Media /// Forward

When you think of the idea of “checking-in” at a venture in a mobile app, you likely think of Foursquare or Gowalla right now. The two gained significant momentum, funding, and users in the location space in 2009. But even with the growth, both services are still relatively small, neither much bigger than 200,000 users. That’s why much larger social networks like Facebook are perceived to be a potential risk to them. And one of those bigger networks has just entered the fray: Yelp.

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Yelp Enables Check-Ins On Its iPhone App; Foursquare, Gowalla Ousted As Mayors

sawickipedia: As anyone who has worked in the casual gaming space already knows - game mechanics can’t be copyrighted and are quickly imitated.  Just ask Popcap about the gazillion Bejeweled/Match-3 knock offs it’s faced.
And as casual game developers have learned, resting on the laurel of your mechanic will quickly lose you market share to competitors.  It’s important to create a rich full-game experience around the mechanic.  It will be interesting to see which of the LBS apps wins as they compete more and more like game developers instead of as “app” developers.
(via caterpillarcowboy)

True on the game mechanics front, but we also have something else going on here: for better and/or worse, the game is what you’re doing in real life.

I think that the winner here will not be the company that comes up with the best game, but the one that adds the most enjoyment to players’ day-to-day lives. As suggested yesterday, I believe (and hope) that the game elements are one facet of what Foursquare is doing, but very much not the end goal.

(via whitneymcn)

You guys are 100% right on this.  The game mechanics are the “special sauce” that keep the checkins coming in, but the goal is the product is not to produce amazing game play.  The goal is to build a killer social utility - something that encourages you to live beyond the daily routine and rewards you for doing so.   -dens

(via dpstyles)

The social utility part is mainly what will hold Yelp back in location-based, I think. My experience with the Yelp community is that random people will add me as a friend and that’s standard practice — so my “network” on Yelp is not personalized at all. Probably the same reason I’ve never felt incentivized to write a lot of reviews, since I didn’t think I could earn Elite status.

Because Foursquare was location-based from inception, I’m sure users managed their networks more carefully. I sure did, and now it’s one of my Top 5 most-checked apps.

TechCrunch hits on this:

But the social connections on Yelp aren’t like more traditional social networks, so it will be interesting to see if with this feature, users start transferring their more traditional social graphs over to Yelp.