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The State of Social Location-Based Services

Pubblicato il August 8, 2010
Dennis Crowley, Foursquare Co-Founder

2010 is the year of social location-based services: Foursquare, Gowalla, Google Latitude, Loopt, Brightkite and MyTown.

In the last months we have seen a rapid growth of social location-based services in particular Foursquare. Sharing your own position to unlock badges and earn points using this kind of services has become an activity that engages and appeals to more and more people.

In the challenge between Foursquare and Gowalla, according to a recent report provided by RJMetrics, Foursquare leads with over 2.5 millions active users and with an average daily growth of 19,000 daily users in the last month.

Gowalla is just over 390,000 active users (circa 15.6% of total Foursquare’s users) with a daily average increase of 1,800 new users.

Google Trend estimates Foursquare generates over 5,5 million unique visitors per month with a growth of 350% from January to August 2010 whereas Gowalla generates 830,000 visitors/month with an increase of 15% considering the same period of the year.

There’s not much data available regarding Google Latitude exception made for a statement of Google’s Steve Lee who, in May, reported the service has 3 million active users with an increment of 30% per month (circa 30,000 daily users). This means that if the Latitude’s growth is remained constant during the last three months the Google’s service has now reached 5.7 million active users.

Loopt, another popular location-based social mapping service reached over 4 million users with 240,000 monthly unique visitors, Brightkite surpassed 2 million and MyTown, a social location game, has a userbase of 2.8 million people.

  • Reply
    Jen Grant
    August 8, 2010 at 3:35 am

    Being that I am tasked with build strategies around these platforms, I actively use Foursquare, Gowalla and one that was not mentioned – Whrrl. In addition to size and growth metrics, I’d be very interested to see numbers like:
    – % of Register users that are considered active
    – % of users who use the app 0-5 check-ins only.
    I must say, Foursquare is lucky the other services haven’t garnered as much brand recognition because I’ll bet, the added features alone will spur you make the move from one app to another.

  • Reply
    joker400
    August 8, 2010 at 4:35 am

    really year 2010 is the year of social location based service :
    Foursquare
    Gowalla
    Google Latitude
    Loopt
    Brightkite
    MyTown.

  • Reply
    indoor LBS
    August 8, 2010 at 12:56 pm

    IndoorLBS published a report on what Apple is doing with LBS and 50 other companies. See http://www.IndoorLBS.com . Checkins need more accurate location. GPS fails in most places like malls.

  • Reply
    Hector A. Henry S.
    August 8, 2010 at 9:29 pm

    Nice post.

    Of course the war juts beggan and its apple a lot that the on etha hit firts will have a lot of power, but there are always a lot of exption, becuase the interaction of users its vital, becuase if user have a a bad expirience whit the apps well ofcourse i willl be a bad result for the market.

    what bad its that alot of this companies are close whit there real information and thats vital to get good info about the back of doze companies whan they generally are really close up.