michael pucher

 Yahoo to buy foursquare (4sq)?

The headline just showed up in my twitter stream:

Yahoo Considers Buying Foursquare For ~$100 Million

I’m not quite sure about that rumor. The founders always said they don’t wanna see something like dodgeball/google again and remain control on 4sq.

Rumor or not, I think that would have the following consequences:

• yahoo would probably rename 4sq into something that fits into their portal scheme
• yahoo would hide it somewhere in the portal structure
• yahoo would spam it’s users with e-mails to join the service
• early adopters will stop using 4sq (as they already do because 4sq lost it’s spirit already)
• 4sq simply fades away/gets obsolete/dies

Thanks to 4sq for being the first mover. First mover isn’t always an advantage. If there is a market others will follow soon, be smarter, don’t make the mistakes you make etc. Until someones new enters the block, is smarter than they….

I enjoyed using 4sq until now. It was fun and made me meet lots of interesting and nice people. But at some point I have to admit it got boring. Checkin just to get badges or being mayor was funny for quite some time but if you get nothing more than badges/myorships it’s simply boring.

I’ll quit my 4sq account pretty soon and you’ll find me on friendticker.com friendticker.com is “next-gen checkin rewards”. Rewards have been in mind when the service was created.