Foursquare has updated its iPhone app with photos and comments, equipping the location-based service with more social tools to take on Facebook. The new features will allow users to attach photos to tips and venues, allowing them to share more information with people. Comments will also help users weigh-in on a friend’s check-in and help them connect.
Foursquare said the updates will help Foursquare turn into more of a digital scrap book, chronicling the experiences of people as they check-in at locations. This sounds like some of the talk Mark Zuckerberg shared with the launch of Facebook Places, a Foursquare competitor. As Facebook has moved into Foursquare’s location territory, it only makes sense for Foursquare to become more social. But it’s not clear if Foursquare is equipped with the right infrastructure to counter Facebook.
Foursquare said the comments and photos will only be visible by friends and it is working on ways to better store photos and comments and export photos to Facebook and Flickr. Right now, the photos and comments are stored on a user’s history page. What this suggests is that Foursquare will have to do a lot of work to make its pictures and comments mature and polished in a way that is a lasting resource for users.
Facebook has done a lot of work to make comments and pictures a core part of its experience. And it’s been able to leverage that work to build out the social side of Facebook Places. Foursquare is going to have to become webscale to be able to leverage photos and comments in a similar way, which is going to take money and more knowhow. Foursquare’s Alex Rainert, head of product, said the location service has done a lot of scaling in the past year with its fast-paced growth and has applied those lessons to photos and comments. “It’s very different launching products for 500,000 users and 5 million users. Over the summer that’s when we saw the growing pains the most and we’ve learned from that,” he said.
It’s another big step for the location based service as it moves beyond the basic check-in. The location service is offering more deals and CEO Dennis Crowley has talked of the service becoming a possible recommendation engine.
Foursquare still has a lot of momentum with 5 million users and counting. And with this latest update, Instagram, FoodSpotting and PicPlz are partnering to enable photos as check-ins with other third party developers working on integration for 2011. Foursquare said photos and comments will come to Android next week and on Palm and BlackBerry in January. But as Facebook and eventually Google accelerate their expansions into location, Foursquare is going to have to gear up even more if it wants to compete with the big boys.
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