In world where Real-Time is becoming the ‘de jour’ word Facebook has done an admireable job of adapting first with how it has evolved its Status system from something rather static to something that now seeks relevance in real-time. Amazing really how they managed to keep pace with over 350million users and growing (fast).
But in the last year things have been a changing.
A key indicator and a common comment by the younger generation:
- ComScore has revealed that the time young people are spending on Facebook has been declining since July ’09. These declines have been steep in relative terms with September reaching 16%.
- Comments by teenagers like ‘when mom and dad are there it is hardly a party anymore’
Also lots and lots of blog posts talk about how people feel Facebook leads to a disconnect after all just how many friends can someone have?
It makes alot of sense that young people would wish to have their own space after all they are exploring their individuality when they get to that age. Also as cool as Facebook and even Twitter are, they have people glued to their smartphones and computers not to people, places and friends.
With FourSquare you get all the perks and perceived benefits of Facebook but you are driven to engage in the ‘real-world’ rather than just via a colour screen of varying sizes. Sure I socialize with friends on Facebook and Twitter, but those sites don’t really encourage that kind of relationship and FourSquare does through its geo-location awareness and game play style of interaction.
With FourSquare I can get a notification of a friend being nearby. This gives me the chance to go visit with them and with FourSquare’s ad platform when my friend and I go for lunch we may be even able to get a coupon to a place nearby.
Source: http://www.adweek.com/aw/content_display/news/media/e3i15e6314384dccfe3fbf6715a445e0e2b