Dennis Crowley and Robert Scoble

Co-founder, Foursquare; Managing Director, Rackspace

The Laser-Focus of Foursquare
22 minutes, 10.5mb, recorded 2011-04-20
Crowley, Scoble (Left to Right)

Scoble & Crowley start off the Where 2.0 conference with a discussion about Foursquare, the location-aware social networking site. People think it's something that lets you just check-in to a place, but it's more than that, says co-founder David Crowley. It is about using a user's social graph to build relationships between the user, his location, and the other people he meets there.

Crowley says Foursquare is always a single-user experience even if it is not always a multiple-user experience. Even if a user does not have any friends on Foursquare, he or she can still check-in and get points or a badge. That incentivises the activity until the user builds a social graph.

How is Foursquare different from Facebook Places or Events or other social networking websites that use location information? What do their data centers look like? Will Foursquare build relationships between user's location and their experiences, such as allowing a user to check-in what television program they are watching, or what news article they are reading? Where is Foursquare going next? How is it different from Color?

The audience ask questions live on Twitter, as Scoble interviews Crowley.


Dennis Crowley is the Co-founder and CEO of foursquare. Previously, Dennis founded Dodgeball, one of the first mobile social services in the U.S., which was acquired by Google in 2005. He has been named one of the “Top 35 Innovators Under 35” by MIT’s Technology Review magazine (2005) and has won the “Fast Money” bonus round in the TV game show Family Feud (2009). His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, Time Magazine and Newsweek. He is currently an Adjunct Professor at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP).

Dennis holds a master’s degree from New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program and a bachelor’s degree from the Newhouse School at Syracuse University.

Robert Scoble is an American blogger, technical evangelist, and author. Scoble is best known for his blog, Scobleizer, which came to prominence during his tenure as a technology evangelist at Microsoft. He currently works for Rackspace and the Rackspace sponsored community site Building 43. He previously worked for Fast Company as a video blogger and is also co-author of Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers with Shel Israel.

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