Every day, Foursquare users check into as many as 8 million locations—that's 12 billion in all over the past nine years—and Crowley wants that number to grow. To encourage Swarm users keep exploring and checking into new places, Crowley and his team needed to do what every social media app does when things stagnate: appeal to the desires of its fickle user base. Gone are the games and inbox tabs. Given that the median Swarm user has just six friends on the app, the new focus on self-documentation makes sense.
The idea, Crowley says, is to streamline the app so that users can check in and browse their location history faster and more easily. Explore more and collect different types of places.
But, as with all apps of this type, continued use of GPS running in the background can dramatically decrease battery life. See where you and your friends have checked in and view tips from others who have visited before. I was a Foursquare user for a long time, then got moved to Swarm when they were forcing people to switch. It has been a great way to keep a history of my check-ins, and I like to have it linked to my twitter.
First, the app is hit-or-miss in whether it recognizes an event is taking place at the location of your check in. And these are huge events with anywhere from 1Kk people. Secondly, if you have the app linked to twitter, it tweets your check-in, then ruins it by sticking an ad in the tweet with a pic of their logo and link to the Swarm website.
The developer, Foursquare Labs, Inc. The following data may be used to track you across apps and websites owned by other companies:. The following data may be collected and linked to your identity:. Privacy practices may vary, for example, based on the features you use or your age. Learn More. Back in when we had 50, people using Foursquare, they were awesome. But as our community grew from 50, people to over 50,, today, our game mechanics started to break down.
Now Foursquare wants to move into the local search space, targeting yelp and google reviews for places such as restaurants. And to do that it needs users to create a lot of reviews, so it can offer meaningful reviews and compete in the restaurant search space. As a result, the company is introducing a new kind of status — expert. This should encourage users to review more places and submit more tips, making the Foursquare service valuable.
The story of Foursquare holds a valuable truth: Gamification mechanics are powerful and can drive user behavior; but the behavior has to contain an intrinsic value without the game mechanics. Gamification is not an end in itself; it is a design choice intended to drive real value. Foursquare is a prime example of gamification of a consumer service.
What can enterprise gamification practitioners learn from it? Here are some that come to mind:. As the CEO of an enterprise gamification company, Centrical , I deeply believe that gamification can drive change.
At first, people were going out of their way to earn foursquare badges and mayorships. This will create a virtuous cycle that will drive employees to continue with the behavioral change even when the gamification novelty has worn off. This also means that gamification should reward behavior that has a real value for the company: if you reward contributions to a knowledge management system that no one uses, or reward employees for unnecessary customer visits, the results can be dire.
Choose the desired behaviors you want to drive carefully; make sure they have a real meaning within your organization and that they reflect corporate goals.
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