Don’t you think it’s a bit ironic in the first place that Forrester has finally decided to jump into social media over a year after Owyang left?

It seems that they’re a bit behind the curve and ousted their best bet at producing solid research and understanding on how new media will gain mass adoption.

Give LBS 2-3 years and it will be everywhere. Question is, will Foursquare still be sitting on top…

SO TRUE, Peter.

Much like the “huge” monitors that allowed a “whopping” 800×600 resolution, when most people were still working with 640×480. I followed a thread in a web page forum for a few weeks as people argued back and forth about working with the lowest common denominator versus going forward with the new size. This was all back before CSS and fluid widths, of course.

Whenever developing a product, one has to carefully consider the target market and what resources are available to them. The newest gee whiz wowzer toys won’t mean a thing if people can not use them.

Good point — but for startups, the trick is often to look ahead and as Wayne Gretzky would say “skate to where the puck is going”. In your example, as broadband was gaining wider option, if a company had limited its features/capabilities based on users having dial-up access, they would have likely been left behind too.

But you’re right. You should be realistic about where the market is today — with an eye towards where it’s heading.

Couldn’t agree more.

The Forrester report didn’t surprise me one bit – location-based services are still bleeding-edge from a marketing perspective. That means they have, at very best, niche appeal and that the best that marketing folks can generally hope for at this stage is to learn lessons from experimenting.

Anyone who invests more than a fraction of their budget into tools at the sharp end of the wedge (and let’s face it, most social media tools still sit there) needs to be prepared to learn a lot but deliver few business results.

Great post Peter

Too often the designers of websites and technology fail to take into account the average Joe. Think Automatic Call Systems most big companies have.

And one thing the internet has not fixed is data speeds. I have Broadband and still YouTube and many streaming videos stutter. As we have gained greater data speeds the data volume has kept up pace. We all know AAC and MP3 are poor excuses for sound quality. But I need 2000GB of hard drive for me to realistically switch back to the fuller .wav or similar file. And imagine the pipe needed for each online streaming song to be 70mb vs 7mb.

The bad thing about the marketing industry is everyone markets. Its all T3 colored glasses. Go to Wall Street talk to a stock analyst. Marketer will say 4mil people now on Four Square in a year! That is awesome. Stock analyst – at that rate everyone in the US will be on it in 62years. Marketer 450mil active Facebook accounts. Stock analyst – only 40mil people world wide are doing something on Facebook each day world wide, and your business model is advertising?

I think glass is half full except when it clouds reality.

This is a fantastic post on understanding your whole market and valuing their perspective. I appreciate that you connected it to a situation in your past that most readers can relate to. As an early adopter (read: Geek) it’s easy to forget that the masses still watch commercials instead of fast forwarding their DVR and don’t get the Mayor discount at their local Starbucks.

Great advice Peter. Everyone needs to slow down and give the not only foursquare but the entire location-space some time to mature.

“Billy Joe, in his trailer in the south?”

I guess the assumption is that no one of interest would be able to read this below the Mason-Dixon line. Probably better that way, I hear most people there can barely spell compound words, let alone fire up Tweet Deck. Must be a jungle, glad I live somewhere more civilized :)