One major complaint about the location-based social network Foursquare is that it’s not in enough cities, and that almost all of those cities are in the U.S. That’s due to change in a small, but meaningful way as Foursquare is planning to launch in London by the end of the week.
Currently, London and Amsterdam (which was previously launched) are specifically the only European cities on Foursquare’s roadmap, but if the London roll out goes well, there will be others in relatively short order, co-founder Dennis Crowley tells us. Not surprisingly, at least one of those is Paris, judging from a tweet sent from the Foursquare Twitter account earlier.
Every time we write about Foursquare, we get a lot of comments and emails wondering when it is coming to your city. Other services such as Gowalla, rely on crowd-sourcing much of the venue population so that they can be available in more cities. But while Foursquare has talked about using that approach more in the past, the company still feels most comfortable pre-populating cities as it wants to make sure it can scale as it grows. When pre-populating a city, Foursquare says that it tries to hit 80% of the places that people are most likely to go — obviously, that takes a lot of work out of the users hands, and instead they can simply “play” the game.
So will London users take to Foursquare? Obviously, that remains to be seen, but it does tend to do well in large metropolitan cities with a good amount of nightlife, as we’ve seen in the U.S. with New York and San Francisco.
Foursquare also looks poised to continue expanding its city base in the U.S. shortly. It would seem that places like Chapel Hill, NC are on the list. Chapel Hill is of course the home to the University of North Carolina, and college towns seem like a natural fit for Foursquare. Get ‘em hooked early, as they say.
I wonder if foursquare will be capable of becoming a new facebook after, let’s say around 5 years. It’s in high demand and the key to its growth is in the hooking college students and creating the network effect of “be there or be square”.
I personally like Foursquare and I am going to check out the other service you mentioned here, I’ve not heard of it yet
Check out this otherservice i tried out its call TextToParty.. http://www.texttoparty.com
Prepare for worldwide and intergalactic domination.
I have tried a few location based services but other than Brightkite I haven’t really commited to anything. Foursquare definitely seems to be generating attention. Will try this once it’s available here in London!
I never really knew what Foursquare was exactly. Knowing it is coming to London got my attention though. Yet another thing that pushes my limits of resisting the iPhone…
The Android app is far better than the iPhone version.
Since London is the capital of Twitter (no really, it’s the biggest Twitter using city on the planet) I think we’ll take to something like Foursquare just fine.
good point mike, meant to bring that up too. add me when you get it.
I like GoWalla a little better for a few reasons:
1 – It’s not restricted to a particular area.
2 – It’s easier to add a new POI. FourSquare makes you enter the address, which can be a pain when you’re out and about. For all the talk about them pre-populating cities, I’ve had to add 99% of my locations here in Atlanta.
3 – It’s harder to cheat. With FourSquare, I can go check-in anywhere right now from my house. With GoWalla, you need to be there. Of course, if your GPS isn’t picking up very well, then you can’t check in with GoWalla at all — this often happens when you’re inside the place you’re trying to check in at.
That being said, I use both for now — double check-ins everywhere!
I like Gowalla because it’s the only option I have at the moment, seeing as I don’t live in one of the few cities currently supported. Why can’t Foursquare pull locations from Yelp or Google Local or Yellowpages? If the devs are concerned with scaling, manually entering each location isn’t the way of going about it…but then again, I’m just bitter.
I noticed that Gowalla bought the entire backside of the SxSW 2009 magazine/catalog thing. So, it’s not terribly new.
I tried to use Gowalla on a trip to Charlotte, NC today. Yeah. Tried.
After a short test I’ve concluded that…
[Delete]
MG, this is like your 324th post on FourSquare. Come on man, I know you love the app, but its time to quit now!
Hahaha good point puranjay, I agree with you, Techcrunch became official blog of 4sq which is lemon
MG, why don’t you write about other location based sites/service and/or virtual worlds?
This is a huge value to me ’cause I lived in London and Paris, so getting in touch with my peeps there, who tend to be early adopter types, will be a cinch. Love how life is becoming so much more seamless. LOVE.
Foursquare just checked in and became the mayor of MG Siegler’s journalistic credibility.
Yeah pre-populating seems a strange strategy for scaling. Will be keen to see how this takes to London with such a diverse mix of people in our bars n clubs. The City-King iPhone app already has some London users but then it rewards users for creating places. Maybe some form of wiki management would be good for bogus place data? Have used brightkite but seems more like a blogging tool than a location based network.
If FourSquare was getting traction I’d say fine, it’s a growing app that perhaps deserve the attention. But it is ranked 60th in the app store with a 2 star rating and the majority of reviews talk about how pointless and crappy the app is.
It’s ranking only goes up when MG writes about it. MG, we get it, you are trying to be kingmaker, but please stop. Your bias annoys a lot of startups that struggle to get coverage but don’t because they aren’t as connected as Mr. Crowley. If Foursquare starts to grow on its own accord without the help of your coverage then great, good for them. If not, then there is no reason to keep covering them. So please, until this startup gets some real growth, stop talking about them. You don’t work for FourSquare’s marketing department, you work for a respected tech blog.
Why was my earlier comment deleted? Surely not censorship?
I investigated Foursquare after reading about it online, wondering it is the next big. My answer is no, its too American and too geared to the American political structure. I’m from South Africa and have very mobile friends and non of them would think that being mayor of a street is cool. And secondly in order for the application and games to work well users all need to have a GPS enabled handset, when you’re talking “next big thing” comparing it to twitter and facebook you have to take into account that The first GPS enabled phone only appears at about no.16 on the worlds most used phones. The rest of the handsets would require LBS which is not as accurate and thus rendering the game, useless.
There is actually strife that other players might be gaming the system? On foursquare, tempers run high because the stakes are so small.