After deadline yesterday for this story on the future of Foursquare, we spoke to the start-up’s head of product Alex Rainert about what the team must do in order to make Foursquare not just a popular check-in service, but to prevail over their competitors– including Facebook Places– in turning it into the dominant platform in the space.
Mr. Rainert joined Foursquare only in April, but he and its cofounder, Dennis Crowley, go way back to the days of Dodgeball, the pioneering mobile check-in tool that the two of them started in 2004. According to Mr. Rainert, the key to making Foursquare a ubiquitous presence will be to offer users not just static tips and reviews but “smaller bites of actionable information delivered at the right time.”
“It’s about finding the right moment to give people information that they can act on in real time,” he said. “So, I check in at a burger joint and it says, ‘Oh, your friend Steve was here two weeks ago and he said, ‘This burger stinks– you should get this other one.’ And that’s information that now changes what I’m going to do.”
Foursquare’s engineers, Mr. Rainert said, are currently working on making the service “as smart as possible about serving up that content at the right time.”
The basic idea is that Foursquare will interpret a person’s check-in history as well as the activities and preferences of their friends, and use that data to offer reliable recommendations.
“The scenario that I always like to picture is a person leaves work at the end of the day and they have three hours to kill, and the fact that they have Foursquare on their phone means there will always be something that they should be doing,” Mr. Rainert said. “If a certain number of your friends have been to a particular place and you haven’t been there yet, there’s a good chance that you might want to go there. The idea is not to get too in your face about it and say ‘You need to go to this place!’ but be smart about leveraging the data that we do have in order to give you more informed ideas about what you should be doing.”
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