2011: The Year the Check-in Died

Early last year, "check ing in" was the cool new craze. No visit to your favorite tech news site could be had with out get ting buried in a tsuna mi of arti cles about Foursquare, Gowal la, Loopt, BriteKite or a myr i ad other star tups. The big guys quick ly fol lowed suit: Yelp intro duced "Check-Ins" while Face book launched "Places" and most recent ly, Google Lat i tude updat ed to incor po rate check-ins and check-outs. But here's the thing: the trends aren't actu al ly that good.

Let's look at Foursquare and Face book. First, there's no doubt Foursquare is throw ing off some impres sive num bers (e.g. the com pa ny's recent announce ment of 6 mil lion users). It typ i cal ly announces total, rather than active, users and that num ber is rough ly grow ing lin ear ly at present. Total users, by def i n i tion, of course, only goes up - yet accord ing to compete.com, Web traf fic has declined for five con sec u tive months, amount ing to a 50% reduc tion in traf fic over that peri od. And while traf fic isn't the best indi ca­tor of usage, Web vis its should be just as like ly now as five months ago, and it's cer tain ly not a pos i tive sign of rapid growth in usage.

2011: The Year the Check-in Died
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