gowalla

FourWhere Opens the Location Door

By Mark Evans in Social Media 1 Comment Tags: , , , , ,

One of the biggest issues with the growing number of location-based services (Foursquare, Gowalla, Yelp, Blippy, etc.) is how difficult it can be to be a “watcher” as opposed to a “participant”. Many people, including myself, have no interest in broadcasting their locations publicly, but would be interested in seeing what other people are doing and what they have to say about the places they visit.

The solution to the watch vs. participate dilemma is FourWhere, a free service created by Sysomos (a client) that makes it easy to see the places visited and commented on by people using Foursquare, Yelp and Gowalla. Using data from the three services and the Google Maps API, FourWhere provides a user-friendly way to access the location-based world without having to register for Foursquare, Yelp, Gowalla or FourWhere itself.

FourWhere is easy to use. All you do is search for a city or address. When you click on any of the red dots on the map, comments appear about a particular location from Foursquare, Gowalla or Yelp users.

FourWhere launched in March featuring information from Foursquare. The response was so enthusiastic that work soon started adding Yelp and Gowalla, and updated version of FourWhere launched earlier this week.

For more coverage of FourWhere, check out CNet in which John Lowensohn said he:

“really like the idea of having one place that aggregates not only the tips from these sites, but, more importantly, the check-ins. When done right, and given a sense of time, Fourwhere could prove itself as a very powerful tool for showing what’s hot and what’s not based on a much larger group of users than any of the three services could offer on their own.”

Anyone Still Excited About Foursquare?

By Mark Evans in Social Media 3 Comments Tags: , , ,

The South by Southwest conference was supposed to be the coming out party for location-based services such as Foursquare and Gowalla. But, for whatever reason, it failed to really capture the imagination of the digital geeks.

Not surprisingly, the lack of enthusiasm has also meant the buzz about Foursquare, Gowalla and location-based services has been, at best, muted. My theory is that, for now, these services are novelties that come on and go. There is some chatter about Blippy or Swipely, and then it disappears.

The biggest problem is broadcasting your location isn’t enough to keep people coming back. After you’ve “check-in”, there needs to be more “meat” to keep people engaged and interested. The big question is whether Foursquare, et al will be able to attract people back for the next chapter when there is more content available. Given how fickle online users can be, it is difficult to get people to come back for a second look if they were less than impressed the first time around.

Another theory for lack of interest may be that people who would use location-based services already have their hands full with Facebook, Twitter, blogs and YouTube. As result, they don’t have the time or interest to get involved with yet another social media service.

While Compete.com is not a good barometer of how much traction that Foursquare and Gowalla are getting given both are mobile tools, both of them only have a modest of amount of traffic, which has slipped recently.

So, what’s your take on Foursquare, Gowalla and the located-based services market? Is it still early days or are they simply not finding a big enough audience?

Foursquare Supplanting Twitter? Ha!

By Mark Evans in Social Media 1 Comment Tags: , , ,

Maybe what happens in Austin (and the South by Southwest conference) should stay in Austin.

SXSW strikes me a great place to have a good time, do some networking/socializing and take in a few panels. But it also seems like a lot of navel-gazing and backslapping happens. As well, you have to keep in mind SXSW is where the digit-rati come to roil themselves into a lather about the next, new shiny toy.

Case in point is Foursquare, Gowalla and the location-based services world. If there was one blog post about LBS, there were a hundred about how SXSW was going to be the big launch pad – much like Twitter jumped out of obscurity and into the mainstream in 2008. The buzz about LBS is just another illustration of how the high-tech world keeps consumers engaged and, hopefully, buying.

And while I’m sure a lot of people used Foursquare and Gowalla during SXSW, I didn’t get the impression from the coverage or tweet-age that LBS was all the rage. But that didn’t seem to stop some people from proclaiming “Long live Foursquare; say goodbye to Twitter”.

Case in point is CNet’s Daniel Terdiman, who declared that Foursquare and Gowalla are “forced to be reckoned with this year”. Aside from lots of buzz and blog enthusiasm, I think Terdiman’s assertion is premature. So fare, Foursquare and Gowalla are still small, niche services that have yet to demonstrate they’re anything more than novelties renting the spotlight until the next shiny trinket comes along.

While you can draw comparisons between the early days of Twitter and Foursquare, the biggest difference is Twitter exploded because it offered lots of different people value as a user-friendly service to communicate, share, market and sell. While Foursquare has potential, I don’t see the same kind of mainstream utility. That could change as Foursquare evolves into more than simply a service to broadcast where you’re located, but until that happens, my enthusiasm will be held in check.

Do you agree with Terdiman or think he’s part of the hype machine?

More: Looks like there’s some backlash about SXSW Interactive, and how it’s evolved.

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