Foursquare's Dennis Crowley: Still deciding on Facebook Places

August 18, 2010 | Cody Barbierri
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With Facebook’s announcement of a check-in feature dubbed Facebook Places, we’re all wondering how it will affect location-based services like Foursquare. So I went ahead and asked founder and chief executive Dennis Crowley.

While Foursquare had a presence at the Facebook announcement, it wasn’t very clear what exactly the two companies would be doing together. Other location-based games, like Gowalla and Booyah, were a bit more vocal claiming integrations with Facebook.

The reason for the vagueness? Crowley said that Foursquare hasn’t committed to anything because the team still needs to try out the service. The company appears to not have had any early access to the feature and wants to “mess around with it for a week or two” before it determines how it will integrate. Crowley says they will have access tomorrow which appears to the same time the general public will have access as well, according to Facebook’s API page.

While Crowley admits that they knew Facebook would eventually do something around location, thinking it would happen at this year’s SXSW (South by South West conference), he isn’t worried about the social network being competition. Rather, he noted that Facebook will help teach people about location and checking in, making Foursquare even more popular.

Crowley also said that this feature launch validates what his company has been working on for three years.

“If Facebook thinks that location is a good idea, then we are on to something,” he said.

While Facebook might seem like a giant able to crush Foursquare, Crowley emphasized the different missions of the companies. The core of Foursquare is check-ins — getting people off the couch and into the world to try new things and share with friends — while with Facebook check-ins are just another feature.

Most importantly, Crowley said the key to Foursquare is that it remains fun and quirky, while Facebook appears to have lost that from its earlier days. Crowley isn’t surprised, he noted that when you have a product or service with millions of users, you have to tone down the personality of the company.

Luckily, he said, Foursquare isn’t at that point yet.

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About the Author,

Cody Barbierri is a contributing writer at VentureBeat and Social Media Manager at Piehead. (None of his posts are about clients or their competitors.) Reach him at cody@venturebeat.com (tips should always be sent to tips@venturebeat.com), or on Twitter at @codybarbierri.

  • http://ebackers.com eBackers

    I never see the hype in all the check in services…that's just me

  • http://wayne-sutton.com Wayne Sutton

    Good points made by @Dens and I agree. Facebook moving into location justifies the geo/location industry.

  • Sebastien Tremblay

    Come on. Is he blind? Facebook places uses the same kind of design and user experience that Foursquare does. The only thing missing are the badges and mayors. I'm quite surprised they did not have a chance to try it before. I really like Foursquare, I'm using it everyday but Facebook is making it very hard to resist. Let's just see how things work out.

  • http://twitter.com/sethhart sethhart

    haha, I love the idea that @foursquare has any kind of say in how it integrates with Facebook Places. Get over yourself.

  • http://www.internet-bard.com KatFrench

    In reading “Facebook will help teach people about location and checking in, making Foursquare even more popular,” I'm flashing back to the movie “You've Got Mail” where Meg Ryan is desperately trying to convince herself that a book superstore moving in a block from her mom and pop book store is going to turn the neighborhood into the “book district” and improve her business. As opposed to what was really going to happen–namely, the superstore was going to crush her smaller business like a bug.

  • http://twitter.com/dens Dennis Crowley

    Hey all – just quick correction here:>> The core of Foursquare is check-ins — getting people off the couch and into the world to try new things and share with friends — while with Facebook check-ins are just another feature…. actually the core of foursquare is everything that happens *after* the checkin. We've long thought that checkins were going to be a commoditized – the magic exists in the reasons and incentives you give people for checking in. We find our game mechanics/ badges encourage people to seek out new experiences. We find that Tips and To-Do Lists encourage people to explore their neighborhoods in new ways. The check-in is the “atomic unit” of location-based social services and we use it as the foundation on which we build tools that change the way people experience the world around them.The “make cities / the world easier to use” thing we often talk about is the DNA of our company. And our focus on this specific use case – bridging the gap between online experiences and offline experiences – is what will continue to set us apart from other players.- @densco-founder, foursquare

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