A record number of new users signed up for Foursquare today, company co-founder Dennis Crowley wrote in a tweet tonight.
That likely means upwards of 18,000 people signed up for the location-based social network, probably buoyed by a glowing article in today’s New York Times and the press generated from yesterday’s announcement of Facebook Places. All eyes are on Foursquare and other services like it in the wake of yesterday’s announcement of Facebook Places, which lets users add a location element to their status updates. Will startups like Foursquare survive?
If they don’t, it won’t be without a fight. Foursquare introduced roughly three million users to location-based check-ins long before Facebook started developing Places.
CEO Dennis Crowley has already indicated that Foursquare is still in the game and aims to be more than just an app on top of Facebook Places, which lets developers use that information in third party applications and was rolled out to its 500 million users today.
“Look what happened when Facebook got into Twitter’s space. People said Twitter was gone. But it just made Twitter stronger and more focused. Our services are totally different. They do different things, serve different needs and different people,” Crowley told the L.A. Times today.
Crowley has said Foursquare signs up about 180,000 users every ten days.
LATE UPDATE: Foursquare sent us this comment:
We currently have close to 3 million users worldwide. We’ve been adding 15,000-20,000 new users a day for the past several months, and we saw a significant increase yesterday.
By entering the space, Facebook is familiarizing more people with the idea of the check-in, which is a good thing for us. Once people get familiar with the concept and start seeing the value of sharing their location with friends, we believe they’ll be drawn to foursquare because of the interesting features we’re building on top of the check-in.
