Thoughts on FourSquare

The NY Times today ran an article by Jenna Wortham on mobile apps, and mentioned FourSquare, one of the iPhone apps I enjoy using the most. While Jenna’s article is very comprehensive and well-written, I find that when it comes to FourSquare, she did not point out some of the truly revolutionary aspects of the service.

Disclosure: I’ve been a regular user of Four Square from day one, met their founders in various NYC tech events and at SXSW, and am a member of their ‘SuperUser’ club. In short, FourSquare lets you share with your friends the places you go to: restaurants, bars, and entertainment venues, and gives you intangible rewards, or ‘badges’, the more things you do. Any time you go somewhere, you “Check In” through the app. The app then typically will identify your location and show a list of nearby places to choose from. The basic cool thing about FourSquare (FS) is that you can keep up with your friends: you can meet them if they’re nearby, and you discover new places through them (this is how I learned about the new UWS Shake Shack for example). Also, the intangible rewards make it fun since you never know what prize you’ll uncover (I recently got the “Far, Far Away Badge” for venturing above 59th st – kinda funny actually given that I live on 58th street).

Some people often have a knee-jerk reaction to location based services (LBS), worrying about sharing their whereabouts with others, but I find that in a world where we all twitter, blog, facebook, flickr, and YouTube our every move, this has become a non-issue. The best solution for that is simply to not check in if you don’t want to be found (which is another great part of FourSquare that you won’t find on some other LBS’ like Google Latitude, which broadcasts your location constantly for good or bad. Ultimately, our lives become much richer with every new social sharing app, and I would even say that people who are not active ‘sharers’ will find themselves living pretty isolated lives very soon. But I digress.

So sharing with friends and getting badges is all good and fun, but not really why FourSquare is such an immensely powerful idea. The most valuable part of FourSqaure is the fact that you can now see what are the actual hotspots in each city and area through your friends and others. Unlike directories such as Yelp, CitySearch, and UrbanSpoon that will give you a ton of listings with reviews by complete strangers, on FourSquare you see where your friends are actually going, and FourSquare knows how many times people actually went there. In aggregate, this info is huge: FourSquare can easily know what the most popular haunts are in each area and recommend them to users, not based on reviews but on actual visits.

So that whenever I go to an unknown area or city, all I need to do is open FourSquare and see all the best spots there. Not only this, but FourSquare also has a tips area, so you can easily and quickly know what to order, when is the happy hour, which bouncer to grease, or whatever other critical info you may need. Like any other review site, at some point FS may become a target for system-gaming of agencies that will try to make some places seem more popular than they really are. This will likely not happen till there is a critical mass of users however, and hopefully FS will have some protections in place by then.

I can’t wait to see a FourSquare ‘most popular spots’ rankings by category across the US or the world (which could be accessible online as well, not just via mobile apps). It would be like Michelin or Zagat, but of the people, for the people, and by the people.