly. Without Y axis it could have just as well dropped 1%. It seems to be a screenshot from google trends though, so it starts at 0 - http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=foursquare http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=foursquare
- aikah 11y agohttps://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=foursquare https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=foursquare It's a "relative" scale. It's the difference between the highest point and the lowest point. The highest point being when Obama checked in on Foursquare. The lowest being ,well, when Foursquare started.
- bandrami 11y agoI'm still astounded by this. They had a #&$%ing verb. That is the #&$%ing gold standard of presence. "I'm going to foursquare this." I actually heard real human beings say this. If your app name has become a verb the last thing you ever want to do is refocus. If you want to go to a ratings app like they apparently did (because... uh... that's not a saturated space or anything?...) then you make another app and leave your wildly successful app alone.
- roel_v 11y ago"If your app name has become a verb the last thing you ever want to do is refocus." What? If you don't make money, you will go bankrupt. You can be a verb all you want, if it doesn't make money, it doesn't matter.
- josephmx 11y agoIf your monetisation attempt kills your app, you will go bankrupt and it is a failure.
- dagw 11y agoYou have two options. One will leave you bankrupt within a year or two with probability 1.0 and one will leave you bankrupt within year or two with probability 0.8. Which would you chose?
- josephmx 11y agoExcept if they had monetised in a way that isn't changing their entire app then they would have been more likely to stay successful. This change was poorly thought out and probably wasn't going to be successful, same as if Twitter spun their micro-blogging to another app, it wouldn't end well.
- und3rw4t3rp00ps 11y agoIMHO - Dens is a romantic dude. He has just as many conceptual aspirations as he does commercial ones. Power users of 4sq. turn their worlds into farmville - mindlessly checking in everywhere they go (i.e. "home", "gym", "home" etc.). He wanted to disassociate the brand from that activity, and emphasize the utility of check ins (i.e. who else is here, how popular is that etc.). Could he have done this in a more elegant way? Maybe. But either way, the data he has compiled to entice advertisers is already quite substantial. If he successfully rebrands 4sq. as a resource and swarm as a tool, he's done exactly what he wanted to do.. as opposed to something close/safer.
- LaSombra 11y agoToday I use Swarm more like a location history than anything else.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- orionlogic 11y agoUsing Google Trends as an indicator of success or failure is pointless. Companies morph, they disrupt themselves and change their core business occasionally.
- DevX101 11y agoAnother non-scientific anecdote here. I attended a talk with maybe 150 attendees recently and the VC asked the audience who had ever used Foursquare. Then he asked who had used it in the past month. Almost everyone had tried the product at some point, but very few were still actively using the product.
- antonioevans 11y agoThey pivoted to become the location data powering major mobile apps (ex. Twitter). Dealing with small business to monetize is hard. You can't charge the consumer because you need the checkin and to get enough of a sales team on the ground in the SMB market is astronomical. If you ask me if they should bring back checkin to core 4sq app, not sure if it's fully relevant anymore. Their new ad platform pretty much just monitors you as you walk. So geoloc ads. I like it, and if they get enough SMB advertisers they can be a good acquisition target.
- joeshaw 11y agoYes! I can't believe that nobody else has made this point. I am as disappointed in the pivot of the app as everyone else, but it's hardly the sign of impending death the post (and many of these comments) make it out to be. 4sq built up an incredible points-of-interest database, and that is their real product. By providing that POI data to other providers -- most notably Twitter -- they get much of the same data that checkins in their own app gave them. And Twitter is massively more popular than the Foursquare/Swarm apps ever was or ever will be.
- shiven 11y agoAs a scientist, the missing Y-axis makes one half of me laugh out in derision and the other half cry out in despair. Get your axes and scales right people. WTF.
- woof 11y agohttps://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=Foursquare https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=Foursquare "Numbers represent search interest relative to the highest point on the chart. If at most 10% of searches for the given region and time frame were for "pizza," we'd consider this 100. This doesn't convey absolute search volume."
- marban 11y agoNow that I've been reminded of the check-in era, I kinda miss the good old Gowalla days and its then superior UI.
- nodata 11y agoAre they making more money than before?
- gchokov 11y agoThey are not making any money, just like before.
- jgreen10 11y agoIt looks more like a long and steady decline that has slowed somewhat since releasing Swarm. https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=swarm%20app%2C%20foursquare%20app&cmpt=q&tz= https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=swarm%20app%2C%20fou... Note that you should sum the two together to be fair, meaning they haven't declined much since a year ago.
- JoachimSchipper 11y agoDoesn't that assume that nobody uses both Swarm and Foursquare?
- phreeza 11y agoIt seems the dip is actually mainly driven by turkey. Turkey seems to screw with many such Google Trends plots, I have noticed. http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=Foursquare&geo=TR&cmpt=q&tz= http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=Foursquare&geo=TR&cmp...
- abalone 11y agoThat is not a graph of the Foursquare app's popularity. It's a graph of Google searches. It was in trouble before it split the apps. Lots of searches are driven by news stories, including bad news stories. For example the marker D is a story about how Foursquare resorted to raising debt financing to avoid a down round. It's a mistake to label that "SUCCESS".
- jackgavigan 11y ago> ..marker D is a story about how Foursquare resorted to raising debt financing to avoid a down round. Keith Rabois has hinted that they did do a down round: http://jackgavigan.com/2013/03/17/foursquare-does-a-down-round/ http://jackgavigan.com/2013/03/17/foursquare-does-a-down-rou...
- jjwiseman 11y agoHere's an actual graph of Foursquare's popularity, showing growth in 2009: https://www.flickr.com/photos/wallofhair/4232092914/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/wallofhair/4232092914/
- kragen 11y agoBTW, the first time I followed your link, Flickr redirected me to an ad for a Flickr app for an operating system I don’t use. You might want to find new hosting for your images.
- sspiff 11y ago> Foursquare's users felt betrayed that their reviews were > used but what they once loved about the app was removed. Well that's just a silly point of view. If you post something to a commercial entity, in general that thing is no longer yours. You gave it to them. No backsies. Seriously, this is how it has worked for years. Don't feel "betrayed". You chose to use their service, and post reviews on it. On the web, if you don't pay for the hosting, it ain't yours.
- code_duck 11y agoThat may be the logical point of view, but it's difficult to get that across to millions of people. Regardless of whether it is a justified feeling, some users felt betrayed, and their reaction was to stop using the app.
- thefreeman 11y agoThe funny thing is, I bet a graph of their profits would be totally different. Companies like Yelp and Foursquare are actually in the blackmail business. They needed the users to achieve a massive amount of reviews. Now they just collect "protection money" from business to remove / prevent bad reviews and laugh all the way to the bank. At least, that is the only way I can see their move making any kind of sense.
- matthewmacleod 11y agoNow they just collect "protection money" from business to remove / prevent bad reviews I hope you have some kind of evidence for that, because it's a pretty serious accusation to throw around.
- acheron 11y agoIf you're talking specifically about Foursquare, I dunno, but pretty much any news story about Yelp in the past decade covers it, e.g. http://consumerist.com/2014/04/04/yelps-controversial-business-tactics-contribute-to-2000-complaints-received-by-ftc/ http://consumerist.com/2014/04/04/yelps-controversial-busine... "The number of complaints might not come as a surprise to those who have followed the numerous lawsuits and allegations of extorting money from businesses to remove negative reviews." "For years, businesses have claimed that negative reviews pop-up on their Yelp pages after they’ve declined to purchase advertising with the company."
- slowmotiony 11y agoAre you serious? Every yelp-like site, including the very local ones, works like this. It's not a big secret.
- wodenokoto 11y agoIt is also a very common accusation. It's almost a monthly recurring story that some business decline an ad sales person from yelp only to see their review plummeting.
- Ensorceled 11y ago
- BigglesZX 11y agoIf you downgrade to 7.0.8 or beyond on iOS (guide here: http://www.cnet.com/uk/news/how-to-downgrade-iphone-apps/ http://www.cnet.com/uk/news/how-to-downgrade-iphone-apps/), you can still use the old combined app to check in AND explore local places. But since the split most of my friends have stopped using it anyway...
- patsplat 11y agoThe new product (Swarm) should have the new functionality (Reviews). The old product (Foursquare) should have been left alone.
- grandalf 11y agoI would unfollow people on Twitter who constantly posted Foursquare checkins. Not because I wasn't interested in their whereabouts, but because clicking resulted in a boring, useless page. Suppose wycats checks in at some interesting-sounding dive bar in the Mission. I want to click and see pics of the place and the menu and a map showing what's nearby. (not implying wycats was a foursquare user just that he's a celebrity developer / trendsetter...)
- fsk 11y agoMy sister used to be a foursquare addict. She no longer uses it. They took out all the stuff she liked.
- briandear 11y agoMy wife and I too.. We had a record of our of travels from about 2010 until Swarm happened. All over the word, even desert outposts in Mongolia. We loved it. I used to use it to find places in off the beaten path towns. It was fun being the mayor of a little tea house in the middle of nowhere and it was fun stealing NYC mayoralships when much of the hipsters headed to South-by. Now, I just use Tripadvisor which isn't as fun. I'll still see faded Foursquare stickers on businesses (next to their LevelUp stickers..) Maybe if 4sq hadn't spent huge amounts of money on prime Soho office space and instead opened regional sales offices to get small businesses to do self-serve ads and promos, the perhaps that company would have had a chance.
- Adams472 11y agoCheck-ins didn't bring any new customers into a business, so foursquare couldn't make any money on that feature. I personally loved the check-in feature. With hundreds of millions in VC $, foursquare had to find another way to make money. They're on the way to building a really nice business with their reviews and ad-tech business. I hope they didn't raise too much money before figuring it out.
- m4tthumphrey 11y agoI am so happy about this, I've been waiting for some news on the subject for a while. I LOVED checking in to foursquare, the main reason was so I could, one day, use their API to visualise where I'd been the most/what time etc. I was GUTTED when they removed check-ins.
- RandallBrown 11y agoThey didn't really remove checkins, they just moved them into a new app (Swarm). There's still a checkin button in Foursquare that launches Swarm. Saying Foursquare got rid of checkins is like saying Facebook got rid of Messenger. They didn't, they just moved it to a new app. It's true, they did (mostly) remove the gamification aspect of checkins. It was fun competing with my friends for getting the most points. Now, you just can compete for stuff like most restaurants, most night life spots, etc.
- m4tthumphrey 11y agoI am so happy about this, I've been waiting for some news on the subject for a while. I LOVED checking in to foursquare, the main reason was so I could, one day, use their API to visualise where I'd been the most/what time etc. I was GUTTED when they removed check-ins.
- gchokov 11y ago@foursquare: We told you so.
- nc 11y agoI'm surprised foursquare didn't go into payments, they have the venue data, merchant relationships, they could do what Reserve (from expa) is doing and radically improve the experience of dealing with any local business. Booking a haircut, paying for your meal all taken care of by foursquare.
- nailer 11y agoFrom the article: > In attempt to placate frustrated users, Foursquare launched "Swarm," a separate check-in app with minimal features, removing most of what made the original Foursquare app great. " This sentence is provably incorrect. FourSquare launched Swarm before their pivot, there were no 'frustrated users' at that time because their main app still did checkins. The article makes it sound like FourSquare were reacting to pissed of customers. They weren't - they foresee people who liked checkins and always accommodated them. Not a frequent 4sq user but for me the app is more relevant now - it pops up useful nearby stuff that I might like as I wander around London, so far its suggestions are pretty good.
- sriramk 11y agoI was about to come say this. That sentence is provably false - Foursquare took great pains to launch Swarm first and launched the other app months later. They also did extensive communication at each step of the way.
- randomsearch 11y ago> FourSquare launched Swarm before their pivot Not really, it was part of their pivot. I think that was pretty clear at the time.
- nailer 11y agoYes, really. Events, in order: 1. Swarm released 2. New 4sq released The article talks about 2 then 1, implying incorrectly that new 4sq was released, people got pissed off, then swarm was released. I don't think anybody is arguing that it wasn't part of the pivot. I specifically am calling them out for implying 4sq was reacting to users who were pissed off with their new app, when their new app wasn't yet released. Reference: http://mashable.com/2014/05/01/foursquare-swarm/ http://mashable.com/2014/05/01/foursquare-swarm/
- zacharyz 11y agoI think you are confusing the initial statement. Foursquare perceived users as "frustrated" before Swarm because of the conflation of reviews and check-ins with in a single app. The pivot was to create a new app and separate the concerns.
- jccalhoun 11y agoThey qwikstered themselves. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netflix#Qwikster http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netflix#Qwikster
- randomsearch 11y agoParody video makes a good point: https://youtu.be/DQAJmmVsi1g https://youtu.be/DQAJmmVsi1g
- munimkazia 11y agoThis is pretty much what I have observed in my social circle, and my own personal usage too. Once they removed checkins and moved it to another app, most of the people were outraged and decided they didn't want another app. The few who did give the other app eventually stopped using it because none of their friends were using it any more. It is like Google deciding they to discontinue search and concentrate on ads.
- jim_greco 11y agoIt's a good lesson on just how difficult building a startup is. - Crowley built this product before and sold it to Google. - Foursquare was an overnight phenomenon and had great user engagement. People were addicted to this app! - They raised a ton of VC money and were able to hire some of the best engineers in NY. - They're still struggling to build a sustainable business model.
- codingdave 11y agoYour last bullet point is really the only one that matters. I know my comments are repeating themselves, but if your business plan does not includes actual transactions that generate actual revenue, then you are not a business, you are a gamble. The days of "Get traffic and it will all work out in the end" are over. Way over.
- jim_greco 11y agoHow do you know what Foursquare's business plan was? Foursquare raised a Series D. They didn't go into that pitch telling VCs that they're just getting traffic and they'll worry about monetization later. Struggling to build a sustainable business model is not the same thing as not having a business model. Again, it's difficult.
- jusuchin 11y agoOne of the biggest things people seem to miss is the discounts offered by business through Foursqaure if you checked in at the right time or X amount of times. How FSq didn't exploit that or at least leverage that successfully is beyond me. To me, that was one of the coolest features at the time. Check in at so-and-so restaurant, get a free this or that or $2 off. In addition, it made an easy way to see where other people were at downtown at the bars in college.
- xwowsersx 11y agoDon't we have to check the trends for "swarm" now though or am I missing something?
- motoboi 11y agoSwarm recently included a messenger functionality. Never used it. Also, I'm seeing swarm gaining traction on my region for some time now. On the comments , there are a comparison between the two: https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=foursquare%2C%20swarm&cmpt=q&tz= https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=foursquare%2C%20swar...
- MichaelTieso 11y agoSince the iPhone introduced widgets, I've found it a lot easier to check-in using Swarm. I swipe down and click check-in. It already knows where I am. Before this, I rarely used Swarm.
- risratorn 11y agoThis is the moment I wish Gowalla didn't sell to facebook :)
- mortehu 11y agoHistorical rank of the Foursquare app in the App Store's "free apps" list, which ranks by download count: https://i.imgur.com/djd7gmr.png https://i.imgur.com/djd7gmr.png Its present day rank is better than at the beginning of 2014.
- mwexler 11y agoCan't help but to note this other story popping up at the same time: Yahoo! in talks to buy Foursquare... http://techcrunch.com/2015/04/15/sources-yahoo-in-talks-to-buy-foursquare/ http://techcrunch.com/2015/04/15/sources-yahoo-in-talks-to-b...
- polynomial 11y agoIf Yahoo plays their cards right, they could become a hodgepodge of various features that other competing platforms -notably facebook- do much better and in a more integrated fashion. Maybe they could also make a play in the Meerkat/Periscope space while they're at it.
- taigeair 11y agoPersonally I use Foursquare most when I'm travelling or in new places. I complement it with TripAdvisor. Foursquare could do what TripAdvisor does better.
- binoyxj 11y agoFoursquare pretty much 'Digg'-ed their own grave. Oh snap!
- mmccaff 11y agoRemoving check-ins was a strange move, given that it was what made Foursquare Foursquare. Personally, I didn't want to install Swarm in the same way that I didn't want to install Facebook Messenger. I had the same feeling of not trusting the reasoning behind splitting the functionality into two apps, and in Foursquare's case - Foursquare no longer did what I had bought into, and I was already in the habit of using Yelp for looking up reviews, so I stopped using it. They took over $162 million in funding, and I'd bet that a lot of people had a lot of ideas on how to turn things around monetization-wise. They had to try something, but this pivot seemed pretty detached from understanding their users.
- rock8y 11y agoI am one of the users who stopped using Foursquare when the new version was released but for different reason. When I was about to check in on my visit to a nearby mall, it said in my feed,my friend was there too. I texted him if he wanted to catch up for a beer after shopping. When we met up and ended up realizing that he never checked in but still showed up on my list, I decided to stop using Foursquare atm. I never knew if it was a bug or intended feature.
- daretorant 11y agoWhat many are missing is that they transitioned from a consumer company to an infrastructure company. Their location database (and API) was just announced by Twitter as the backing for all location handling in tweets. That's a big freaking deal, especially given they already do that for Facebook. If you read the FS CEO's comments about the Twitter thing, you'll notice he mentions they have basically focused on what their main value prop is: solving the difficult problem of accurate and quality locations. The consumer apps are just something they "still do" but I certainly don't think they consider it their primary business model anymore.
- shusain 11y agoSome feature ideas they should have tried: real time locations of friends/family (ala Google Latitude), integration with something like Angie's list, integration with something like gasbuddy.com, pull in data from Google Now (be like Google Now but I see it on a map).
- OhHeyItsE 11y agoI never understood how they could not make money. You have built a platform where people notify you exactly when and where they are about to spend money. Loyalty program? Upselling? Competitor advertising or intelligence?
- will_brown 11y agoI have not seen a single comment regarding, what I think is the true/inherent value of Foursquare. Everyone is pointing out that they failed to monetize...but, just look at all the other billion dollar acquisitions on start-ups/companies that have not monetized. Anyhow...If I were to relate Foursquare and its value to any recent acquisition it would be to Waze. Waze does have some degree of ads, but going out on a limb, I would venture to guess they are pretty negligible. Others may argue that Waze has all this valuable crowd sourced traffic data, well I don't think that data has been or will be monetized either. So what is the value of Waze that justifies a >$1B acquisition? In my estimation, it is the same thing as Foursquare (if not now, at one point should have had), due to their user base and the nature of the app, by default both Waze and Foursquare are cartographers and there is real money/value in that, and I am surprised of >100 comments I didn't see one mentioning that. Because of the cost involved, there are only a handful of true map makers in the World, and from what I can tell they are all Billion dollar + companies. Waze (and Foursquare) both found novel ways to propel themselves into the space...and on the backs of their users, not with the traditional investment of satellites/GPS technology. If anyone anywhere creates an App that has millions of users who are updating geocentric data in real time from their own users and not paying for this data...I wouldn't be to concerned with ads for its own sake, just losing my user base.
- lectrick 11y agoCertainly one of the dumbest moves I've seen by an app in a long time. I was a loyal checker-inner, though, and still use Swarm, although other people keep asking me "people still use Foursquare?" I like the recommendations it can give me once I tell it what I like, also its "places I want to go to" type lists.
- acd 11y agoI feel foursquares removal of checkings was the same as facebooks removal of chat from the main Facebook mobile app. Now it's fragmented you need to use two tools from what previously required one tool.
- alcima 11y agocan't resist http://www.bhorowitz.com/the_new_foursquare http://www.bhorowitz.com/the_new_foursquare