It is very misleading to think that Foursquare "owns the brand around location." Location is an engineering aspect of certain products or services. It is not a market or customer experience in its own right. It can't really be owned anymore than the "retail space" brand or "machine shop" brand can be owned. The concept of brand does not make sense for the word "location."

If anybody owns the location brand at all, it is the US government (owners of the GPS system). In fact my own first mental association is NOT with Foursquare but Garmin, TomTom and Google Latitude.

And therein lies a problem for Foursquare that star biz-dev talent cannot solve. It is a fundamental unresolved customer experience and product completeness problem.

Yes, they have mindshare. It goes beyond location in fact. They are the default association when you ask yourself, "what's smart about a smartphone?"

Foursquare was the first thing I tried after getting a smartphone. They are the first thing I think of when I hear the word "app." They signify a universe beyond email and mobile browsers. They currently own the gateway to the App world.

That's actually a danger, not a strength. People don't stop at gateways. They pass through. If you stand for everything, you stand for nothing. You are a widget in the original MBA sense of the word.

Sure, it is good to see the team developing a strong biz-dev side, so long as it doesn't obscure the fact that they still haven't carved out a stable market around a clearly valuable (even if poorly understood) customer experience.

They may be getting a lot of partners, and due to sheer curiosity, a lot of people give 'em a spin, and with a lot more patience than other services (I seriously tried it for more than month before finally shoving the icon into a "rarely used" folder on my iPhone).

Here's the issue. I couldn't figure out what the value was, and I was not getting any subconscious value that I did not understand either. The fun of uncovering badges pretty much petered out after the first few. I thought maybe it gets more interesting once you get mayorships and such. I asked some mayors. Nope, they said they really didn't get it either, they were still persisting to try and figure it out.

The "deals" are worth it in about 1 out of 20 cases for me. Too low a hit rate to be worth the bother of checking in.

This wouldn't normally be an issue if it was still fun in some inscrutable way like Twitter was before people figured out its value.

But in this case, it is not fun after a few days. Inscrutable or not. There is no real incentive to keep doing it. I am told it gets to be somewhat fun if you are in an area where you know a lot of IRL people, and it catalyzes interactions when they are close etc.

But if that's the case, they've got a much narrower market than they are reaching for. They'll have to focus on venues where a sufficient density of friendly contact can be engineered and compete with the pure serendipity players, so the value doesn't all come down to the artificial incentives of gamification and badges. Somebody recently tweeted that gamification is the high-fructose corn syrup of user engagement. If only that were true. HFCS works because it substitutes for a real craving, regular sugar. Badges by themselves don't.

So long as Foursquare is brand over-extended in terms of leaving the complete customer experience poorly defined, they will be disappointing a lot of people and will not be safe. If there is a large class where the only value is coupons and deals, Groupon could take that market away with a few good moves. If there's another large class where serendipitous meetings is the value, a narrower product focused on that could take the market away.

The fact that you are forced to say Foursquare owns the location brand reveals the problem: the brand is wildly overextended and doesn't stand for anything at all at the moment. We don't notice this because users so far are still groping and haven't yet figured out the smartphone/app technology well enough to decide what they want. In a sense, Foursquare is the Hello World app for them. They are using it to figure out "what all this smartphone app fuss is about" and as a waiting room to gain familiarity with the UX skills while waiting for apps that are actually useful to them.

Props to Foursquare for that, btw, for inventing the building blocks of the customer experience, like the check-in metaphor and "nearby" lists.

The reasons the customers aren't dumping Foursquare en masse is that as yet they haven't found good alternative places to go.

But boy, are those alternatives on their way. Every second person I talk to seems to have an app idea they are working on. I've seen a bunch of prototypes. A lot of them are very smart. A lot of them make a lot more sense to me than Foursquare, and they are targeting Foursquare directly. Even if 99% of them are idiots, that 1% of contenders is enough to give Foursquare some serious trouble.

This means focus on growth/biz-dev as THE big challenge is dangerous.

The Foursquare product is not complete in any sense of the word. The big/growing user base may be fostering a very false sense of security. The leverage with biz-dev partners based on claims of attention share could evaporate overnight. If you view Foursquare's user base as just a very full waiting room, with users watching the action and waiting for specific buses/planes.... you get a sense of the danger. I know *I* am waiting for a few specific sorts of apps for which Foursquare is my mental placeholder widget.

So no, I don't think Tristan Walker is the future of Foursquare, even though he seems like an extraordinarily talented guy. The fundamentals of the product and customer experience are just too weak still.