Five reasons why Foursquare’s mainstream success is inevitable

Foursquare may only have two million users, compared to Facebook’s near 500 million, but there are no plans to slow down the pace, Dennis Crowley, Foursquare's co-founder, tells Emma Barnett.

Here we present five reasons why Foursquare’s mainstream success is inevitable:

1. Discounts and rewards

If users choose to remain opted into the setting which allows local businesses to see when they have checked into their venue, they should be able to reap certain rewards. For instance, those who reach mayoral status (by checking in the most in one area), gain access to a Starbucks discount plan.
Crowley is working on scaling these types of deals around the world and making them as highly personal as possible.

2. Winning the game

Badges and mayoralty have so far been the main ‘game mechanics’, as Crowley describes them, deployed by Foursquare developers to incentivize people to keep checking-in. However, Crowley and his team are currently working on a “whole host of new gaming features” to keep the competition thriving among the community. So stick with it as some more addictive rules to the game are to be released in the near future.

3. Honest place reviews

When people check-in anywhere they have the option to post a message which can be shared across their social networks. This means people can give a real-time location based update on how the food or service is in a restaurant you may wish to visit that night which could change the whole course of an evening. Arguably people are already doing this using Twitter, but Foursquare’s service is based on locations near you, which is a different way of disseminating similarly useful information.

4. Efficiently managing the city

Crowley said he and Naveen Selvadurai set up Foursquare with the dream of it becoming a “social utility” which helped people manage ‘the city’ they were in better. “I was sick of tearing articles out of newspapers when I saw a place I wanted to go and then losing the piece. I thought that there had to be an easier way of organising my time in a place through a location app that my friends were using and updating too.”
Certain newspapers, such as The Wall Street Journal, have already added the Foursquare button. This tool allows people, when reading a restaurant review or other cultural coverage on WSJ.com, to click a button to add the venue(s) mentioned in the article to a ‘Foursquare to-do list’, along with a tip written by a WSJ editor and a link back to the original article.
It is these types of neat innovations which could change the way people plan their down time.

5. Increasingly insightful search

If Crowley signs search partnership deals with the likes of Google and Yahoo! as revealed by The Telegraph, which will allow the general search engine to index annoymised data from Foursquare to show what places are trending in each city, the search experience is likely to become more thorough and useful. Twitter signed deals with all three search engines, allowing them to index tweets, incorporating them into the body of search results. This improved search engine’s abilities to serve real-time results.

link :http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/social-media/7895109/Five-reasons-why-Foursquares-mainstream-success-is-inevitable.html