4 minutes with the CEO/co-founder of Foursquare

A chat with the co-founder of Foursquare from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

Have you heard of Foursquare? If not, you likely will in short order. As some people here in the Valley are saying, it’s the Twitter of 2010.

Yesterday, at the Where 2.0 conference in San Jose, I caught up with Foursquare CEO and co-founder Dennis Crowley just after his eye-popping keynote talk.

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For those who don’t know, Foursquare is a web and mobile app that lets its users to connect with friends and update their location. People in their 20s and 30s obsess over checking in at various locations to win digital badges. It runs on the iPhone, Android phones, Blackberry, Palm and other devices.

Crowley says the year-old company is on track to hit a million registered users around May 1, which would be quicker than Twitter made it to a million.

In our chat, Crowley says Foursquare is about “trying to make the real world more playful (and) trying to reward people for doing interesting things.”

Merchants are starting to climb aboard the bandwagon, offering coupons and discounts for people to check in or create a swarm, where 50 people need to check in at a venue or event. Some are pretty funny, like the Seattle business Babeland, which wanted to give a free vibrator to its Foursquare mayor, or the medical marijuana dispensary in Beverly Hills that wanted to give a 15 discount to its mayor.

This kind of swarm behavior, which Howard Rheingold chronicled early on in “Smart Mobs,” was much in evidence at this year’s South by Southwest Interactive Festival, where groups roamed from one party to the next following their friends’ leads on Foursquare.

Connecting the real and digital worlds

“Media companies and brands also want to get involved,” Crowley told me. “When it comes down to restaurants, bars and events of local interest, there’s a real opportunity to throw some Foursquare there. It’s a real fun space to be involved in now.”

That was evidenced by Crowley’s rat-tat-tat presentation, where he showed off example after example of people being motivated to unlock Foursquare badges. “People say this is silly and stupid, and it is,” he said during his keynote, “but we made a gym badge and people said they now were going to the gym more.” Foursquare also made badges for attending art galleries, visiting pizza parlors, going to birthday parties — you don’t really get anything except good digital vibes and beating out competitors to be the “mayor” of a local business, coffee house or venue. It’s still early days. Stanford University, for example, has had 716 check-ins by 256 users.

I wanted to ask Dennis about 50 more questions — for example, any glimmerings of a business model yet? — but a line of other conference-goers was eager to shake the hand of the tech world’s latest star.

Foursquare has followed Twitter’s lead and created an open API. They have 100 apps built by independent developers already, “so who knows what it’ll be next year?” Crowley mused.

Related

• Steve Rubel interviews Dennis Crowley in July 2009

• If You Use Foursquare, You Are an Annoying Jackass (Valleywag)

• More video interviews on Socialmedia.biz

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• The Twitter Highlights of Foursquare CEO’s Where 2.0 Talk (gigaom.com)
• Foursquare location game generating real-world rewards as it approaches 1M users (mobile.venturebeat.com)
• Foursquare Everywhere in Bing Maps (thenextweb.com)
• Foursquare CEO: We’ll Hit 1 Million Members In A Few Weeks (blogs.wsj.com)

JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.