In this edition of Localogy’s Local Beats, we examine news and moves from Foursquare, Google & Poshmark.

End of an Era

What Happened? Foursquare this week announced that it will sunset its flagship City Guides app. This is the original Foursquare app launched in 2009 that became the poster child for the Social, Local, Mobile (SoLoMo) movement. In 2014, it was rebranded to City Guides when Foursquare decided to split its apps into Swarm (the local check-in app) and City Guides. But the latter has remained the OG Foursquare app that carries its legacy as the catalyst for SoLoMo. At its onset, it was one of the first apps to bring native thinking to smartphone app development. In other words, it wasn’t just a website packaged up as an app but rather tapped into all of the unique capabilities of the then-new form factor. We’re talking GPS, social portability, gamification/leaderboards etc. And besides all that, it was just fun. The engagement was fueled by healthy competition amongst friends for mayorships of their favorite bars and hot spots. As a thirty-something in San Franciso at the time, I personally was an avid user. Now, its passing marks the end of an era. But it’s for a good reason, as Foursquare has executed a hugely successful pivot as a B2B location intelligence powerhouse. Ironically, of the location data in the original Foursquare app enabled that pivot, but the company has since moved on to a more varied and scaled source of location data from all the apps out there that utilize its API (plus its Swarm Check-in app). RIP Foursquare.

Why Does it Matter? Besides marking the end of an era, this move is a lesson in pivoting and prioritization. Foursquare’s pivot from consumer app darling to unsexy (but lucrative) B2B powerhouse will be the stuff of HBS case studies for years. Extending from that, this week’s move is a lesson in prioritizing resources where they have the most impact. The value of the City Guide app these days has become more about nostalgia than utility. So it made the hard decision to sunset it.

Watermarking Win

What Happened? There’s ample consternation over AI from entrenched interests and industries. At the top of that list are creators who feel that their central function in life is subject to disintermediation – an understandable sentiment. The retort to that sentiment has been that AI will be more of a co-pilot or assistant in empowering such creators to streamline their workflows… which is true to a degree but often doesn’t allay concerns. Another mechanism is a sense of transparency when AI is being used. More disclosure about AI’s role in any creative work can allow users to differentiate AI-generated fare from human creativity. There have been several methodologies proposed, mostly involving things like watermarks. But the difficulty will be to establish common standards that everyone can agree on. That will take a tech or media giant with enough gravitational pull to execute such standards. Enter Google. This week it launched the general availability of its SynthID Text. This lets developers detect and watermark text written by generative AI models. The technology is already baked into its Gemini models and is now accessible as a download from Hugging Face and Google’s Responsible GenAI Toolkit.

Why Does it Matter? Some sense of transparency for AI’s role in producing any given piece of content – text or graphical – is the first step towards allaying many of the fears that surround the technology. Indeed, one of the fears that follows AI closely is its ability to trick the user into thinking it is human-generated. Google’s solution is to bake disclosure into generative AI models to begin with – in its case Gemini. OpenAI has toyed with a similar idea. If enough big players do this, it will establish a user expectation to the point where there’s critical mass of pressure (read: user demand) for all AI models to include such disclosures. Google is getting the ball rolling now.

Fee Fails

What Happened? Poshmark this week reversed its previous move to re-engineer its seller fees. The short version is that it reduced fees imposed on sellers for the transactions they accomplish on Poshmark. That sounds great… but those fees were shifted to buyers. You can see all the granular details about both pricing structures, before and after, here. This led to a backlash among the Poshmark seller community. Paradoxical at first, but logical at second glance, the backlash was simply because the new buyer-imposed fees have noticeably dampened demand. Selles are now seeing abandoned carts in large numbers, as buyers are turned off by the fees. Poshmark internalized the backlash and returned things to their previous state, along with a healthy mea culpa.

Why Does it Matter? This is a classic case of unintended consequences, and the versatility to be nimble. Poshmark exhibited both. For the former, surprises can happen with product or pricing moves, no matter how much you game them out in advance. For the latter, tech companies have to be willing to reverse decisions and do their best mea culpa dance. This brand of humility isn’t usually in the DNA of tech companies or execs… but it’s usually the right move.