Is The Location Check-In Dying A Slow Death?

Location based technology has been around for a couple of years now and although it was hyped as the next big thing 18 months ago with the launch of services like Foursquare and Gowalla it really doesn’t seem to be getting much traction and if anything is slipping backwards. Yesterday Facebook announced a major change to their own check in service that effectively means they are taking the emphasis away from physically checking in and moving towards a place where users can tag themselves at locations in the past, present or future even if they are not there. Facebook are not the be all and end all of location but given the fact that they brought Yelp, Foursquare and Gowalla as partners at the start this shows that the traction clearly isn’t there. Check ins clearly haven’t exploded in popularity like many though they would but does that mean they are going to die out or do they have a future?

Foursquare

One of the most over hyped start ups to ever emerge in the social media space. The fact that brands and businesses saw it as a huge potential source of revenue probably propelled it much further than it should ever have been and help it capture huge media attention. Although they have released a bunch of new features in recent months including a self service ad platform the simple fact is that the number of users they have is absolutely miniscule. With approx 15 million users they are reasonably big in the USA but outside of big cities and in the rest of the world the service simply doesn’t have the scale to make it remotely commercially viable for businesses to engage on the platform. They have just raised a boat load of money and continue to evolve but given how much free media coverage they have already had you do wonder about the entire concept of the check-in itself.

Facebook Don’t See The Value

You probably remember when Facebook launched places last year that you would see a bunch of people in your stream checking in to places but you have seen those check ins drying up in recent months to a point where it is very rare to see one. Yesterday Facebook didn’t kill the check in but they certainly changed it dramatically. Instead of the focus being on people checking in to physical locations they can now check in either in the past, the present or the future and crucially they can do it from their desktop or laptop as well. Facebook obviously think a lot more people are going to use this to tag locations than they ever would using their mobiles. All of this is going to add up to a huge amount of new data for Facebook to use to help advertisers providing it works.

The Problem Is Simple

I’ve always said that the problem for location is simple…People don’t want to check in to places. There are a tiny group of people (techie heads and geeks) who want to play games and check in for the sake of it but most people really can’t be bothered telling people where they are at. The other incentive was meant to be deals but bar a few free coffees and stunts there doesn’t seem to be a huge amount of incentive to check in. I’ve only really seen people check in at impressive places like international airports, sports events and other places where they want to show off and let all their friends know they were there but even those have been drying up in recent times. Far from location based services being dead I think they just need some tweaking which is what Facebook are doing. We need to face the fact that the vast majority of people don’t want to take their mobiles out and physically check in but they probably will do so via a web interface in a less structured way. Local advertising is going to be huge but the lovely notion of us all walking around seeing where our friends had all checked in to and meeting them on the fly is not going to happen any time soon. The check in was a lovely idea that captured the attention of many and will continue to be used by a small minority but it really doesn’t seem to be going much further than that.