It's feature friday and today I want to talk about our portfolio company Foursquare, which put out a completely redone app this week on iOS and Android. Blackberry is coming shortly.
I've got a few simple frameworks for thinking about things. In social media, one of my main ones is the tenet that 1% of the users will create content, 10% will curate it, and the rest will consume it.
Foursquare has, for most of its life, focused on the 1% who want to checkin to places and share those chekins and related data like tips and to dos, with their friends. They have close to 10mm people who do that actively. That's a lot if you think about it in the context of the 1% rule.
About six months ago, Foursquare launched explore which was a consumption experience. Users who don't want to checkin can get value by exploring cities using the data created by the 1% who are checking in.
But what about the 10%? How do users curate Foursquare without checking in?
Enter the like button. It seems so trivial. It seems like every social app I use has a like button. But in the past 24 hours, I have gotten something like a dozen likes on the four or five checkins I have done since the new app launched. That's new meta data that is being created on my checkins by other people. It's a way for people who will use the app largely for consumption to create important data signals without having to checkin.
Sometimes it is the littlest things that are the biggest things. In the new Foursquare app, which is really really good, I think it is the like button that will be the biggest game changer.
