Four score and seven years ago, no one heard of the discovery service mobile app Foursquare or its co-founding father Dennis Crowley even though it proved wildly successful after its 2009 launch. Back then users liked the personalized local search experience Foursquare offered.
But nothing lasts forever in the digital fast lane so, in 2014, the company launched the companion app Swarm as well as Foursquare 8.0. Despite the new and improved assets, Foursquare was losing steam—and users. That is, until a recent deal resulted in a Twitter partnership. With this development Foursquare is back on the map, so to speak, and Crowley is back in the news.
Now, more than ever, it seems a good time to look back on Crowley’s past projections on Foursquare, which include:
“I said a long time ago that Foursquare can make cities better. You have these augmented realities like Foursquare and Twitter and Facebook that provide these virtual nodes and instant feedback from anywhere, adding annotation around a physical places… Foursquare is about invitations to places.”
“Between the three, Facebook is literally everyone I’ve ever shaken hands with at a conference or kissed on the cheek at Easter. Twitter seems to be everyone I am entertained by or I wish to meet some day. Foursquare seems to be everyone I run into on a regular basis. All three of those social graphs are powerful in their own.”
“Facebook is about sharing experiences that you’ve had. Foursquare is more about the present tense and the future tense.”
“The best version of Foursquare is the one you don’t think about using.”
“The misconception about Foursquare is that it’s just hipsters in New York and San Francisco checking in at bars. It’s happening all over the world. I’ve seen huge growth in Europe, Japan, South America.”
“It’s very clear to users, more clear than in other apps, that Foursquare is an app for search and discovery, and we’re very good at delivering you a social map that will show you friends’ faces on the map and things that you might like.”
“One of the biggest hurdles about Foursquare is you need to remember to use it.”
