Anthony M. Townsend - Smart Cities - Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia

On a screen mounted by the elevator, Foursquare’s torrent of check-ins unfolded in real time. An animated globe spun slowly, revealing hot spots of check-ins flaring up in a self-service census of the creative class. Berlin, Stockholm, and Amsterdam burned bright as smart young things and their smartphones set out for dinner, drinks, and dancing. With each check-in, they furthered their quest to unlock the app’s “badges,” a kind of symbolic reward doled out for, say, checking in at four different bars in one night (“Crunked”) or at a health club ten times in a month (“Gym Rat”). Crowley came up with the idea after jogging by a spray-painted mushroom ripped from the screen of Super Mario Bros, on the Williamsburg Bridge. “Why can’t you get power-ups from exploring the city?” he recalled thinking/ It’s just one of Foursquare’s many improvements over Dodgeball.

Why has Foursquare succeeded so wildly where Dodgeball failed? What can it teach us about the ability of grassroots smart technologies to scale up? There are three key ingredients.

First, there was a new, reachable market for mobile apps. The rapid spread of iPhones created enormous demand for new software, and the walled gardens that wireless carriers used to control the Internet experience of users quickly came down. Almost immediately after the iPhone’s launch in June 2007, hackers figured out how to “jailbreak” the iPhone’s operating system, a technique that allowed them to load third-party software. A little more than a year later, in July 2008, Apple co-opted the growing movement by launching the iTunes App Store. The App Store created a place where buyers and sellers of software for mobile devices could come together and easily do business with a few clicks. While not quite as open as the Web (Apple could and did ban many apps, especially those that replicated the iOS operating systems core features like e-mail), it was a huge improvement.

Second, apps made signing up new users and getting them to interact with the service much easier. Getting on Dodgeball was a complex process—signing up on a website, adding its e-mail or SMS code to your phones address book, and then tapping out a carefully spelled check-in request to guarantee a match with the systems master atlas of venues. But the App Store could get software into users’ hands quickly. You could download Foursquare within seconds of hearing about it from a friend over dinner, and check in before your drinks order arrived. The effect on start-ups was transformative. Once an app caught on, entrepreneurs could take those hard download stats in hand to investors and secure the funds to quickly accelerate development and marketing.

But most important, Foursquare’s success was the result of Crowley’s experiences with Vindigo and Dodgeball, which gave him a stockpile of ideas to draw from. Both Radar and Explore—another clever function of Foursquare that mines data on your habits as well as your friends’ to recommend nearby venues—were things he’d dreamed of building for years. Even as the rest of the industry got hung up on concepts like simply sharing personal location, Crowley was always pushing himself to “do more than just put pins on a map,” as he put it. Dodgeball had taught him that knowing where you are wasn’t actually that valuable; the value was in using that information to unlock new experiences.

Building on its early success, Foursquare’s next move was to become the center of a universe of other apps—a “platform play,” in industry lingo. In the years since Dodgeball, the World Wide Web of static documents had evolved into one driven by data, much of it shared and recombined across sites in “mash-ups” of multiple information sources. The Web, like the ancient cities Christopher Alexander idealized, was becoming a lattice of its own. Companies that controlled repositories of valuable data, like Twitter, held a key strategic position. Foursquare had accumulated a similar data stockpile—past check-ins, tips, venue information—but, also like Twitter, couldn’t explore every possible use of it. It was time to open up and make itself a piece of the social Web’s infrastructure.

Like Twitter and countless other companies, early on Foursquare had launched an application program interface, or API, a structured mechanism that allowed others to write their own apps that would pull data from Foursquare. For example, you could give permission to an app that would repost your Foursquare check-ins to your profile on Linkedln. The API allowed Foursquare to build an ecosystem of start-ups and hackers that added to the value of its own business but also created thousands of new features that Foursquare either hadn’t thought of or didn’t see as core features for its millions of users. To seed the community of hackers, Selvadurai hosted “hack days,” when Foursquare staff worked with outsiders to build software that plugged into Foursquare. One of my favorites, Donteat.at, built by Max Stoller, a computer science student at NYU, mashed up New York City’s health inspection database with your last check-in to warn you off if the restaurant received a failing grade. Crowley must have liked it too, because Foursquare hired Stoller as an intern the following summer.

With its API now used by over 40,000 different apps—many with far more users than Foursquare itself—Crowley’s company has established itself as a wholesale provider of location services and data about places for the entire Web and the entire world. It is poised to become a de facto urban operating system, and one that’s conceptually light years ahead of anything IBM or Cisco has created. Telemetry and the tracking of stuff—the mere “pins on a map” that Crowley scoffs at—is still the tech giants’ killer app for their mundane Internet of Things. For him what matters are the digital breadcrumbs, the pointers that make links between physical and virtual points in the urban lattice. The Foursquare tip by his cofounder, “Naveen recommends the pork sandwich at Porchetta,” is more important than where Naveen actually is right now, or even where Porchetta is (110 East Seventh Street). Foursquare doesn’t just help mobile, social people figure out where they are. It plugs them deeply into their surroundings in ways we never imagined possible.

Foursquare’s success shows how the open, organic structure of the social web’s lattice has become a powerful tool for putting people at the center of smart cities. Crowley’s meteoric rise has in turn inspired countless tinkerers to turn their own utopian visions of the city into code. But unlike other social-media breakouts like Twitter and Facebook, which were born nearly fully formed (at their core, the basic interaction model of both has changed little since they launched), Foursquare’s long incubation shows how hard it can be to engineer the smart city from the bottom up. The technologies are many and hard to plumb together, and interactions between people and the urban lattice are tricky and complicated things to design well. It took the better part of a decade working on Vindigo and Dodgeball before Foursquares outlines jelled in Crowley’s mind. Many of his ambitions still remain unfilled.

Foursquare continues to evolve in response to new lessons taught by its users and the cities they inhabit. In early 2012 Foursquare turned a corner when its users suddenly stopped checking in. As Crowley told TechCrunch, a leading news site tracking the start-up scene, “I asked myself: did we break something? But in fact, its because people are using Foursquare to look for where their friends are, to find things, and as a recommendation service.” Twitter had successfully navigated the shift years earlier, when in 2009 the now-familiar asymmetry of celebrity tweeters to their crowds of followers took shape. “When you start, you are so focused on engagement,” Crowley said. “Then you hit this point when you are big enough and say there is something awesome going on anyway. At some point you look and say, oh wow, the consumption model is actually taking off.”10 The first three years of Foursquare was like a massive crowdsourced survey of the worlds cities. Now the task was to mine the results and deliver relevant, on-demand recommendations.