Foursquare and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this Internet a new application. The latest venture capital love object is Foursquare, which has signed up 275,000 New Yorkers to a mobile phone GPS app that lets their friends know where they are.
Business Insider details how the app works; you check in when you go to a venue (a place which serves alcohol) and you get points for visiting. Then, if a friend happens to be in the same street, you can meet and have drinks, just as if you’d actually organised it.
The Business Insider article is the normal breathless account of a new startup about to take over the world. The comments on the article tell another story. “I played with it for a few months, and obsessively checked in everywhere… I stopped participating over a month ago.” And “4 square fills up my Twitter with meaningless crap. Well I should say: even more meaningless crap.”
As I understand it, you can limit your Foursquare friends to a subset of your Twitter friends, but I suspect the status updates (which are juvenile in style) go to all contacts. This is spam for most people and will wear thin. If Foursquare can’t deliver this to only your interested subset, we’ll probably see Facebook and Twitter introduce friend categories. “Bar buddy/friend of mother”. Would seem to be a sensible development anyway.
For Gen Y in particular, mobile applications will affect how people meet and what they do when they get there. Although there seems to be nothing particularly compelling about Foursquare it has its own API so developers will build on the functionality. The value will be in creating apps that address specific niches. Groups of teen boys meeting new groups of teen girls. Business people finding the closest available php programmer. I can imagine an app that o.O that’s a good one. Might keep that one to myself :p
Meetup.com is/was a 2002 startup which was all about using the Internet to create community meetings of people with shared interests. It gave you a message board, allowed members to RSVP and sent out reminders about meetings. Its legacy is that of the software used in Howard Dean’s successful social media campaign in 2004; the first successful use of social media in politics.
Today both the Adelaide and Brisbane Bloggers’ Meetups closed. Sydney and Melbourne limp on, with about 10 attendees at each meeting. We closed the Perth Bloggers’ Meetup over a year ago.
Writers and geeks are not known for their social proclivity. So all these groups struggle to attract party numbers anyway, but it highlights a bigger picture. I can’t find any Meetup groups in Perth that regularly have 10 people attend.
Despite a capital infusion from high-flying good-guy Pierre Omidyar, Meetup has had it. They started charging people (ie the organiser) for using the service in 2005. At that time, numbers were growing but they’ve flattened out at 5 million subscribers. They’re a victim of Facebook. Meetup comprises small special-interest groups and the $100 to $150 a year is a significant cost. Facebook provides all the core functionality of Meetup, has a wider installed base and is free.
At one point Meetup was valued at US$40 million, but its current income stream looks to me like less than $2 million per annum. There are 50+ employees (~$2 million in salary alone) and without a growth factor, it’s Goodnight Nurse.
Interestingly, they’ve recently switched to an employee-driven model, much like Linden Lab – Omidyar invested in that business too. In this structure, if that’s the right word, employees create their own projects rather than inheriting them from all-knowing managers.
On paper Meetup are dead in the water. If they can manage to survive, it should be seen as an endorsement of this (sorry; here it comes) new management paradigm.
Is that people insist on interacting with it. If you look at the Facebook applications generated by big business you see that Facebook spam is a major hurdle for corporates. Once again the battle between the old respectables and ambush media.
Businesses continue to treat interactive media the same way that they treat magazine advertising. In interactive media you can’t place the ad and walk away. You need to allocate human resources to managing the medium. That’s code for a spam editor.
Second problem: if you’re a big company and you put up a Facebook ap, expect as much criticism as praise. This is a serious issue with interactive media for business. Doesn’t happen when you advertise on TV but Jesus, people love an opportunity to have a whinge.
Quote from the Dell Spot Facebook site: ‘Ive hated dell from the start, there products are cheap peices of crap, and they charge u wayyyy to much, like damn.’
So having appointed an editor to manage your Facebook ap, now decide if their job description includes editing out the comments you don’t like, remembering that those who are edited out will most likely blog about it.
If you’re in the computer industry or politics, I’d say keep your toe out of the web 2.0 water.
On the other hand, if you’re selling lingerie, jump in. Victoria’s Secret has 350,000 Facebook members. Their content is professionally written, social and full of fun.
Dell’s is unmoderated. One topic is headed ‘Dell wants you to think your eating a cheap dick’. Why do so many people write ‘your’ instead of ‘you’re’?