There has been a lot of debate recently about whether Foursquare will truly become the main point of check-in’s around places in the future, or our others going to to be the next game in town ? With Facebook’s Places now extending to Blackberry’s and the roadmap growth process for the 600M+ users,  Foursquare only has 4M users is not even 1% the size of its Goliath predator. Foursquare has been growing with brands and starting to bring lots of new value with different promotional relationships and feeds to their platform, but can they grow fast enough as a company focused on local and is their growth  pace enough to be sustainable? Recently Foursquare was compared to Groupon in its efforts to bring value-added promotions around the community, and some say that Foursquare will need thousands of resources to keep the momentum going.   Even though advertising can be considered great content ( if presented in the right way)  is it the right content that will make Foursquare scale with user acquisition?  For some reason, I believe that it is a good direction, but I am not convinced it is really the right focused strategy as it is so resource intensive to do all those deals.  Groupon emerged with a very different business model for user attraction that has been very local, but not as hyper-local as Foursquare.

In my recent visit to conference around local advertising from the perspective of the local directory companies, Foursquare was a hot-topic, but they seemed to be working toward building their own anchor around local advertisers and Foursquare was not the centerpiece.  There was more debate and discussion around social media distribution in general around Facebook and Twitter.  Foursquare’s game got them out of the gate, and they have tapped into the behavior of the check-in, but others are fast to copy this phenomena.   I am really looking forward to seeing how they scale, but they need something more organic wow now to attract users like they did with the first game concept.   I am looking forward to this evolution and see how they balance user focus vs. advertising in the future, with or without that sales force.  My question is can they keep the game going to continue to game users? Can the game concept continue to grow at a local level?

The recent blog post by John Battelle ( SearchBlog) prompted me to share some of my own quick thoughts on Foursquare, Apps and syndication of the Twitter bit-pipe.

I myself started to use Gowalla, Foursquare, Brightkite and a variety of others and I have to admit that had very similar feelings to what John had to say.   I also found that it is not what they offer today, but what they could be…

Up until now many location based services were based on Lat/Long and following you on a map.  Google latitude was just this.  Seeing my little face on a map was cute, but having it follow me around all the time somehow just did not make sense ( for me anyway).  Even thought it was system of opt-in, it was designed very much so as a 1x opt-in.  What I find so powerful about Facebook is the ability to always opt-in with a status update.    This is what I believe has become the real power of these services;  the ability to always control your opt-in by checking-in.  Instead of the lat/long trace, an individual can opt-in  ( check-in) to a location and leave notes or syndicate out their status via Twitter, Facebook and any octopus service they are tied into.    The application is the key point of user experience and these services have started to really attract users and build offers with marketers as per their check-in.   Even though I still use Twitter quite a bit via the web interface, I have started to use more services that appeal to me and just push it through Twitter as well.  Having the relationship with the end-user at the Application level and then building relationships with brands and marketers could be the real power here.  Over time as more and more services present themselves that are competitors to Twitter and unless they own the end-user in some sense, their ability for true marketing and managing the sales funnel could become quite difficult to keep control.  Could they end-up as a dump bit-pipe?

We all have been waiting for Twitter to showcase their new advertising business model ( which seems to be delayed), but as a bit-pipe they have pushed a key mass of  the end-user relationships to the developer communities.  It isn’t surprising to me that Fred Wilson ( a lead investor in Twitter) made the announcement today that Twitter is at an inflection point and may start to build and leverage its own applications to enable the “killer app”.  Yes- Twitter has built a very powerful syndication model and a strong loyal gathering , but the ownership of the end-user is something that is very key in balance to attract marketers and advertisers; that direct relationship has traditionally been key for media  and media sales.   However, if they did have the advertising machine, like in the case of Google, then syndication is a very strong balancing act for buffering and building out distribution.  Some how I feel like Twitter has sandwiched themselves in the middle with out the control over the end-user completely, and with no monetization engine just yet.  This is like flying with out flaps on the each wing on either side, so to speak?  You can go fast, but were is your control…

So as Foursquare, Gowalla, Brightkite and others  battle it out for control of the end-user and the unique interface to the local community, twitter may in fact just become just another vertical feed provider  in the growth of real-time conversations and local.