MoLo, Happyface and the Local Business
I must admit that after about a year I am beginning to run out of steam as a Foursquare user… it felt like the damn thing was down most of last week whenever I was looking to check in somewhere and I’ve also begun to use both Gowalla and MyTown more regularly, so the sheer amount of checking in and the fact that I don’t go to that many new and interesting places is beginning to take its toll.
Despite claims of hundreds of thousands if not millions of users across these apps, the vast majority of my friends aren’t using it so it can get a little boring.
Recently I’ve found myself playing more and more with MyTown, last night as I waited for my wife outside Mermaid Inn, a neighborhood restaurant, I had time to check in on all three, but ended up spending 15 minutes collecting rent and upgrading a bunch of business I own on MyTown… frankly I am not sure how much longer I’ll be doing that either but it’s not a bad way to pass 15-20 minutes. And I did take advantage of the special offer that was running on Foursqaare for a free side dish at Mermaid Inn, the restaurant we were headed to anyway… a little surprise free side order of onion rings popping up in your day is never a bad thing. So maybe I’ll stick with it all a bit longer.
On a random technical side note, I did notice that the MyTown geo location feature is noticable more off than folks like Gowalla and Foursquare. Standing on Amsterdam avenue in front of three restaurants Mermaid Inn, B Cafe and Rancho Cafe I noticed that B Cafe was MIA while the other two were right there near the top of the list on MyTown with their little green indicator lights on. After a search I found the restaurant B Cafe, and they had the correct street address, yet still MyTown thought I was nowhere near the place… and it’s not the first time I’ve had to use search to find nearby places on MyTown… definitely some kinks to get worked out there.
I’ve found myself recently thinking alot about all these folks from places like Gowalla, Foursquare, myTown, Loopt.. not to mention the bigger guys like Patch, Google, and Yelp trying to sell in digital advertising to local retailers and some of the challenges they must face.
On Greg Sterling’s blog Screenwerk he posted a video from a company called WebVisible that speaks directly to this challenge, where many local retailers talk about the various ways they think customer find their businesses (walk-ins and yellow pages types stuff) and then consumers talk about how they really find businesses in this modern age (“the Google” and the Internet). Check out the video below… the bit near the end about one flower shop setting up a page on HappyFace (er Facebook?) is kinda telling. Good luck to the FourSquare sales guys calling on that lady!
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