Size Matters: Will FourSquare Get Too Big?

Someone was recently talking about how their use of Twitter changed once they accrued a few thousand followers and about 30% as many folks who they were following. They lost interest. The stream became too cluttered and full of people they knew only marginally (I believe the Dunbar number may expand for some in the future but its basic premise about the limits of our ability to "maintain active relationships" with only so many people remains sound).

There is a danger that FourSquare will get too big for each of us and lose its intimacy. I have already turned off push alerts on my phone which is a shame as I was able to see last week that I was in the same airport as a friend at the same time. We couldn't meet up but I enjoyed knowing she was a few gates away. But now the alerts from the growing list of folks I follow is cluttering up my view.

Mashable reports that FourSquare turned oneand reached 500k+ users. (on a side note, I find it interesting that the top referrer(33%) to the domain foursquare.com is Facebook which is often eclipsing Google (22%) as the source for traffic). Will FourSquare accelerate in terms of acquiring users and activity (they are at 15m+ check-ins)? Looptis somewhere north of 3m users and probably 1/10 the buzz of FourSquare. Is that because they don't have the same gaming quality or does something happen to friend/location-based services when they get big? I would love to see the growth trends for FourSquare, Loopt and Gowalla side-by-side to see if there is any common plateau by overall user base (does the site slow down growth after a million users?) or any patterns of average follower-per-user.

My hypothesis is that, beyond sheer novelty drop-off, once the service gets big and the average follower-per-user grows past fifty than usage drops off as people become overwhelmed by check-ins. (this is smaller than the Dunbar number as I believe there are fewer people that we want to track throughout he day) Only a core group will remain game-junkies vying for mayoral bragging rights to LaGuardia Marine Terminal. (lets watch the insane mayoral competition in Austin this week for SXSWi...)

Publicidad Guatemala, website La Agencia Mas Efectiva