What Does Facebook's New API Mean For Eat.fi And How Foursquare Could Help
Eat.fi is hands down one the best designed Finnish webservices, if not the best. I love it and use it weekly, but can't keep thinking it could be so much more.
Facebook just yesterday released its new API in its developer conference f8. This is really big news for everybody. Much bigger than we can yet grasp. With their new really(!) big vision, Facebook will now compete with Google in being the one who parses the web together for the rest of us. Google does it with hyperlinks. Facebook will try to do better job with the meta data from our social relationships. That aside for a moment, let's look at what this announcement could mean for Eat.fi in the short term.
Just as with Yelp, who was Facebook's partner at the f8 launch and have integrated their service to Facebook API, Eat.fi could gain similar benefits by simply integrating its service with the Facebook API. This would surely channel more traffic to Eat.fi as it would let people see who else likes the same restaurants (or even meals) that they do and let the users share the restaurant reviews more easily to their activity feed on their Facebook profile. The Facebook integration would help Eat.fi to get more traffic, but I believe they could do much more.
Not only is the Eat.fi website great, but Eat.fi's iPhone app is one of the best I've seen in tying in the location. This proves that the team can design for mobile experience. Now, let's come back to the 'it could be much more' part. I think Eat.fi would greatly benefit from designing some of the game mechanics into their service that Foursquare and Gowalle are build on.
Eat.fi already has something that Foursquare and Gowalla are only building - A location based platform that offers a real utility service. By mixing the utility with addictive game mechanics I could see the number of Eat.fi's daily active users sky rocket.
Admittedly Eat.fi does not have the potential global scale that Foursquare and Gowalla has, but while it might be more time and resource consuming to expand into other regions, it would also be much harder for competitors to steal the markets they get to dominate. I can see Yelp being a very very distant threat if Eat.fi would start expanding into the markets, but first Yelp would have to enable Check-Ins themselves and secondly they would have to enter Europe. Neither of these happening yet. Conversely, Eat.fi could become the 'European Yelp' for restaurant reviews.
Let's analyze where this would take Eat.fi. By getting much more daily active users through check-in mechanics, Eat.fi could legibly project much bigger advertising revenues. If the revenue potential would be there, they could raise capital for the expansion instead of developing the service with the same sluggish pace that they have so far. They have also been smart enough to build the platform so that it can be replicated into other locations if and when the time comes to expand. With a new addictive check-in feature at the core of the service, that time could come quite soon.
Nice ideas Ville! eat.fi is a great site and "by default" it's really social.
But in eat.fi you can only share stuff outside to the site by providing them a link (which of course isn't too hard if you want to do it).
It would be interesting to see, if they used something like Facebook Connect, would it add more singups to the site.
Actually, WHY doesn't Eat.fi use Facebook Connect and/or Twitter integration?
Seems like a no-brainer.
Thanks for the nice article! We've been watching both Facebook and the location based services develop for some time now, while figuring out what would be the best way to make this kind of thing both useful and profitable for Eat.fi. Game mechanics are a big part of this.
The mobile version is going to be increasingly important overall, and I think you will be happy with the direction we are heading in there.
Also, F8 looks like Facebook finally has a plan they might actually be sticking with, so stay tuned for related features to be showing up on Eat in the next few releases!
Hi Harri,
Facebook keeps switching around what they're doing and where they're heading every month, so I've wanted to make sure they stay put for a bit before throwing resources in that direction. We're streamlining the sign up and login processes in general next, so as long as we don't encounter something weird in this updated Facebook API, that's a likely integration and yes, in some ways a no-brainer. :)
Facebook changes their API arbitrarily, yes, without notifications so I can see your point.
Let's see how they behave with the new API.
One thing that I'd like to know is where's the sentence "Admittedly Eat.fi does not have the potential global scale that Foursquare and Gowalla have…" based on?
If the service seems to be as great as it's described above and some of the features beat for example Gowalla's, why isn't it being hyped outside the Finnish borders, too?
It too often seems to be the default that we get services and apps from the outside world, but few go the other way. Or maybe there's just something that I don't get here. ;)
Marko,
Eat.fi does not have the potential global scale that Foursquare and Gowalla have because they have to build the content (see http://eat.fi/helsinki/demo) for each new city. Foursquare and Gowalla are much lighter content wise and in large part get their users to add the locations. Creating good content takes time and money.
I'm am sure Eat.fi would make a killing if it would expand outside of Finland, but this costs money and they can't do it before they can build a stronger business model or, as I outline above, get a lot more traffic to make the advertising model feasible.
Another possible model, if they would enable the check-ins first, is to go the coupon route and start making deals with restaurants. They are currently experimenting with a model, which let's the restaurants advertise their specials on the map interface.
OK, thanks for clearing that up for me Ville. And many thumbs up for the Eat.fi project!