Over 40 Million check-ins why isnt your business there?
Great post by Pat about Foursquare, have a read.
I think I did the first 4SQ check-in in Ireland (cos I’m a geek rather than cos I’m with-it).
I’m a huge fan of the 4SQ concept and bang the drum about it but TBH I think we’re still a long way from it having any real business impact in Ireland.
Are there any stats on rate of venue addition and rate of check-in in Ireland?
You only have to sit in Coffee Pod in Cork City Centre and look at what is “near me” to see what a wasteland it still is.
In a group of 11 “normal” people (plus me) in Carrick on Shannon last weekend with people carrying a mix of HTC Desire, Nexus One, E72, N97 etc, I was the only one doing any check-ins. I think 2 others even knew what 4SQ was.
In a town with a population of approx 4,000, I’m guessing that @johnnybeirne and @reverbstudios are responsible for a large percentage of the venues and check-ins.
Having said all of that, if I was a Dublin City Centre business with a strong following on Twitter, it’d be the next logical move.
But I think most will wait until Facebook do all of this and jump there instead where the numbers are. 1m users globally for 4SQ vs 1.5m users in Ireland alone on Facebook. And a big number of those FB users accessing it on mobile.
As for Gowalla. Game over already?
UPDATE 1: I hope GEO search on Foursquare (web-site) is broken otherwise it’s a lot worse than I thought. In Greater Cork (population approx 250k), it is listing 50 venues and 25 people. I’ll do more digging to see if I can set a centre and radius on that. Something we have in the LouderVoice Reviews API 
UPDATE 2: Whew, GEO search is crap. It’s just returning venues/people with “Cork” in their name. More data as I dig in.
Been thinking for a while there has to be strong “synergies” between LouderVoice and FourSquare/other location-based services. Wouldn’t it be cool if there was a ‘Review this Venue on LouderVoice’ button right in the FourSquare Client?
Me and you both! Alternatively, you could write a review in our App and it’d use the 4SQ API to do a check-in and leave a summary Tip. If they allowed for links in the Tips then that could point over to full review in our App.Unfortunately there is no obvious revenue path for us there so it’ll stay on the back-burner.Unless you are looking for an Android project to get your teeth into?
I have to assume that 4SQ will do full reviews at some stage or partner with one of the big guys like Yelp/Qype.Great chat at Internet World with a mobile guy who thinks native apps will go away for a lot of this stuff and it’ll all be HTML5 with location.
Conor, as an update to my comment on Pat’s blog posting (http://patphelan.net/how-to-get-your-business-ready-for-location-based-market…)…The average foursquare/gowalla/brightkite user does a manual checkin what, once a day? Useful information for the venue checked into but not much use in terms of driving location-based ad inventory for nearby businesses.Compare that to a trackme app such as Latitude/CellFlare/Loopt, where “checkins” (not venue, but approx location) happen every 3-5 minutes. That generates 500x more location-base ad inventory than the manual checkin method.Manual checkin may be the first step towards a sustainable location-based advertising ecosystem, but ultimately automagical trackme is going to be needed to drive the impression volumes necessary to make location-based commerce viable.Ronan
I used to think so too Ronan but the fact is that Latitude is a dodo and Loopt is adding check-ins. Like most people, I don’t want to be tracked, I want to opt-in with some sort of positive feedback loop (mayorships, tips, discounts).It’s that feedback loop that incentivises people to check-in more. As a punter I don’t want 500x more ad inventory pushed in my face, I want the places where I actively choose to check-in to make me offers.That’s why Foursquare has captured so much mind-share. As for Latitude’s 3m “users”, how many are actively sharing their location? I think there are 5 people in all of Munster.In fact you may have hit the nail on the head. Foursquare and Twitter built something for users and then looked for the business model. Google built Latitude/Buzz/everything_recent for advertisers and then tried to find the users.
Following through with that thought: Everything Facebook did for the first few years was for its users. Everything it has done in the past 12 months has been for advertisers. I wonder will that impact user growth or are all the privacy complaints just “12 bloggers whining”?
Hi folks, Interesting discussion. We have recently developed http://www.MapAlerter.com for the non-smartphone amongst us who wish to receive notifications and alerts for their “important” locations. the idea is that you can pre-register your Home, Work and Commute Route locations in Ireland. The service will send you an SMS/Email alert if the Council or other agencies issue a notice such as a service disruption (water, road works, road accident, etc).That’s the concept! It’s not in any way competing with GPS-base solutions such as FourSquare… we are trying to provide more important alerts to as many people in Ireland as possible.Please visit http://www.MapAlerter.com and let me know if you have any feedback. Just finishing testing at the moment and hoping to launch as soon as possible. All feedback greatly appreciated.
Thanks for letting us know about it! Really cool idea. I tried to do a trivial version of that back in 2007 where Twitter users could tweet traffic/water/etc problems to specific Twitter accounts e.g. @corkprobs and then you could follow whichever account matched where you lived. Of course doing anything on Twitter in 2007 in Ireland was a bit pointless. Complete lack of critical mass.Let me know when you’d like some coverage over on web2ireland.org