Wait, so why Foursquare?
A certain Sean Healy has been tweeting a ton lately about why everybody’s been getting so giddy about Foursquare, when other ‘games’ such as Brightkite have been around forever and nobody seemed to care about them. Honestly, I have no idea why, but I feel the exact same way. I’ve known about Brightkite for a while, and haven’t had even as much as a hint of desire to create an account, yet I just about lost it when I found out Foursquare was finally available in Edmonton. WHY?
Brightkite:
- Looks hella better
- Has a bigger database of locations
- Is all around way more polished and well though-out
Yet, take a look at Brightkite, and then take a look at Foursquare. There’s infinitely more people in Edmonton using Foursquare than Brightkite. They’ve even wrangled in a fairly hefty 1.4 million in venture capital.
So what the hell makes Foursquare so special?
- The site has (in my opinion) a much more ‘gamier’ feel. I look at Brightkite, I think “yet another Twitter clone”, where as when I look at foursquare, I think it looks hella fun. I can’t wait to go get super drunk and post checkin’s 900 times across the entire city.
- There wasn’t any marketing (in the traditional sense) that I saw, but the hype it generated on Twitter was fairly impressive. See point three.
- Lastly, and possibly most importantly, we had to wait. There’s something about being forced to wait that makes anybody want it even more. I would’ve assumed that people would have simply turned to a competitor instead of waiting, but clearly, that wasn’t the case.
Maybe foursquare isn’t all that much better, and we’re just half-way through a week-long fad that will be gone by the time anybody reads this blog post.
In summary: Create a semi-awesome product that looks like a game, and whatever you do, don’t let 75% of the population use it. I think all of my future projects will be based off of this simple, yet apparently effective strategy.
