Fishburn Hedges

11.06.2010

Foursquare – it’s just hit the second wave of attention, as it begins to reach a critical mass of early adopters sufficient to mean mainstream press start covering it, and before you know it, everyone will have piled in. (Passim – Twitter.)
 
We’ve  been using it for many months at Fishburn Hedges, as is routine amongst our crack team of digital crash test-dummies. You’ve read Simon’s love for it earlier this week , and now you can read my scepticism.
 
First the confessional:
I am a total advocate of location-based services and think they are 100% the future ™. Plus, I think the Foursquare team have successfully built, and marketed, a very stable system from nothing, which is proving there is a desire, and it can work.
 
Next – the problem:
It requires me logging into another service, which when I already have Facebook, Twitter, emails, IM and Spotify on a typical journey around town, is a bit much. I have to build a separate network of people, all of whom overlap directly with my other networks. Plus, frankly, I don’t care about the game aspect. I like the ability to show people places I’m at, to receive recommendations, and to get special offers. But do I care if I have visited more places this week than others? No, not really, and given it’s so easy to cheat (logging in at places you’re not really at), it becomes fairly pointless, very fast.
 
Finally – the future
However, the killer for Foursquare will come when Facebook turns on the geo-location services which it already has built in to the platform, and has shown off at developer events. After all, if I can ‘check-in’ somewhere via my status update on the biggest and most varied social network, why would I bother doing so on FourSquare as well?
 
My view
I’m not a FourSquare hater. I’m a FourSquare pragmatist.  If you’re a nimble brand, who values the ability to target consumers by location, get in there now, there’s digital hay to be made, while the sun is shining. For everyone else, I say Foursqare itself is a false dawn, but what it demonstrates and represents, will be key aspects of the digital tomorrow.