Foursquare Shifts Focus from Present Tense to Future

Dennis Crowley with Robert Scoble at the Where 2.0 conference

Foursquare has grown to almost 10 million users by connecting them to where they are now, in the present. But the company sees a much brighter future in focusing on the future movements of its users, said Dennis Crowley, who spoke at the Where 2.0 conference today.

We have to look at the future tense, thats a big opportunity, Crowley told the crowd. How do you tell people where they should be going. He said the future is what holds value for users. The location-based service is leveraging the wealth of data its gathered on the movement history of its users into a service that explains and suggests what users can do next. Youre seeing that with the latest update to Foursquare, which introduced the Explore recommendation feature, a suggestion engine built off a users previous check-ins. But theres a lot more that can be done in capitalizing on that idea, said Crowley.

Crowley said he was interested in apps like Ditto, which helps users broadcast where they will be in the future, in essence sharing their upcoming check-in. He said hes also looked at Plancast and Google events and how Foursquare data could be used there. Its an interesting idea for Foursquare, one that I think makes sense. As I wrote about earlier, Im excited by Ditto and other apps that help users plan and coordinate events so they can check-in together. Foursquare is very social now, but its n! ot reall y set up to help people come together for future events.

Crowley said that the future check-in is one of these things weve wanted to do for a while. Weve been focused on the present tense; we have just gotten there.

While check-ins are the main mechanism for inputting location data into Foursquare, Crowley said the company is looking at building in background location, so users will be able to check-in automatically. That will speed up and simplify the check-in process and help the service grow to the next 50 to 100 million users, Crowley said.

But it will also enable interesting ways for Foursquare to get moredetailed in how it pushes out recommendations. He said the service could start to understand how fast a person is walking and can intuit if a person has already had lunch by whether or not theyve stopped at a restaurant recently. By that they can decide if it makes sense to push out a recommendation for a local lunch spot.

Despite the growing competition from Facebook and others, Crowley said the company is well positioned to keep growing in the location space because its focused on the relationship between people and places. And thats why its eschewed ideas about doing check-ins for TV shows and other entertainment because it doesnt have anything to do with place. Now that company has started add more resources and nail its current offering, its showing now that the check-in is really just the beginning and that the real battle lies in who can help users plan where they should go next.

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