My son reminded me today that I had just told him a month ago that it was just a matter of time until Facebook bought Foursquare, or just copied their location based model. It was just too obvious. Facebook with their huge volume of users would be too interested in the new marketing horizons that can be opened up when you start letting users check in at business locations. Facebook will bill this as a service to help users better track where their friends are and what locations they prefer. Make no mistake, the real coupe will be their ability to access millions of new potential paying clients that will want to provide discounts and coupons to Facebook users that check in at their retail locations. Although I was not surprised at all when Facebook rolled out Places as a new feature, two aspects of this move surprised me…
The first is that the week Facebook made this announcement, Foursquare had more sign ups than at any time in their history. You have to wonder at the meaning of this piece of trivia. Either people are already figuring that the Facebook system will not be as good as Foursquare, or Facebook is legitimizing this industry. I have not heard what has happed and location based services firm Gowalla, but I assume they probably did OK last week as well.
The second is the logo that Facebook has chosen mocks Foursquare as it puts a four inside a square at the base of a map tag (see above.) Really??? That is a bit juvenile – even for a young technology company. It seems like they could better spend their creative energy creating a logo that actually looks nice because this one is as pedestrian as they come.
My real concern about this is the possibility that Facebook will be able to add this capability to their base platform and crush Foursquare and Gowalla. I dearly hope that does not happen, but the possibility exists, and if it does come to pass, it is yet another symbol of a disturbing fact about the technology world. Ideas are just about impossible to patent, and large organizations can digest them and crush the originators. We are pretty good at providing patents for specific engineering methods or sophisticated inventions. We even do allow a software patent to stand from time to time. However, there are many ideas that are simply embraced, and extended by the gorillas.
If Facebook is able to release this product and basically steal the ideas from the entrepreneurs that have labored to get them on the market, we will all shake our heads and move on. The sad thing is we will be one step closer to the day when innovation and creativity are simply another piece of inventory for large organizations to mash up into their hegemony. I am not sure allowing people to patent concepts is the answer, but certainly there has to be better solutions that Facebook believing they can crush a Foursquare with their might, and mocking them with their logo at the same time.
Now, to be fair, I do not know what is going on behind the magic curtain, and for all I know, Facebook is still going to acquire one of these firms and make a it a little more legit. Time will tell I suppose…