Foursquare’s days are numbered…

Posted by John Moore on October 6, 2010

1 comments | 1480 reads

I have said it once and I will say it again, Foursquare will not survive this year (yes, 2010). I know that anyone who loves Foursquare will completely disagree with me and they would probably be smart to do so given that there are only a couple of months left this year. However, beyond the outage that the blogger I am linking to below speaks about:

Remember Facebook Places? Turns out that Facebook was granted a fairly broad patent covering Location-Based Social Networks And Checkins . The announcement today means that they could effectively shut down Foursquare, GoWalla, and others that are in this space.
Foursquare is still tiny. As of the end of August they had reached 3 million users. Even if we assume they have now grown to 4 million users, which I doubt, they are less than 1% of the size of Facebook.
Foursquare still does not have its services business in order. From personal experience I can tell you that as recently as September 27th I requested a Foursquare Special for CityCamp Boston, deciding to try to give Foursquare a shot for this event. As of now (8+ days later) I can tell you I have not heard a single word (email, phone call, smoke signal, or carrier pigeon) from Foursquare.

Take my advice. If you are not yet on Foursquare, don’t bother.

John Moore

Founder and CEO of The Lab. An open government strategist, consultant, and analyst. Part writer, speaker, and educator. Other interests? Mobile and CRM.

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Walter Adamson

October 7, 2010

Tend to agree

I'm not sure about the timeframe, and I enjoy FS on my iPhone, but I'd have to wonder how any of those services would survive in the face of Facebook Places. At the moment you can certainly still learn a lot more about the habits of people from their traces on FS, but that's just a curiosity. The power of Places within Facebook is almost overwhelming.

Still, I suppose that's what a lot of VCs said about Yahoo! when the Google boys were looking for money :)

Walter Adamson @g2m
Certified Social Media Consultant
http://NewLeaseG2M.com
Melbourne, Australia
My social spaces and places: http://xeesm.com/walter

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