Are you a frequent user of smartphone check-in services like Foursquare or Gowalla? I don’t use them because personally, I don’t want people to know where I am. I guess I like going incognito.
Come to find out, I’m not alone. A recent study by Pew shows that only 12% of smartphone users use theses check-in services.
The study shows that 59% of smartphone owners use their phone to access social networking sites, and 15% use their phone to access Twitter. As for sending photos, 80% and sending or receiving texts was 92%.
So, what do you think this study shows? Are check-in services’ popularity slowing down, at a stand still or just getting started? To me it seems when someone first starts using these check-in services it’s fun and exciting, but after awhile, it just gets old.
Please share your thoughts in the comment section below!
My problem is I always forget until I’m leaving or I’m already gone. Maybe it’s a subconscious need to not make it easy for stalkers to find me. LOL
It is just habit that is all. When you get a big enough reward you will never forget. More local restaurants need to get off the pot on this and leverage better.
Cybercrime – that’s why I don’t do it.
Let’s see, there’s a estimate that 1 in 2 americans would own a smartphone for this christmas. That would be half of the current 312,607,841 extrapolated figure. That give us a market of nearly 18,000,000 people. Now, most of the people I know use it, however there’s also a lot of people that I’d meet that knows about such services and their voiced fear of using them is out of being robbed or kidnapped by beaming their wereabouts, however, they KNOW about the service because the offers their friends that use it get at local business and to create an account for their own businesses as a way to market it. Guess most people would keep using in a passive way, by localized marketing than like myself, to track my whereabouts. It requires a quite open mentality to use it, or at least to lose the fear, same fear as when facebook went mainstream and people complained of “oversharing” over time, those also jumped into the wagon.
Hi Julie, I’m in agreement with you. I really don’t want to tell people my location. I think that the information from the research that interests me most is that 92% of adults use their phones to send and receive messages. This is a great leverage point for small to medium sized businesses to take advantage of. More local business should be taking advantage of SMS text messaging to promote their businesses and reach out to their customers with special offers.
I think location based services are going to get more prevalent but only because casual smart phone users don’t know better. The same reason most people on facebook have no idea how public much of their data is.