Foursquare is, as they say, crushing it. And the news broke today that they can show you at least fifteen million reasons—or three times as many as last year—as to why this is.
ClickZ received a “pair of emails” (it takes two?) in which they learned the following stats from foursquare:

• They now have fifteen million users.
• Fifty percent of those users are in America.
• The other 50 percent are spread around the globe.
• It’s three times more than they had last year.

 
As for their competition?

• Something like twenty million “known” users exist for geo-social apps.
• Facebook’s recent acquisition of another location-sharing service, Gowalla, is yet another example of Facebook “acquiring” a group of people. Gowalla’s being purchased is more of a “talent grab” than anything else. But you knew that.
• There are approximately 90 million “known” smartphone users over the age of 13, which—by ClickZ’s count—results in a 78R% slice of the market for foursquare to seize upon.

 
Finally:

• foursquare still insists on being spelled with lowercase letters despite being the Coca-Cola of geo-social apps. Branding, right?

 
Takeaway:

• Your friends who weren’t on foursquare before are very likely on foursquare now.
• So are the people you want to avoid.
• If you ‘friend’ the friends you have on foursquare, you’ll know where to find them.
• If you ‘friend’ the people you want to avoid on foursquare, you’ll know where to hide. Assuming they’re checking in honestly and not being creepers like you.
• If you download foursquare, and they do too, and you both use it, you’ll know where everyone is and isn’t. And if that’s not a scaling strategy—growth by intimidating user necessessity—we don’t know what is. Congratulations to them, they get the “Social Life Sanctity Ruination” award, for better or otherwise.
• Gowalla shirts are now a vintage nerd souvenir. Get ‘em while they last.
• Finally, just because you have fifteen million users doesn’t mean TEH OLDZ will understand what your startup is any more than they did fifteen million users prior to today: But to be fair, they probably never will.

 
fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

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