Every year (if not every half-year) a new service becomes the main topic of conversation on the web. The buzz comes, of course, at a so early stage that’s it’s impossible to guess at this time how perenial the success will be and if the service will be able to find a sustainable business model, but this does not prevent experts to imagine it as a pillar of new usages on the intranet that will, at last, make enterprise 2.0 mainstream in the workplace.
In these early months of 2010 the pretended “next big thing” is called Foursquare and many things have already been writen here and there about its future brilliant success in the workplace. Let me also mention Gowalla, that’s more recent but has many interesting features and Whrrl that is not “officially” working in France at this time.
So, is it one more craze or the future next big thing ?
What’s that ?
To keep it simple, let’s say these services allow you to “localize” where you are to tell your network “I’m there” or tells any of your contact going something “x… whas here and he even let a tip/recommandation about the place”. You can tell me that it may quickuly become boring and even pointless. That’s why some funny things have been added to keep the interest up.
The person with the most “check-ins” in a given place becomes the “mayor” of this place. This is an honorific title but some businesses alread
y try to make things to pay more attention to the customer who owns the mayorship of their place. People may also win “badges” when they accomplish things like cumulating x check-ins, x airports, 3 Apple Stores….there is no limit to what can be invented to create new badges…
Everything is, of course, opt-in : one share only what he wants with whom he wants.
What benefits for users ? ?
Here things get more complicated. It stimulates a kind of funny competition within one’s network, most of all when these people do a little bit more than home-transportation-work every day. It’s always funny to go to a new place and to know that a friend of yours was theis months before and let a message about things to do, to see, specials if it’s a retaurant….
Now let’s be honnest and pragmatic. Except this funny competition side (I sometimes like these kind of pointless games), the vague feeling of being closer to other since we can know who is where, who’s around…I can’t find any tangible benefit at this time. Maybe I once appreciated a “since you are there, xxxx recommands such restaurant that’s one block away” but nothing more. Humm..I was forgetting one point : when I’m at a conference abroad it’s always useful to know who is where, attending such track in such room, is at the airport, is at such restaurant to be able to micro-organize all together without spending our time calling each other on the phone.
I’m afraid that’s all.
We used to live very well without that in the past. Let’s also admit we can say the same about mobile phone…
Let’s admit that it does not look that a business killer-app. But is there a part of this new paradigm that may bring any benefit in a business context ?
). They are asked to qualify their leads better, to react in an adapted way to each situation…. The solution has a name : training. But how can an expert trainer work with people all over the world knowing that it’s just not possible to put him on a plane every morning !
You can find the "original" french version of this blog here
