With Foursquare, Dennis Crowley Aims Past the Nerds

Crowley, by Boris Veldhuijzen
van Zanten via flickr.

Dennis Crowley is betting that you want your phone to tell you what to do in New York.
 
This is actually a bet that the 33-year-old programmer has been making since 2001, when he became Internet-famous for building a Web site called Dodgeball. The service, which let its members text their whereabouts to friends at any given time, was a basically a social-media network before there were many. It was initially conceived as a “way to coordinate drinking plans,” and was quickly adopted in certain New York media and tech circles. Remarkably, it survived the bursting of the tech bubble and was acquired by Google in 2005.

But, unable to figure out a use for it, Google shut it down earlier this year.
 
Crowley still believes that people want to augment their social lives with technology.  “After I left Dodgeball in 2007,” Crowley said over a beer at a loud, dark-paneled bar called the Scratcher, near his Cooper Square office, “I worked for a company called Area Code, designing interactive games using real-world spaces. Like a game of Monopoly played by thousands of people all using their GPS locations to make moves.”

A year later, Crowley and partner Naveen Selvadurai started Foursquare, an app launched a little more than three months ago to considerable fanfare from outlets like The New York Times and Wired (along with an early mention by the New York Observer).  Part of the reason it drew so much attention is because if it works, Foursquare could revolutionize the way New Yorkers get information about restaurants, bars, weekend plans, stores, lunch specials, landmarks, scenic views, and the like. Or, depending on what happens in the coming months, it might just turn out to be a very cleverly designed game.

To try to explain Foursquare concisely is to pack a lot of description into few words. The program essentially turns a user’s social life into a video game using their cell phone’s GPS chip. Users “check in” when they visit a bar, restaurant, gym, supermarket, or pretty much any destination they might encounter in a city, and earn points for doing so. Visit a location more than anyone else playing and you become its “mayor,” a contested title that is lost just as easily as it is awarded. Different activities also unlock themed “badges,” virtual distinctions like “Local: You’ve been at the same place 3x in one week!” or “Photogenic: You found three places with a photobooth!” Were that not enough, the app also notifies your friends of your whereabouts, and lets users add comments and tips to places they visit. Anything from “nice views at dusk” at a park, to “I threw up here last night” at a bar.
 
“We had a lot of trouble explaining Dodgeball to people until Friendster came along. Then it was as simple as ‘like Friendster for your cell phone.’ With Foursquare, as much as I hate the comparison, it’s easy to explain it as ‘like Twitter for your social life,’” Crowley said.

On one level, what Foursquare aims to do is simple—use GPS and a phone to digitally connect your life with the lives of your friends. On another level, the app promises a maddeningly complex world of possibilities. “Where we’re trying to get to with it,” Crowley said, “is that you can be walking down the street in a neighborhood you don’t know around lunchtime, and your phone will suddenly buzz with the location of a sandwich shop near you that your friend has recommended.”
 
If Foursquare goes the way Crowley hopes it will (that is, if you all join), your everyday activities—from your commute to your grocery-shopping—would unlock what he calls “contextually relevant information”: tips, tricks and thoughts sourced directly from people you know. It would “make people more aware of the cities they live in,” and “motivate you to do things you wouldn’t normally do,” Crowley said. If Foursquare succeeds—if it's adopted by enough people—it would fundamentally change the way many people interact with the city. It might well make today’s guidebooks, weekly event listings, and reviews look like the early versions of Mapquest by comparison.

Of course, Foursquare may not catch on in the way Facebook or Twitter have. Although the idea of contextually relevant information is not new, no one has yet translated it from a concept expressed through niche technology to a household name. Foursquare’s forerunners have primarily been art projects and digital experiments, never intended for mainstream consumption.
 
But whereas Dodgeball was the outgrowth of Crowley’s studies at N.Y.U.—and ahead of its time—Foursquare is among a handful of startups making a serious bet that the time is now right for apps that provide geographically relevant social information to the technology-oriented urban masses. Like Loopt, which lets users find one another by GPS location and pull in content from neighborhood review sites such as Yelp. Or Britekite, which does basically the same thing with the added ability to tag photos and notes to different locations.

What Crowley believes will set Foursquare apart is, rather than just giving people the ability to broadcast their lives—unfiltered—it organizes that information by drawing on behavior that's already deeply entrenched: competing for popularity and social credibility. “The game mechanics make Foursquare sticky, but the real bottleneck is in people’s awareness of it. To get where we want it to go, the content has to be there first. That means people have to find out about it, sign up for it, and get into the habit of using it,” he said.
 
And there are other challenges. Crowley has a growing user base, but he's concerned about what that base might look like. People who want to participate in virtual popularity contests are more likely to treat Foursquare like a video game instead of a true utility. He doesn't want it to become “that nightlife game,” something played by a small New York strain of social butterflies. But getting there presents a paradox: Foursquare needs new users to sign up and submit substantive personal content and recommendations to ultimately make the app more than just a game. Enticing them to join and use, however, means hooking them with a video game system that lends itself most readily to a virtual popularity contest.

In other words, to become the application that truly transforms your city living experience in the way that Crowley hopes, Foursquare may have to outgrow the very features that distinguish it.

Crowley said positive reports are coming in. Brooklyn’s Gowanus Yacht Club is posting their “mayor” on the chalkboard and offering a free drink to anyone who steals the title. Some parents are using the service to check in at local parks, so other parents can arrange play time with their kids. And in one amusing anecdote, a user named Mary registered a complaint that her friend (another Foursquare user) had created a destination on the service called “Mary’s Soul,” had subsequently become mayor, and was refusing to relinquish the title.

Aside from the the money conversations, event partnerships and constant fixes to improve the technology, Crowley said this of Foursquare’s challenge: "I think it’ll live or die on the strength of the content people share through it, but if we get it right, there’ll be something it in for everyone.”

How to get it right, of course, is the next question.

John Fischer is a writer and marketing strategist. He currently works as a strategic planner for Anomaly, an advertising agency.