Last night, Business Insider sent foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley an email shortly after social networking giant Facebook announced the launch of their geo-location service, Places. The short email reads: “So is Facebook the location platform now? And is Foursquare an app on that platform?” Crowley responded with a few details about how his company will interact with Places, and their plans for the future:
No, we’re still a platform for location, specifically around sharing locations though check-ins, surfacing interesting things around you and using game mechanics to encourage and reward for certain actions and/or behaviors.
Facebook also launched a location platform, which appears to be mostly based on checkins (and common FB elements like comments/likes/photos).
We already allow users to publish their 4SQ checkins into the Facebook News Feed and we’ll eventually going to allow users to push them into the Facebook Checkin Feed. I’d imagine we’ll prob pull FB checkins into 4SQ too. We’re in the middle of a redesign and some new feature launches, so we’re going to get thru those before getting started on FB integration.
It will certainly be interesting to see how the two companies push each other and differentiate themselves while adding value to and growing their user-bases. What are your thoughts on geo-location social networks like foursquare and Facebook’s Places?
