Size Matters: Will FourSquare Get Too Big?

Someone was recently talking about how their use of Twitter changed once they accrued a few thousand followers and about 30% as many folks who they were following. They lost interest. The stream became too cluttered and full of people they knew only marginally (I believe the Dunbar number may expand for some in the future but its basic premise about the limits of our ability to "maintain active relationships" with only so many people remains sound).

There is a danger that FourSquare will get too big for each of us and lose its intimacy. I have already turned off push alerts on my phone which is a shame as I was able to see last week that I was in the same airport as a friend at the same time. We couldn't meet up but I enjoyed knowing she was a few gates away. But now the alerts from the growing list of folks I follow is cluttering up my view.

Mashable reports that FourSquare turned oneand reached 500k+ users. (on a side note, I find it interesting that the top referrer(33%) to the domain foursquare.com is Facebook which is often eclipsing Google (22%) as the source for traffic). Will FourSquare accelerate in terms of acquiring users and activity (they are at 15m+ check-ins)? Looptis somewhere north of 3m users and probably 1/10 the buzz of FourSquare. Is that because they don't have the same gaming quality or does something happen to friend/location-based services when they get big? I would love to see the growth trends for FourSquare, Loopt and Gowalla side-by-side to see if there is any common plateau by overall user base (does the site slow down growth after a million users?) or any patterns of average follower-per-user.

My hypothesis is that, beyond sheer novelty drop-off, once the service gets big and the average follower-per-user grows past fifty than usage drops off as people become overwhelmed by check-ins. (this is smaller than the Dunbar number as I believe there are fewer people that we want to track throughout he day) Only a core group will remain game-junkies vying for mayoral bragging rights to LaGuardia Marine Terminal.  (lets watch the insane mayoral competition in Austin this week for SXSWi...)

Geographic Spread
"Too big" is a relative term. I mean too big for me. Any of these services increase their utility based upon how geographically ubiquitous they are in my life. I travel a bunch. Checking in overseas (like at the Blue Mosque in Istanbul) still is pretty special. Shane Snow had a great wayto think about Foursquare vs. Gowalla in this respect:

"If this were the board game Risk, Foursquare would be the guy who’s got 1,000 armies in Australia while Gowalla has one army everywhere else. Unless Gowalla is really lucky with the dice, it’s probably only a matter of time before it gets edged out everywhere else too"

These check-in services have one value in-town for me and another on the road. Makes me wonder if a simple toggle -like on my email inbox - could allow me to switch between my travel status and then receive a slightly different pattern of updates.

Will Brands Deliver More Value or...
The last question I have about any of these services is whether the introduction of brands delivering value based upon our location will enhance the experience and cause us all to stick with it regardless of our friend/follower overload. Loopt has been delivering coupons. Starbucks, bless their forward-thinking retailer heart, has jumped in with a Barista badge we can all earn by checking in. And we have heard of many businesses, some quite small, who see the value of FourSquare as the new loyalty platform. See this recap from our own Christine Ngo about Intel's use of FourSquare at CES.

Four Final Words

• Location-based friend services will grow too big for individuals but...
• They will adopt filtering and status-toggles that will allow us each to limit the notifications to our inner ring or those we need to stay connected with more
• They will continue to merge with review sites (e.g. Yelp) but not replace stand-alone review sites
• Four Square, Gowalla, Loopt and other location-based services remain on my top three trends to watch and explore for 2010

Comments

[Fabrice Calando]

This is a great post! Definitely food for thought! I think Facebook is also implementing location-based services. I think their take will be very interesting as well

[Daan van Rossum]

Excellent distillation. Thank you.

From a store (brand) perspective foursquare will be an excellent platform (check out the new analytics dashboard) to build relationships. Of course that will only work when people keep using 4square.

[Interpretivist]

Great post. Personally I very strongly believe that for services/companies in the digital world, success will largely depend on how well they understand and further the cause of two critical cultural movements - personal empowerment and communal world building.

Foursquare definitely has done tons of things right on point 2. Now what remains to be seen is how quickly local businesses will adopt foursquare and use it to empower their customers. So the continual growth of foursquare in my opinion is heavily dependent on that. Not on the number of people who use/subscribe to the service.

Just #my.02