An interview with Foursquare co-founder, Dennis Crowley
Get Facebook, Twitter, gaming and location, mix it all together, throw in a smartphone and you´ll get something very similar to Foursquare.
Foursquare is today´s hottest social network and it´s growing fast. Already 1,5 million registered users in just a year, and adding 50% more each month, according to co-founder Dennis Crowley.
I had the chance of interviewing Dennis recently. We spoke for an hour and he shared some great ideas on how he´s planning to develop and transform Foursquare in the next months. The full interview was published today in EL PAÍS (Spanish).
Key takeaways?
- He thinks Foursquare could reach 10 million users by the end of 2010. My take? They will make it. The question is: will they maintain double-digit growth in 2011, once the novelty effect is over?
- Dennis admits the gaming layer (yes, the mayorships, the badges, the annoying Twitter messages…) might be putting off some new and existing users. They want to change that. My take? Do it soon, or Foursquare will vanish. At least in the web (not in the mobile app), I think it´s closer to be perceived as a dumb Zynga game rather than a value added service.
- He believes the future of Foursquare is becoming more of a discovery and recommendation-type engine and not just a fun social network. My take? Definitely. I´ve been playing with the Foursquare iPhone app for a while, and that´s where the real value lies. Not in telling your friends you are the mayor of a pet shop…
You can read the nitty-gritty of the interview in EL PAÍS. Below are some additional questions we didn´t have room to include. Dennis will be in Spain in June, attending the HiT Barcelona event. By then, the mistery of the sale or the additional funding will be probably solved:
QUESTION: Do you see Foursquare as a social network in itself or more as a functionality within an established social network?
ANSWER: I used to think that we could piggy-back off someone else’s social graph, from all your Twitter and Facebook friends. But we are finding that Foursquare´s social graph is different. It is about sharing very personal pieces of information. And that tends to be something people want to be a bit tight about who they share it with.
Q: A lot of Facebook and Twitter users don´t like seeing location messages from Foursquare in their timelines. They complain about it. Does it worry you?
A: Wee see that from some users. But it´s ultimately the user decision if they want to do that or not. We ask them to opt it or not. Some people turn it off, some turn it on. If we were forcing users to do it, it would be a different issue. But everything that we do is about opt in: share as much or as little as you want. We see people pushing stuff on Twitter and if their friends complain about it, they turn it off. It´s a very personal thing.
Q: But one of the reasons you are growing so much is because the Facebook and Twitter effect. If we don´t link these services, don´t you think your growth will be affected?
A: Yes, I think so, but that´s just a tiny part of what´s pushing us. Twitter and Facebook are great as an advertising-type service. But we find a lot of our users come from word of mouth. We see people using this in bars, restaurants, movie theatres, and that´s how people spread the word to other users.
Q: What new functionalities are you planning to add in the next months?
A: The priority is taking the data that we have and playing 
it back to users. People are giving us a nugget or two of data every day: the coffee shop they go, where they have breakfast, the park they go… What we´ll do is to look at this data, analyze it, and suggest new things to do based on their preferences.
Q: The gaming part, earning the badges, the mayorships… all of that is now a central part of Foursquare. Is this where you want to go moving forward?
A: The scoring system is not exactly what we want it to be, and we are revisiting a lot of the stuff. We realize that people can get tired of the gaming system and the badges. That´s part of what we are working on. We need to make the Foursquare experience fresh. As a game, is not a great one, it gets boring after three months or so. But what we need to work on are things like social recommendations, helping you figure out where you should be going next and people you should be meeting up with. It´s about helping you expose interesting parts of a city.
Q: A sort of interactive city guide made by friends…
A: Yes, my career has been focused on working with city guide-type products. They are about how you make a city easy and interesting to explore. We are on that path.
Q: But, still, you are in a very niche market of young, technology savvy, smartphone owners. Do you see this as an obstacle?
A: It could be, but that´s what people thought about Facebook and Twitter. These companies have busted against these roadblocks over and over again. People said “no one is going to share their status update”, and now you have 125 million in the world doing it; “why would you put photos online”… people have been asking the same questions for years, and eventually there´s a breakthrough company that convinces people that is important to do it.
Q: So you think you could be the next Facebook or Twitter.
A: I can see a world where Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare coexist. We are all doing slightly different things. But we have a long way to get there. We are just over a million users. If we keep our growth, we´ll more than double that every two months.
Q: Location based services are a big opportunity in mobile marketing, but still most of the companies in this space don´t make any money. Why?
A: The space is very new. Does Facebook turn a profit? They might do it this year. Does Twitter turn a profit? Not yet. This is a classic thing. You take you best stab at starting a company and you hope at some point there´s some way to monetize it while still preserving what makes the product great.
Foto 1: Carlo de Marchis
Foto 2: James Duncan Davidson
Tags: Dennis Crowley, Facebook, Foursquare, Twitter
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