FourSquare: We are all developers.
I have been thinking about the FourSquare platform a lot recently. I think that’s partially because of the work I did last weekend at Twilio HQ, their publicity at SXSW and also because of their 1 year anniversary.
They’ve made a huge amount of progress in 1 year. The number of users and venues has exploded. It’s got a brilliant API that’s RESTful and they have OAuth support. The have iPhone, Android and Blackberry clients now.
However…
There is still the perception that they should do more. Lists like this one popup all over. Reviews, pictures, automatic actions, future action, past actions, group activities… the features just pile up.
Should the team at FourSquare HQ have to build all these features? Should they even have to decide which features should be built?
No. We should do that.
You want a mashup of Plancast and FourSquare? You want to be able to include pics in your FourSquare checkins? You want to know who is currently checked in at a current venue? You want an “auto-checkin” feature?
Build it!
By the way, if you want a phone system that changes its behavior based on the category of the last venue you checked in to? Well, I built that already. (more on that later…)
My point is that the Twitter ecosystem evolved over the past few years because of the community of developers who took their API and ran with it. Noah Everett created Twitpic himself instead of waiting for Twitter to build it.
Go forth and do likewise.
