Slow Growth for Foursquare?

Every time I check out Facebook or Twitter for my daily dose of ‘entertainment’, I’m bombarded with messages about ‘checking in’. I used to quite enjoy these, actually, because apps like Foursquare contributed to my love of secretly snooping on people I don’t really care about. But recently I’ve begun to get slightly agitated at all the check ins. Frankly, its taking over my newsfeed and the truth is- I don’t particularly care that you went to Pizza Uno before you stopped into the Loews movie theater on 68^th street to watch Harry Potter last night. It’s too much. Too much information, too many details—the window into all of my ‘friends’ lives has grown so big, all I really want to do is pull down the shades. Only slightly though. I still want to peak. My feelings of frustration could very well be temporary (like the time I decided I had enough of FB and forbid myself from looking at it for a week, only to realize that FB had become a part of my ritual. Coffee and FB for breakfast. It was like a bad addiction I couldn’t quit. I even tried replacing it with smoking but the nicotine wasn’t as satisfying as photo updates)

Anyway, this brings me to the actual point of this posting which is to comment on the fact that only 5% of US online adults use location apps at least once a month, up from 4 % last year. Despite the fact that this article was intended to make the reader gasp at the astonishingly low number, I think the rate is incredible. 30 % of online audiences are familiar with location apps, up from 16 % last year. This means that not only have location apps successfully convinced people to publicly post exactly where they are (when I heard about this idea years ago I literally LOL’d) but if you’re not using apps like foursquare, you at least know what it is. 30% is a very high number and truth be told, I don’t know if the 5 % will ever reach the numbers foursquare wants it to. I mean, do people really want to expose themselves that much? From personal and professional information to photos of newborns (not cute- have you ever seen a newborn?) and extensive family trees to now publishing your exact location? Have house robberies gone up since foursquare was released? No need to check the lights anymore, just log onto Facebook.

Uggh, what do I know. All I can say is that 15 million Foursquare users enjoy checking in and that’s about 14.9 million more than I ever thought would. Makes me think about what’s next. Let me tell you something, folks, if people start checking in from the bathroom, I’m seriously done.