Location lamented
The co-founder of location-based service Foursquare, Dennis Crowley, has slammed Facebook's rival check-in offering as "boring."
Much like Foursquare, Facebook Places, which launched last week in the US lets users share their location with Facebook friends.
Crowley told The Daily Telegraph: "I have now had a chance to play around with Facebook Places and it's not that great or interesting. It's a pretty boring service, with barely any incentives for users to keep coming back and telling their friends where they are."
Foursquare differs from the Facebook offering as it offers users the chance to become ‘mayor' of a location they frequent regularly, encouraging users to continually check in with the service.
"The only interesting thing about Places is that it has a potential audience of over 500 million people around the world... but that can only be a good thing for location-based services, like Foursquare, as Facebook will educate the masses about check-ins," he reportedly added.
Crowley has been bullish about Foursquare's prospects ahead of the Facebook launch, despite some commentators predicting the demise of the service. "I always knew Facebook would launch a check-in tool. I knew that on the day we started creating Foursquare," he told the newspaper.
The fight for survival for smaller location-based services such as Foursquare and Gowalla now seems to depend on their ability to evolve quickly and stay one step ahead of their giant rival in a future battle of David and Goliath proportions.
Facebook has just acquired Hot Potato, which combines a Twitter-like feed with location check-ins, in a bid to boost its new Places capabilities. The social networking giant is also believed to be working with Yelp to develop its Places proposition further.
Although he declined to reveal any specifics, Crowley reportedly said: "Facebook could copy our games ideas, but we are working on a raft of new mechanics which we hope will keep Foursquare fresh and ‘check-in fatigue' away."
He seems to be upbeat about the long term health of the company and reportedly said: "In the future, I want Foursquare to be able to tell people where to go wherever they are in the world, based on their previous visiting habits, likes and dislikes and the time of day...We want to be able to push venue suggestions to you. That's what I am pushing towards as we develop Foursquare's tools and how we use our data."
The company also reportedly plans to let users push their Foursquare check-ins to Facebook within the next fortnight, but stressed it will not be a commercial arrangement.
Facebook had been in talks with its now location rival to chew over the possibility of acquiring Foursquare. However, Foursquare instead secured a $20m cash injection from a venture capital firm. The gutsy company has also previously turned down an acquisition offer from Yahoo! for a rumoured sum of $80m and is now estimated to be worth around $95m.
