Will Facebook’s ‘Places’ be the end of Foursquare and Gowalla?
Facebook’s announcement of their new “Places” feature is not too surprising. With startups Foursquare and Gowalla eating up the emerging market of location based social networks (LBSNs), there had to be some response from the social networking giant. This new feature has some wide-ranging ramifications for other players in the market though.
Think about how large Facebook is versus the size of its competitors in the LBSN market - 500 million users against several million for both Gowalla and Foursquare. The biggest problem for the younger companies will be that they now have to convince their users to start using a new service instead of remaining active where they already are anyway … Facebook. Put another way, if you bought a car with built-in GPS would you go out and by a Tom Tom? I don’t think so.
Second, mainly early adopters are the people who are using Foursquare and Gowalla. Guess who uses Facebook? All your friends. This will be the main reason Facebook will be eating their competition’s lunch. Using LBSNs is much more useful when all your friends are using it too. There won’t be anymore, “Hey, what’s that Foursquare thing?” questions from your friends because everyone will be able to see the “Places” updates on their own, familiar social network.
Basically, easy access + network familiarity + large audience = high adoption rate by Facebook users. Add to the fact that the Facebook iPhone application had remained in the “most popular” list since it was released, meaning people are already using Facebook in a mobile environment. How could this feature possibly fail? Time will tell, but Places seems to be in a great position to crush its competition.
What do you think?
