Why the Checkin is Alive and Well
April 17, 2011
Last week a controversial-for-the-sake-of-controversy article appeared on ReadWriteWeb. It was called 2011: The Year The Checkin Died. It stirred up a lot of conversation and has sparked a debate about the future of location-based services. Mark Watkins, the CEO of Goby and guest author on the article rips checkins as useless and uninteresting in many ways throughout the article. A lot of people have been asking for my response.
Here it is below in an audio except from the AboutFoursquare podcast:
Of course several days after the article was posted, foursquare logged their largest checkin numbers in a single day to date with over 3 million. Several of those were mine.
My Top Five Reasons Why The Checkin Is Still Alive
- Checkins are not about broadcasting. They’re about telling an app what you’re doing. Private checkins are growing because of the fact that use of the LBS services is evolving.
- Checkins are useful for tracking behavior. Services like Scoville and foursquare points system enrich your life by helping you remember when the last time you saw your friends was and when the last time you went somewhere was. Post checkin experiences are like reminders of fun times and good memories. You can’t have those post checkin experiences without the checkins.
- LBS deals DO influence decisions if they’re done correctly. You can’t blame the technology for the way people are abusing it. Eventually best practices will arise, just like other marketing channels.
- Checkins DO aid discovery. They are data points that are valuable for recommendation engines, but they work in tandem with other data points. Without checkins, you have no verification, you rely on shaky self-reporting and aspirational data.
- A service they relies sole on checkins will fail. Yes. It will. But there are not services that rely only on checkins. Checkins are always paired with other interesting data, and that’s what makes them so powerful.
What do you think? Are checkins dead? Are they useless? I think the definition of a checkin will change, and eventually the icky experience of having to go through five or six screens on a mobile device will give way to passive checkins.
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7 Comments
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I'm an emerging tech strategist by trade constantly going out into the future and bringing it back to clients, colleagues and friends.
Great points here, Eric! I certainly agree with your top five reasons why the checkin is not dead/dying. I would, however, love to know if you have data to back up that private checkins are growing? That’d be a cool study to see as it not only reflects on the state of the LBS technology and its applications, but it also reflects on the state of the average LBS user. Cool stuff!
I wish I could get that data on the private checkins. I’m basing my assumption off of personal observations and conversations I’ve been having with LBS users about privacy. Unfortunately that’s the kind of data foursquare keeps close to the chest.
From what I can tell, the mainstream consumers are VERY concerned with people knowing where they are “all the time.” For that reason, I’m convinced the future of LBS exists in the private exchange of data between consumers and brands. It’s not about broadcasting. Forget broadcasting; it’s not interesting. Private, secure sharing is the future.
Great points indeed. From what I’ve heard from people who have been late to adopting LBS, their number one concern is privacy, so that’s certainly an understandable perspective. So would you also argue that it is all about the value received by the consumer AFTER the check-in (based upon the data collected from checking in)? In other words, better recommendations, and better memories like you mention in the post above?
Great rebuttal Eric – a couple of quick comments:
1. I wrote the draft prior to to Foursquare 3 and there is no doubt that is a very significant advance on the discovery theme I mentioned. But checkins are not just about Foursquare – there are a lot of other checkin services out there and as yet I think discovery is not clearly solved.
2. Yes I would also be very interested to see data on private checkins – that is certainly my most common behavior.
3. Check-ins do aid in discovery as data points, as I mentioned – however, the person doing the checking-in doesn’t necessarily receive the benefits of better recommendations immediately – this will be interesting to watch.
4. It should be an interesting day tomorrow at Where – I think I better bring my flak jacket 8)
Hey Mark, thanks for reading/listening.
I don’t think your argument that your wrote the article before foursquare 3 has any merit. Whrrl was doing almost the exact same thing (making discovery recommendations) for nearly a year before foursquare 3 was out. Where has also been doing those for a while. Again, though I think that rises out of our different definitions of a checkin. I say any time you log activity (i.e. marking a favorite venue in Where or clicking Want on Whrrl) from the real world into a digital product, you’re checking in–GPS or no GPS. The foursquare Explore feature is not new, it’s just now starting to happen with foursquare’s location-based checkins. If you were listening to the interviews Dennis Crowley was giving starting in November 2010, he was talking about foursquare’s recommendation engine in depth. foursquare 3 was no surprise to the LBS world, it was just fulfilling a prophecy.
I believe increasing private checkins are the reason why according to Compete, web traffic on foursquare.com has dropped, while registered users have grown. Fewer people are posting checkins to social sites, so fewer people are clicking the links attached to the checkins. Sharing has become a secondary interaction.
Recommendations CAN be offered immediately after a checkin, but, like any personalization service, it takes time to build personalized profiles. It’s a long-term game if you want recs to work perfectly.
Hope things went well at Where! Lots of news, I see.
I agree that people have been talking about, and even attempting, recommendations for some time. In my own experience, until Foursquare 3, I had little luck getting good recommendations on a consistent basis from any LBS-oriented service, without a big investment of my time in doing check-ins or building out my network or otherwise making use of the features of whichever LBS system I was working with – but maybe that’s just me.
My point of view is that normal, everyday people just aren’t going to invest that hard in a new service unless the return is immediately clear. Early adopters like you and I are different, of course. In the case of Foursquare in particular, I have gotten some great recommendations from Explore recently and I think it has a chance to change the game, for Foursquare at least.
Your analysis of private check-ins causing traffic changes sounds entirely plausible.
In any case, I’m writing all this because I want LBS to go truly mainstream – at the level of a Yelp or a Wikipedia, not because I think the concept has no merit 8) – just talking about the means, not the ends.
Mark, you’re absolutely right to draw a line between early adopters and mainstream users. Even with recommendations the entire checkin experience is too clunky for everyday users to want to do consistently. But I believe that now that American Express is experimenting with passive checkins via credit card swipes, we’re on the fast track to making checkins almost entirely passive. NFC is coming, that will help too. Dens mentioned in his interview at Where 2.0 yesterday that foursquare is trying to take checkins from a 20-second experience to a 5-second experience. It’s going to get much smoother before mainstream audiences latch onto LBS. If there’s value and not much extra effort, I think mainstream consumers will get it and use it.