[roldie]

The pastry example is really important. You can't just serve ads to people, they have to be targeted toward the users' interests. Perhaps they're based on your check-in history, but this won't convert well to sporadic users.

I don't know how the majority of Foursquare users use the service, but my friends and I pretty much only use it to check-in - at a place that we had pre-determined. There is no discovery or opportunity for an ad to capture my attention or push me toward a promoted business. If I'm going to get a burger I don't care about your pastry ad. But there's no way for Foursquare to get this information. Not without disrupting the check-in experience.

As has been suggested, I don't see how Foursquare can grow their ad network with this kind of usage. How can they convince businesses to sign on?

[jason_shah]

Admittedly I don't check in often. I use Path / Facebook for this now.

Trey Titone suggested in the comments on the post that if Foursquare could do frictionless sharing with the app running in the background, maybe they could get more checkin data. But I think the battery constraints / privacy concerns are too high, at least in the next 18-24 months, for people to opt in for this without getting much product value.

Battery life will get better, apps will be more battery-efficient, and privacy concerns tend to fade away. But frictionless checkins don't seem highly compelling to me from the user point-of-view for people to make the necessary sacrifices that adoption would demand.