DENNISCROWLEY
co-founder, Foursquare“Our ultimate focus
is about becoming thebest social utility possiblethat overlaps with the realworld. We’re not trying tobuild this amazing game.”
4 | ADWEEKMEDIA | 12.13.2010
NEWS
What icon did Facebook choose in August forits long-awaited Places location product? A fourinside a square of course. The underlying mes-sage seemed clear: The Silicon Valley jugger-naut was gunning for the darling of the NewYork tech scene, Foursquare.
The question now is whether scrappyFoursquare, with 40 employees and $20 million inventure capital backing, can hold off the Facebookbehemoth. Foursquare is currently testing thebiggest overhaul yet of the check-in service whichis now used by 5 million people. The update, whichshould go live around New Year, will downplaygame features like the leaderboard, mayors andbadges and will emphasize the ultimate utility of
the service: discovering new places.Naveen Selvadurai, one of the co-founders
of Foursquare, said the system aims to be likethe collaborative filtering that’s a hallmark ofNetflix and Amazon. Those services crunchbehavior data—what movies you watch andbooks you read—to suggest new products.Foursquare wants to do the same, only with rec-ommendations of real-world activities. It nowplans to tweak the game mechanics to makethem more personalized in challenging users todo new things that matter most to them.
“If it knows enough about me in one city, itshould be able togive me a map of
the five things I should go see,” said Selvadurai.Many observers feel the update is long over-
due. Foursquare last updated its service in Sep-tember and now needs to work more on the“why” of the service, according to Sapient’s headof social marketing, Nathaniel Perez. The problemis Foursquare’s impressive user growth pales incomparison to the half billion people using Face-book. If someone wants to check in to connectwith friends, why not use Facebook, where theirfriends are? It’s a critical step as Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley admitted last week at aconference; the check-in itself is “not interesting.”
As it steps further into utility, Foursquare willfind itself firmly on Facebook’s turf. Facebook
Location Services: Let Battle CommenceFoursquare aims to see off Facebook with new version
Digital
By Brian Morrissey [email protected]
has tabbed mobile as atop priority, and location
is a key part of that. Itrecently recruited
Foursquare’s No. 4 employee, head of opera-tions Nathan Folkman, to come over to itsmobile team. Poaching Folkman was such a highpriority for Facebook that CEO Mark Zuckerberghimself wooed him. His defectioncame after Facebook brought ontwo other stars of the New Yorktech scene, Drop.io’s Sam Lessinand Hot Potato’s Justin Schaffer. Ithired them by acquiring theirsmall startups and shutting themdown. The message: Facebook is serious.
“Location’s not an application in and of itself,”said Michael Sharon, product manager for mobileat Facebook who led the release of FacebookPlaces. “It’s a magic pixie dust you sprinkle onmany services. There’s not going to be one thingthat’s going to be the future of location.”
Unlike Foursquare, Facebook has toned down
the gaming aspects of Places and focused square-ly on usefulness. The lure is twofold: broadcastingyour location to friends and finding discountsfrom businesses. The power of the latter was ondisplay when Gap gave away 10,000 jeans forcheck-ins on a single day. It was the kind of vol-ume Foursquare would struggle to get, Perez said.
“It shows the power of reach and scale versusfunctionality,” he said.
The battle between the compa-nies is being fought on unusuallypersonal terms. Many of the majorplayers have been good friends foryears and pioneered early locationservices. Selvadurai and Crowley
met while working for different location startupsthat shared an office in Greenwich Village in2007. Selvadurai worked for Socialight, a mobileservice for users to leave “sticky notes” tied toreal-world locations. The service was started bySharon before he joined Facebook. Crowleyworked at Area/Code, a startup focused on gam-ing in the real world. New York City in 2004-2007
was a hotbed of early location efforts, centeredaround the Interactive Telecommunications Pro-gram at New York University, where both Crowleyand Sharon graduated.
“Location services are going to come out ofplaces with dense multilayered points of inter-est,” said Kevin Slavin, founder of Area/Codeand now CEO of Starling, a system for sharingmessages while watching TV. “The reality isNew York City is where it’s densest.”
Slavin is loath to pick sides but said countingout the smaller competitor is foolhardy.
As location services mature, the questionnow is which is more valuable: the city sensibili-ties of Foursquare or Facebook’s networkeffects and computing might? Most likely, thecompanies will take divergent paths based ontheir strengths and weaknesses.
“These ideas are going to come to maturityin different forms and in different places,” saidSlavin. “Something was basically cooked some-time around 2007 on 12th Street near NYU, andit’s now becoming different things.”
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MICHAEL SHARON product manager, Facebook Places“It’s a way for you to capture these memoriesin your life, keep these markers in a timeline
that you’ll go back andlook at in 20 or 30
years and say, ‘I remember
that day so clearly.’”
NAVEENSELVADURAIco-founder, Foursquare
“The end goal is to get allthis great data and use
it for good, to leadpeople to betterexperiences.”
KEVIN SLAVINfounder Area/Code and Starling“There was a room at a moment
in New York Citywhere a lot of
ideas gothatched.”
2010 Sharon leads the launch of
Facebook Places.
2009 Crowley and Selvadurailaunch Foursquare.
2008 Sharon joins Facebookas product manager for mobile.
2007Crowley leavesGoogle and joinsKevin Slavin atArea/Code, whichbuilds interactivegames in the real world.
2007 Naveen
Sevladuraijoins Socialight,
which sharesan office withArea/Code.
2008 Crowley andSharon teach“DesigningAround Place”at ITP.
2005 Sharon startsmobile social networkSocialight.
2005Google buys
Dodgeball, an earlymobile location
network that wasCrowley’s ITP thesis.
2004 Crowley takes FrankLantz’s “Big Games”class, which buildsPac-Manhattan, areal-world version of the videogame.
2002Dennis Crowleyand Michael Sharonenter New YorkUniversity’sInteractive Telecom-munications Program.
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