I haven’t used foursquare much though I do have a lot of contacts on the service, I just don’t feel my check-ins would be that exciting – with a small child our dining and going out has been pretty limited to places like Nandos and GBK for the most part. But I do wonder if the good folks behind Foursquare/Gowalla and all of these other Location Based Services (LBS) are building products or features.
Let me explain, a product is something that stands on it’s own two feet. Something that can grow, innovate and develop in to a really successful, scalable big business.
A feature is something that is nice but is really part of a suite in another product. So for example a lot of companies building twitter clients are feature builders and when twitter buys a service and integrates it into it’s suite or when twitter creates their own client the service suffers.
Sure there are nice ones like Tweetdeck and others which are extending themselves and building out browsing across platforms to try and establish themselves as products but a lot of these companies are just building features.
When I hear that Facebook is launching locations or Yelp is launching check ins, I wonder if LBS companies really launching a new product or are they basically doing R&D for larger companies?
If the goal of the company is to flip, i.e. to be bought by a big brand in a short amount of time, then companies need to make sure they’re building the best service around so that the big brand doesn’t acquire a competitor. If the goal is to be huge and to change the world maybe some of these companies need to re-examine their business models.
