What is Foursquare?

I've been seeing the name Foursquare a lot lately, and it seems to have suddenly become a hot topic, sparked by this article , with over 20 friend requests arriving on my account since yesterday. I've only just started using it myself, but as you'd expect from a popular platform, I've noticed a number of surprising features.

At its core, it's a service that you might have seen before: it uses the GPS function on your mobile phone or smartphone to detect the places you've actually visited and lets you post them on the spot. However, it has some unique features:

  • Motivational measures using points, mayorship, and badges
  • Users can select nearby places to check in from their general location, eliminating the need to upload their exact location.
  • If a place doesn't exist yet, users can register a new one and earn points, which acts as an incentive.
  • Users can leave tips for places—for example, a ramen shop could share their favorite dishes.
  • Later visitors or those who find interesting tips on a friend's timeline can add them to their to-do list for future reference.

As you can see, the more users there are, the more fun it becomes to watch. There may be other attractive features, but I'd like to continue using it for a while longer.

By the way, Foursquare is starting to become popular as a matter of course, but it actually captures several trends that will likely become commonplace in the future.

The royal road to services of the near future #

Be social #

Don't say, "What? That's obvious!" Yes, it is. In the future, most services will be based on social media. I don't think I need to explain to anyone reading this blog that, unless it's a very special case, it's advantageous to develop a popular service on social media online in order to spread it by word of mouth.

Foursquare is also social, making it easy to find places your friends have checked in as well as tips for those places.

Facebook Connect / Twitter Compatible #

It seems to be becoming commonplace in the West for new services to support Facebook Connect and Twitter. Both are useful for many services to skip the tedious process of registering. Even when logging in with Facebook, Foursquare still requires you to enter a lot of information... The good thing about it is that you can register without entering much information at all.

What's interesting about Foursquare is that you don't have to decide on your own profile URL; by linking your Twitter account, your Twitter screen name will become your URL. (This is proof that Twitter is becoming recognized as a profile page overseas, but we'll talk about that another time...)

Import your friends list #

One of the reasons I received so many friend requests this time was likely due to the feature to find friends from Twitter followers. It seems likely that various services will continue to offer this experience, where you can filter and display a list of already registered users from your follow list imported from Twitter, and then send a friend request with just one click. Of course, Foursquare also lets you do the same thing using your Facebook friend list.

Activity Feedback #

The best reason to connect with social services is the activity stream, which allows you to post feedback on your timeline (Twitter) or updates (Facebook), catching the attention of your connected users.

This feedback also makes it possible to share events in real time. For example, the simultaneous barrage on Twitter and last year's Christmas Eve DJ performance on Ustream have become commonplace on the web recently, with real-time event sharing centered around Twitter.

Foursquare also allows you to provide feedback on your activity when you check in, so it will not be uncommon for people to find out via Twitter that they happen to be in the same place and meet up.

Compatible with iPhone and Android #

An increasing number of services are releasing dedicated apps for iPhone and Android in conjunction with web services. This trend is likely to grow stronger if the service not only runs on a smartphone but also takes advantage of the unique features of that location.

Foursquare is, of course, a prime example, with applications available for iPhone, Android, and Palm Pre.

In Japan? #

So what if we tried to do something similar in Japan? Let's examine each item.

  • Social: This is pretty obvious, right?
  • Compatible with Facebook Connect / Twitter: An increasing number of services are supporting Twitter, but due to the small number of Facebook users in Japan, it doesn't seem to be actively supporting it. This brings to mind the existence of mixi Connect and GREE Connect, but neither are yet publicly available, so we look forward to seeing them in the future.
  • Feedback to activity streams: This is also discussed in conjunction with Connect technology, but the development of the receiving activity stream is also important. The concept of timelines (or streams) has yet to take root in domestic services, with GREE's one-line feature only recently being released. As for mixi, the activity stream in its app is not being fully utilized, so as with Connect technology, we look forward to future developments.
  • Compatible with iPhone / Android Smartphone compatibility seems likely to be possible soon, even given the current domestic situation.

When you analyze it like this, you can see that while domestic services are sitting idly by, it wouldn't be surprising if a new social service that takes advantage of Twitter's virality were to appear. In fact, it's a good opportunity to do so!

summary #

This time, we used Foursquare as an example to introduce the image of the social web of the near future. If you don't understand what's so great about it, it might be interesting to think about it the other way around. It's not social, you can't import your friend list, and you can't get activity feedback... When you imagine it, you might think of similar services that failed in the past.

Other services with similar features to this one include the news site Huffington Post and the local information site CitySearch.

Also, although it was almost a year ago, I think the talk I gave at the beginning of the first Social Web study group, Social Web Talk, is still quite useful. Please take a look at it again.