Why you should care about 4Square.

Posted by Avi Savar on Apr 21, 2011 in Bylines, News & Information | 0 comments

Mark my words, Geo-location will be at the heart of Social Media.

Social Media Is About Me.

I had the good fortune to hear Peter Theil speak a few weeks ago.  He shared a lot of wisdom from behind his podium — one memorable moment for me was his answer to the question “why did Facebook succeed where other social networks (ie. MySpace) stalled out?”

His answer was simple and elegant.  “MySpace was started in LA as a place where people went to become somebody else.  Facebook was started in Boston as a place where people went to be themselves.”

I have always said that Social Media is a channel of “people stories” but Peter’s insight into what made Facebook successful adds further context.  The people stories are real, they represent a collective human experience and every individual user is part of it.

Essentially, Social Networking is about real people and the connections between them.  However, social media is also a highly individual experience — I experience social media through my “social graph” and my experience is different than your experience.  Social media is about me — it’s the place I go to be myself.

Mobile Is My Gateway

Like many folks today, I am constantly on the go.  Like many folks today, my mobile phone has become an appendage.  My mobile phone is what connects me to my digital world no matter where I am.  Mobile is the gateway I use to access information, make connections and “plug in” to my social graph.
The use and adoption of mobile is critical to the thesis of this blog post ( “geo-location is the heart of social).  If the stats are true and by 2014 a person’s first online experience will be via a mobile phone not via a computer, then mobile and social will converge — social media becomes more than just being “about me,” it becomes being about me and… where I am and what I am doing.  Everything that I do is tagged by “where I did it” and the mobile device becomes the conduit to sending and receiving that information — mobile provides context to everything about me.

I “Check In,” Therefore I Am

Content is the fuel that makes social media run.  Whether it’s a 140 character tweet, a video clip or a photo — content is at the center of the social universe.  Moreover, content with context is the holy grail.  Geo-location provides instant context to the content we create and share because remember — social is all about me, what I’m doing, where I’m doing it, etc.

Now let’s think about this a little differently.  Let’s think about this eco-system from the perspective of someone that needs to find information rather than share information… Here is a scenario:

I was recently in Amsterdam for 3 days of client meetings.  I landed a day early to adjust to the time change and get settled in, which gave me a free afternoon to explore and wander.  As I headed out of the hotel I had a few choices:

1. Ask the concierge what I should do or where I should go.
2. Open google maps and search for some points of interest.
3. Or…. You guessed it.  “Check-In” to my hotel on foursquare and access real-time information about my current surroundings.

Here is the hypothesis.  As adoption rates continue to increase across mobile and location-based platforms like Facebook Places and FourSquare, hopefully the quality of real time information improves also.  This means that in the future FourSquare could become the front door to the mobile web just like Google became the front door to the desktop web.  When I’m at my desk, I search to find information in the digital world.  When I’m on the go, I “check in” to access information about the physical world.  Social lives right in between the two.

Social is what connects my physical world to my digital world.  “Checking in” is the digital representation of “showing up” — it’s how your digital self knows where you are.

Think about it.  We have all seen movies like Terminator.  Where a the creature or robot from the future (good or evil) has a built-in computer embedded with some augmented reality view of the world.   What does that computer do?  It provides relevant (and real time) information based on where the creature is and what it is doing.

If FourSquare can unlock delivering users relevant information, connecting them to their social graph and providing context to the content they create — then they could indeed become the future front door to mobile — then we will all care about FourSquare.