The Foursquare Phenomena: Does Anybody Care Where You Are?
One of the most common questions when twitter began to become popular was whether or not anyone cared what you were doing every minute of every day. But twitter has since evolved to become one of the most popular places for people to share information on the internet.
Foursquare, however, still relies on people sharing exactly where they are and, to some extent, what they are doing, and still struggles from people failing to see the point of it. This is a problem that Foursquare will likely continue to struggle with as they attempt to create a more solid business model, something that even more accepted services such as twitter struggle with.
How can Foursquare solve this problem, though? One way they are trying to attract more people to their service is by partnering with businesses to offer specific deals if the customer checks into foursquare, helping both the local business, by drawing in traffic through free advertising (when the customer shares their foursquare status on Facebook or Twitter), and bringing in new users that might continue to use the service to get deals elsewhere, or hopefully become addicted to the system, and use it regularly, even without a discount.