The importance of what phase your social platform is in

Really great point about building social platforms:

"What’s important to realize when comparing Facebook Places to Foursquare is that both services are at very different stages in the adoption life cycle. Facebook Places is in it’s infancy and Foursquare is starting to mature. Foursquare’s been around long enough to develop an active user base and to collect a heap of check in and user data. Without that data, the functionality that can be presented to users out of the gate is very limited, so the focus for the first stage of building the service is VERY different from the later stages. The first real challenge for a team at the beginning is to make the service fun and compelling enough for users to check in and build a habit without having to give them much information about other users (remember, if no one else has checked in, there’s no information for it to tell you where your friends are and to make it interactive). The adoption stage is about creating a fun experience where people actually want to add data points to the system when there’s not much interpersonal feedback between them and other users. There’s a long period at the beginning (especially in sparsely populated areas) where gathering geo-specific data is a lonely, single-user focused affair.

After lots of people use the system for a while, though, the focus for the team building the system shifts. Rich data gives you options. Now you can give users all kinds of cool feedback and information when they interact with the system because now the system knows more about you, where you go and what your friends do. This is the phase Foursquare is in – they’ve got lots of people who use the system regularly. Now they have to decide how to use and surface the data to make the system increasingly fun, useful and interactive. This is where Facebook wants to be, but they’ve got a long way to go. They’ve got a huge advantage because they already know lots about their users and their friends, but they don’t know squat about where people go, and how much they’ll contribute. The video ads Facebook put up to launch the service (see the second video in the next section) show us what Facebook wants us to share, but without any data, they’ll never be able to deliver – let’s see if they can get people to use the service first."