5 Reasons Foursquare Is Losing The Social Local Mobile Revolution. Foursquare has been the darling of the burgeoning "SoLoMo"(social-local-mobile) revolution ever since the company burst onto the scene at South by Southwest (SXSW) in 2009. The company's financial fortunes, however, have not been so sweet. According to BusinessWeek, Foursquare brought in a paltry $2 million in revenue for all of 2012. Perhaps that's why after raking in $71 million in three major funding rounds, Foursquare's lastest funding comes in the form of $41 million in debt. Still, that's a lot of money, and with the new cash stash, the company is shifting its business focus away from check-ins toward selling its trove of user location and behavior data to businesses, ad exchanges and others. This may be the company's last, best chance to succeed.
What went wrong? Here are five primary reasons why Foursquare failed to capitalize on the disruptive market potential of social-local-mobile — despite its early mover advantage. 1. 2. What is Foursquare? That's a lot of different things. Pinterest, Tumblr and the Trouble With ‘Curation’ There’s a German word for it, of course: Sehnsucht, which translates as “addictive yearning.” This is, I think, what these sites evoke: the feeling of being addicted to longing for something; specifically being addicted to the feeling that something is missing or incomplete. The point is not the thing that is being longed for, but the feeling of longing for the thing.
And that feeling is necessarily ambivalent, combining both positive and negative emotions. A paper titled “What Is It We Are Longing For?” Published in The Journal of Research in Personality, breaks down these “life longings” into essential characteristics. In other words, your average Pinterest board or inspiration Tumblr basically functions as a longing machine. Pinterest’s sudden and spectacular rise has been met with some skepticism, and it’s often talked about in that particular dismissive way reserved for things that have the temerity to seem both frivolous and feminine.
Not everyone buys into this, of course. 98. I'm Remembering! — The 100 Best Tumblrs of All Time | Complex#gallery. Pinterest for Brands: 5 Hot Tips. This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business. We've all been hearing a lot about Pinterest lately, so you're probably wondering whether you should take the plunge and create a profile for your company.
We say you go for it, especially if women are your target consumers — 70% of pinners are female. Pinterest has a highly engaged audience — a reported 3.3 million users logging more than 421 million pageviews — so there's plenty of opportunity for brands to flesh out pinboards and catch pinners' eyes. First, let's go through a quick explanation of how it works.
Pinterest is a visual social discovery network. You create online pinboards (like a bulletin board) for various categories (i.e. "dream home" or "things to buy" or "recipes"), and you "pin" items to it. Sounds fun, right? 1. On your page, you can curate as many boards as you like. 2. 3. 4. 5. What Facebook Knows. Photographs by Leah Fasten If Facebook were a country, a conceit that founder Mark Zuckerberg has entertained in public, its 900 million members would make it the third largest in the world. It would far outstrip any regime past or present in how intimately it records the lives of its citizens. Private conversations, family photos, and records of road trips, births, marriages, and deaths all stream into the company’s servers and lodge there. Facebook has collected the most extensive data set ever assembled on human social behavior. Some of your personal information is probably part of it.
And yet, even as Facebook has embedded itself into modern life, it hasn’t actually done that much with what it knows about us. Few Privacy Regulations Inhibit Facebook Laws haven't kept up with the company's ability to mine its users' data. Even as Facebook has embedded itself into modern life, it hasn’t done that much with what it knows about us. Contagious Information Social Engineering Doubling Data. Have Arrington and Conway screwed up big time with their investment in Highlight? Tonight I’m getting message after message that friend after friend has joined Highlight (the photo above is of Paul Davison showing it off to some of its first users back in December on the day it launched into a closed beta).
What is Highlight? Well, two weeks ago, in the Next Web, I named it as one of two apps that will “win” SXSW. What is it? It’s one of a new band of companies trying to own the “real time people discovery space.” Just for completeness, the competitors are Glancee, Kismet, Sonar, and Ban.jo with more coming this week (by the end of the week I’ll write up a more complete analysis of the competitors, since most of these companies, including Highlight, will ship major updates to their apps this week — I’m sure I won’t be the only one, either, given the attention these things are getting). Why? So, let’s dig into the hype and anti-hype and see if Ron Conway and Mike Arrington are going to either lose all their money or have just backed the next big thing? 1. 1. Virality.