Isn’t it interesting that Tumblr and FourSquare...

Hi. My name is Dennis. I enjoy such things as snowboards, four square and unemployment. I live in the East Village, NYC.

Archive

Dec
24th

Thu

Isn’t it interesting that Tumblr and FourSquare are NYC’s major contributions to social software in the past couple years? I have a theory! They share this commonality: they’re both semi-closed networks. To wit: Though wildly successful, both platforms still somehow feel clubby and insidery. In the long run, it will be interesting to see if this distinct (dare I say New Yorky?) quality is a feature or a bug. (Before I lived in NYC, I had a name for social software like FourSquare’s predecessor, Dodgeball. I called it “NewYorkWare” because those apps seemed specifically made for the hyper-urban. Similarly, Tumblr seems made for the hyper-mediated.)

—

Hmm.. in this scenario, I think that “NewYorkWare” and “this idea is too early” are kind of the same thing. Dodgeball was way too early… not just in the “we all didn’t have smartphones” type of way, but it was pre-Twitter - before Twitter and Faceook taught us the benefit of oversharing. These days, we all Get It that life is more interesting when I am ambiently aware of what my 100 best friends are doing all the time. And back in 2004 when we were able to convince our 100 best friends to check-in every time they went something interesting, we were able to see a little bit of the future in a way that other folks outside our circle were not.

The fact that people find foursquare more interesting than dodgeball is not because the places where foursquare is gaining traction have become more like New York the city, but because the people that live those places have since learned to use social media in the way that our group of New Yorker friends were back in 2004.

Rex Sorgatz - Mediaite Interview (via msg)

Comments (View)