2010 Will Be the Year of Location
Foursquare and Gowalla will be this year’s Twitter.
This will occur for a number of reasons:
- Twitter’s wide-spread adoption has people used to the idea of real-time updates. Privacy is dead. With the advent of Twitter, people realized that the inane details of their lives will be posted and distributed in real-time and that nobody can control what is spread. At this point, I’m not going to argue whether that is a good thing or a bad thing, but there is no denying that it is true. The natural extension of this idea is that it will soon be public knowledge where you are located at any point in time. Twitter has dabbled with this idea, but I do not expect them to package it in as seamless experience as Foursquare and Gowalla deliver.
- Smartphones are now ubiquitous. Five years ago only business executives had phones which could be used to check e-mail. The Blackberry was the end all and be all of the smartphone in America. Today there are new players in the game, and the market is growing at an extraordinary rate. After the failure of the Newton, Apple is back in the mobile business. Google threw its hat in the game by releasing the Android operating system and, more recently, the Nexus One phone. Smartphones are everywhere, and many of them are location-enabled.
- An increasing number of phones support geolocation and internet access. In the past, even many smartphones did not have GPS functionality. That was reserved for the absolute highest-end devices. Today every iPhone comes with built-in a GPS, forcing every serious competitor to include one as well. Combined with a mature SDK, location data become easy to access by applications such as these. With the widespread adoption of mobile internet access, this can be uploaded to a centralized service to be displayed.
The timing could not be better for these companies. These services have already experienced phenomenal growth. Foursquare has recently announced that it is going global, allowing users to post from any city. They no doubt realize that they are incredibly positioned in an emerging market, and they want to dominate this space. They are getting ready to release a new iPhone client, and their Android client is one of the most popular applications on the platform. They are also developing a Blackberry client application in order to cover the majority of location-enabled smartphones. Gowalla is taking a more niche approach by only having an iPhone client.
Like with Twitter, this isn’t about the money. Foursquare and Gowalla have not and can not charge for use. That would be suicide in every way. Make no mistake: the winner will be determined by number of users, not how well those users are monetized. Later I’ll post more about how I think these businesses can monetize their services while still gaining users and attention.