Foursquare Merges with Factual
Back in college I used to love Foursquare (about 9 years ago). It was fun, lightweight, addicting (competing to be 'mayor' of my apartment building). Actually I feel like all social media was fun back then. When they split off the actual fun part into it's own app, I knew the fun was just dead. Sure Swarm was more polished, but I didn't really understand why would I move out to another app to do what I was already doing in the Foursquare app. I think a better product owner could have kept it unified somehow.<p>But alas, Foursquare simply had no way of making money. The often quoted 'How Not to Die' by pg seems especially relevant to foursquare. Compare the company they started out as, to the company they are now. They may not have 'died', but they sure as hell aren't the same company, product, or userbase. They figured how to not die by pulling a Ship of Theseus, replacing fun with features, features with ads, replacing ads with 'tools'.<p>Is there a way for social media to stay fun and profitable? I guess Instagram is probably the closest thing to staying fun, though for some reason I never latched on to Instagram. Perhaps it's focus on vanity never really resonated with me. When I think of goofy fun, I don't think of Instagram - Instagram is for the beautiful and that's not what I think of myself as.<p>Reading the line 'Foursquare is No. 1 when it comes to attribution and ad effectiveness, when it comes to app developer tools' is so the opposite of what I considered Foursquare to be when I used it.