Foursquare made The New York Times. An amazing piece written by Jenna Wortham featuring the mobile web darling that has taken over metro cities and my friends alike. (Seriously, don't even DARE try and steal my mayorship of Pete's Tavern. :) )
This quote in the article from Deborah Schultz, an analyst with the Altimeter Group who specializes in trends in social media basically summed up my view of early adoption in social media apps/sites:
“There will always be people who love new technology and want to test it out, kick the tires,” she said. “Once those services become too big and the bridge-and-tunnel crowd shows up, they can lose some of that initial interest.”
It's kind of like Twitter now. It's still part of my daily life and an extremely valuable resource, but it's not the same as it was. It's cluttered and there are tons of people adding an overload of information daily. It's lost that "it" factor that a service like Foursquare has right now and I don't want it to. I like using it and want everyone that I interact with to stay involved.
Services like Facebook and MySpace, the long lost days of AOL 3.0 dialing up for 3 hours to talk in chat rooms and browse the Internet are past memories. But, they were the Foursquare of that time. That cool new thing we all wanted to be on.
For companies like Twitter and Foursquare---in some way I think the key thing that needs to be discovered is not just the growth and acquisition of new users, but the maintenance of that "it factor." I hope they figure this out.
