Sunday, September 12, 2010

Foursquare Fatigue

Am I the only one who's gotten past the honeymoon period with Foursquare and is wondering what the point is anymore? Lately I've found myself either not checking in at all or feeling kind of like a chump when I do bother to check in.

There seems to be so much hype about Foursquare and geolocation apps in general, but I can't shake the feeling that most of the hype is coming from people who in some way stand to make a profit off Foursquare rather than users. So far my experience with Foursquare has been very lukewarm: first I had to manually input most of the places I checked in at since I live in the burbs where nobody else was using it. Then I checked in a bunch and got caught up in the hype about how Foursquare was the next big thing and surely me spending time checking in constantly would result in something cool. Then I kept waiting. And kept waiting. And I'm still waiting.

Sure, more companies seem to be doing Foursquare promotions of some type...but a lot of them are still stuck on the notion that the ultimate prize is a badge. I've said it before and I'll say it again: I don't care about badges. If I'm taking my real-life time to do Foursquare, ultimately it will require some kind of real-life reward for my trouble or I'll lose interest.  Stuff like a badge for getting checked for an STD? Not so much. A $100 Sephora gift card would be cool, but nobody seems to be doing stuff like that in Olney, MD.

To me, the difference between, say, Twitter and Foursquare, hype-wise, is that with Twitter, initially you may not find it useful but the more you use it, the more useful you find it. With Foursquare, the more I use it the less useful I'm finding it. As to all the hype about Foursquare being the next Twitter, I'm just not seeing it. If Twitter disappeared today, I'd be a wreck--I get news from Twitter, I connect with people, I use it as a search engine. If Foursquare disappeared, I'd maybe fidget for a minute or two the next time I bought a movie ticket, wanting to check in, but then I'd probably forget about it.

How about you? Do you think Foursquare is still up-and-coming or has it already jumped the shark?

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