Foursquare: The Right Mix
May 22nd, 2010 by Stephen SullivanOrigins of an App
Foursquare was founded by the makers of Dodgeball, a similar location service that Google bought and subsequently killed to insert their own product called Latitude. Dodgeball’s founders became disgruntled and soon split off from Google to create Foursquare as the next evolution of the original service. It launched to the public at SXSW in 2008 and has been rapidly growing ever since.
Foursquare’s growing success is interesting from an academic standpoint. It’s a perfect example of incentives and rewards, and how the right design can overcome the divide between the minority who publish and the majority who watch. Foursquare is a location service that provides just the right incentives to create and harness network effects.
Posters vs. Watchers: The Divide
Location services seem great on the surface. There’s the obvious appeal of knowing where your friends are and what they are doing at any given time. This would provide great opportunities for serendipitous meet-ups, conversations, and event planning. But there is one fundamental problem. While people generally are interested in knowing what their friends are up to, a vast majority are not publishers by nature and therefore are not motivated to broadcast their own location. This leads to location networks were you can’t actually see what your friends are doing because too few people are participating. These inactive networks are not very interesting.
Incentivizing Participation
To address this issue, Foursquare provides a tiny incentive, points in a game, to broadcasting your own location. Suddenly it is more beneficial to broadcast your location than to keep it private. With this, we find a network where you want to post your location and your friends do too.
The funny thing is, you don’t actually win anything in this game, but the simple point system is enough to make you feel like you are getting something out of broadcasting your location. Just like Wikipedia and Yelp, Foursquare have figured out that people are motivated by more than just money.
Now the question is: Can Foursquare defend their service against competitors and copycats? Now that Foursquare seems to have found the secret sauce for for a location network, is it just a matter of time before Facebook unveils its own location features to take over the space?






