Posts from Foursquare

I'm doing a keynote presentation today at the Geo Loco Conference in San Francisco. In putting together the visuals for my talk, I wanted to show my Foursquare checkins from my recent trip to europe on google maps.

So a little googling around led me to this post which explains how to do it:

• Visit your foursquare feeds
  page. Right click the KML link and copy it to your clipboard (don’t
  download it).

• Visit Google
  Maps and paste the link you copied into the search box. Hit enter.

It is so simple and easy to do. Here is the visual that I wanted to create:

And you get a list of checkins that you can share via the google maps sharing features. Here's a list of all the checkins I did in Zurich, for example.

 

I would love to save these foursquare feeds in discrete chunks like this for future reference. Someone sends me an email saying "what did you do that was fun in Zurich?". I could simply send them this list of checkins. So simple, so easy, so useful. I love it.

We spent three days in Tuscany with old friends. We had a blast. The Gotham Gal batched up a bunch of blog posts and put them all up just now. 

The Gotham Gal used to do her travel blogging like that in "batch mode". Check out this post about our visit to Rome a few years ago. It covers four days or more in one post.

Nowadays we all travel with laptops. I even brought the iPad with us this trip. We do something and she blogs about it that same day. Like this visit to MAXXI, the new modern art museum in Rome. 

When you can share something you did right away, it is a lot easier to remember the details. And a post about a meal or a museum visit can be a lot more detailed than a post about four days in Rome.

I call that real time blogging and it is very much the way we do things these days. And in a strange twist, being without fixed Internet over the past three days limited how we could blog but also forced us to do more real time blogging. Check out my Tumblr, where I was posting photos from my blackberry. I could tweet too.

And we got seriously into Foursquare in Tuscany. My son must have checked into every store, restaurant, gelateria, and town we visited. It is so easy to do that. 

Real time blogging doesn't take any time to do. You snap a photo with your phone, if you like it, you upload it, and get back to seeing the sights and sounds of the town. You sit down to a lunch, checkin, and then open the menu and discuss the options with friends and family.

Even though it doesn't take any time to do, there are benefits of real time blogging, both for us and for those who care to follow our travels. For us, we have created an archive of the things we did and when we want to go back, we can search our archives and find them again. For those who care to follow our travels, there are tons of tips and advice on places to go and where to eat, shop, etc.

Services like Tumblr, Twitter, and Foursquare utilize the mobile phone to make real time blogging possible. It's quick and easy and you can leave a trail both for yourself and your friends and followers.

I did not really miss fixed Internet very much over the past three days and really enjoyed using the phone instead. Next time you go on a trip, try setting up a Tumblog and a Foursquare account, download the apps for your phone, and give it a try. I think you'll enjoy it as much as we did the past three days.

Our portfolio company Foursquare closed a second round of financing yesterday. This was a much covered financing process and also much criticized. I think it makes an excellent case to talk about some conventional notions and why they might not be right.

Back in the early spring Foursquare decided that it needed to raise more money to support its growth, both service growth/scaling and team growth. Foursquare identified about a half dozen venture firms that it thought would be ideal investors and opened discussions with them. A few backed out of the process because they had investments in competing businesses. But all of the other firms were eager to make an investment. The Company could have closed a financing at a very attractive valuation in two or three weeks if they had chosen to.

But as they kicked off the financing process, a fair bit of acquisition interest in the company materialized. So the founders made the decision to dig into what those transactions might look like. They spent the better part of the spring doing that and eventually determined that staying independent was the best thing for the service, the user base, the team, and the shareholders (pretty much in that order).

All of this was conducted in the glare of the public eye as the tech blogs and tech focused media was quite interested in how this story would play out. Kara Swisher called it "a very long and decidedly strange funding journey" in a blog post yesterday. She also said "the wrapping-up of what has been a very convoluted funding process comes after a series of missteps and switchbacks over what’s next for Foursquare."

I have great respect for Kara, who is one of the best journalists working in the tech sector, but I think she and many others who have voiced these sorts of criticisms are wrong.

The Company started this process when they had sufficient funds in the bank to operate the business for six months. They were not in a hurry and there was no need for any kind of interim bridge financing as Kara's post suggests. So closing the financing quickly, which is often advised as the best approach, was not necessary and in hindsight, the founders were wise to take their time.

The conversations with potential acquirers were very beneficial to the founders and the company in many ways. It helped them to understand what the risks of going it alone were versus the risks of selling. And both have risks if you are thinking about the service, the users, the team, and the shareholders (in that order). And it allowed the founders to develop close working relationships with some of the most important Internet companies who can not only be acquirers but also distribution partners and monetization partners.

I am a big believer in making quick decisions on most things. But on some things a bit of deliberation is important. In this case, the founders walked away from what Ben Horowitz from Andreessen Horowitz calls "generations of your people being set financially." Ben is also quoted in that same TechCrunch post saying "It is a really cathartic and emotional decision to make." Those kinds of decisions are best left unforced by the founders and the people around them.

In the end, the Company got a great financing with a great group of investors, including our firm, and now has the resources to invest in scaling the service, the team, and building out the feature set to make checking in an even better experience than it is today. 

So the moral of this story, if you will, is don't let conventional wisdom force you into making decisions you don't need to make and you aren't ready to make, particularly about very big decisions that you will be living with the rest of your life.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Foursquare Raises New Funds (online.wsj.com)
• It's Official: Foursquare Raises $20 Million Series B From Andreessen Horowitz At $95 Million Valuation (businessinsider.com)
• Foursquare Finally Raises Funding (gigaom.com)
• Foursquare Raises an Additional $20 Million (nytimes.com)
• FourSquare Raises $20 Million In New Round (Finally) (paidcontent.org)
• Thoughts on the Foursquare and Its Funding (readwriteweb.com)

My partner Albert posted this on his blog yesterday:

But I see at least one flaw with this plan for domination. I simply don’t believe that there is a single social graph that makes sense. I may very well follow someone’s booksmarks on del.icio.us that I don’t want to have any other relationship with. Or take the group of people that I feel comfortable sharing my foursquare checkins with — these are all people I trust and would enjoy if they showed up right there and then. That group in turn is different from the people I work with on Google docs for various projects which is why I would be nervous about using the Microsoft docs connected to Facebook. Trying to shoe-horn all of these into a single graph is unlikely to work well.

He's talking about Facebook and the new services they announced this week at f8. Clearly Facebook is executing fast and well at a scale that few Internet companies have ever reached. It is very impressive to watch.

But I am with Albert on the issue of one social graph for the entire web. I don't think it will happen either. And we are putting our money where our mouths are by backing companies like Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare, Disqus, GetGlue, and others (remember del.ico.us?) that are building different social graphs.

Today Facebook is the mainstream social network and where most people keep their entire social graph. The other services I mentioned, with the exception of Twitter, have not built large mainstream social graphs. But I think they will for the exact reasons Albert articulated.

I want to share some things with the widest group of people that is possible. Those things end up on this blog and/or Twitter. I want to share some things with the smallest group possible (like checkins on Foursquare and financial transactions on Blippy). That behavior requires a very tight, very private social graph. 

Facebook sits in the middle of all of this and has created the largest social graph out there. These other social graphs can and will grow in the wake of Facebook. I am not sure if Facebook's ambition is to create the one social graph to rule them all but if it is, I don't think they will succeed with that. If it is to empower the creation of many social graphs for various activities and to be in the center of that activity and driving it, I think they are already there and will continue to be there for many years to come.

I want to thank my friend Mo Koyfman and my partners Brad and Albert for helping me crystalize my thinking about this over the past few weeks. It is a very important topic for those of us who invest in the social web.

 I've been carrying around two phones for most of this year, my trusty Blackberry and the Google phone. I use the blackberry for voice, text, and email and the Google phone for web, maps, and apps. I'm getting pretty good at typing on a touch screen but I still cannot type a three or four paragraph email easily on the Google phone and until I can, I'm not walking away from the Blackberry.

I do occasionally use the Blackberry for mobile apps and my two favorite Blackberry apps are SocialScope and Foursquare. I've been using both of these apps since they were in alpha and they have improved a lot over the past six months. They are now rock solid.

This week The Gotham Gal got a new Blackberry, the 9700, which is what I use. It's a mighty fine phone. This morning I installed the Blackberry App World on her phone (it's crazy that it does not come pre-installed by T-Mobile). Then I installed Foursquare and the new Blackberry Twitter app. You'll find the new Twitter app in the Test Center category in App World.

After I did the install, I played around a bit with her Twitter and Foursquare apps. It occurred to me that with the arrival of rock solid apps like the new Twitter app, Foursquare, and SocialScope (which aggregates all of these services into one app), the Blackberry has become a damn good mobile social media device. The only thing that it is missing is a good Facebook app. The current one is not great.

Blackberry has a bunch of catching up to do to stay relevant and one important thing is getting really great social media apps on its platform. My sense from this morning's experience is that they are getting there. And not a moment to soon.