With the news that Foursquare has now notched up it’s first ‘million check-ins in one day‘, it’s with little surprise that there’s an increasing number of new apps and services attempting to horn in on Foursquare’s fairly lucrative racket. But rather than go toe-to-toe with the heavyweight champion of the check-in, these latest services are instead focussed on getting you to ‘check-in’ to your favourite TV show…. or book… or CD.
Should you be interested to learn more, there’s a good article here on this new breed of sevice and what exactly they offer. However, in brief, these services are designed around allowing users to ‘check-in’ to various entertainment media and thereby not only announce to their social network(s) that they are watching X, reading Y or listening to Z, but also in some cases ‘win’ badges (or somesuch variant thereof) to give the service an element of competition (no matter how arbitrary). Of course these serices also – and to varying degrees – allow one to connect with friends and like minded-strangers around a favourite show/book/album as well as recieve recommendations etc.
The question remains then, will any of these services succeed in the way Foursquare has for location? The jury is still well and truly out on this one. None have grabbed a genuine foothold stateside and I imagine it’ll be another 6 months before they make any sort of ripple on British shores. For me it just feels that Twitter is already the place turn to when they want to tell their mates how great a TV show, book or album is. It’s immediate: you have an existing network of people and it’s simple. Foursquare worked as Twitter (at least six months ago didn’t have a location-based offering); there’s no such shortcoming on Twitter around one’s media consumption.
Of course none of this means that 12 months down the line we won’t all be using a new service to advocate our favourite media: a simple interface, some compelling incentives and a few choice celebirty endorsements and it could well be the next big thing in Social. For now though, i’d conclude that UK audiences and UK media brands needn’t concern themselves with GetGlue, Miso, Philo, Hot Potato, Tunerfish, Kickfour et al: Twitter is still where it’s at.
