[staunch]

He's referring to Loopt (and others I suppose) when he says "The other companies built elaborate infrastructures: e.g they partnered with wireless carriers so that users’ locations could be tracked in the background without having to “check-in”."

This is the kind of mistake that burns so badly. You find yourself saying something like "You mean you just ask them to update their location manually and that works?"

It reminds me of when Ballmer was bragging about how sharing songs via WiFi on the Zune could get you a date. Then Steve Jobs recommended simply giving one earbud to the girl.

The differencing between trying to untie the The Gordian Knot and taking a sword to it.

[hooande]

To be fair to loopt, the market changed between 2005 when they launched and 2009 (ish) when foursquare launched. 5 years ago people weren't nearly as comfortable with the idea of location based social networks. Loopt and the deals that they signed probably had a big hand in making the concept more familiar and paved the way for many of it's competitors. The popularity of twitter might have also had something to do with it.

This probably holds true for a lot of examples of companies that solved the wrong problem. When your competitors can evaluate your progress, it's much easier for them to position themselves according.

[jmm]

The timing of the iPhone (its OS and its app store ecosystem) played a significant role in the check-in model, I think, as it encouraged developers to [finally] sidestep the carriers, and also prevented background processing. Though this is kinda irrelevant to Chris' bigger point of pivoting towards a perceived advantage.

(It will be interesting to see how things change with OS4's background processing. I'd guess users will continue to prefer for check-in based over continuous gps logging, though there may be some interesting/appealing applications of continuous logging. Haven't really looked into the specifics yet.)

[kylemathews]

Google Latitude on the Android follows the continuous logging model. It's interesting but for very different reasons than Foursquare. Foursquare's appeal to me is more keeping a record of interesting places I go and sharing that with others. Latitude's appeal is, oh, where are my friends right now.

[jonny_noog]

... Then Steve Jobs recommended simply giving one earbud to the girl.

Not to disregard or in any way invalidate your point, which has been taken, but did Steve have a solution for the possible ear wax issue, or does his famed reality distortion field extend to ear wax as well? I'm generally not keen to use anyone else's earbuds, nor am I keen to lend mine to anyone else (and they're not even the kind that you need to wedge into your ear).

[davidmathers]

I want this girl to stick her tongue in my mouth but I'm horrified by the thought of her earwax touching my ear.

Um, what?

[jonny_noog]

I was actually thinking of it the other way around, the comfort factor of a girl that I assumedly don't know very well being offered my ear buds and the potential awkwardness that this may engender, regardless of the actual condition of my hypothetical ear buds (which would be very clean) or my general rule about no one using my own ear buds (to which there are admittedly some rare exceptions, with people whom I know well enough). But I guess judging by the downvote, not Steve or anyone else must think this way. Message received.