South by Southwest Interactive gets underway today in Austin, Texas, and a broad swath of the technology community will be headed there to check out the bands, barbecue, and, oh yeah, the startups.
Ever since Twitter had its breakout moment at the 2007 festival, SXSW has been considered a king-maker of sorts. Yet no startup has yet been able to replicate Twitter’s success.
This year the major theme is set to be location based services, and the battle between Foursquare and Gowalla in particular. The two similar services let users “check-in” to different locations and earn virtual badges and points, and tech enthusiasts believe that with the proliferation of smartphones, both companies could become hugely successful.
Foursquare had the early lead, but Austin-based Gowalla has come on strong in recent months, and it will interesting to see if SXSW attendees wind up backing the hometown hero. Meanwhile several other similar services are vying for attention as well. (I’ll be interviewing Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley at a panel on Sunday.)
Yet for all the hype around checking-in, and all the genuine promise of location based services, neither company is very big. Foursquare just recently topped 500,000 users, while Gowalla has somewhere in the neighborhood of 150,000. This makes them shrimps on the internet, where Twitter has upwards of 60m users and Facebook just raced past 400m.
I’m signed up for both Foursquare and Gowalla, and even among my generally tech-savvy network, it is surprising just how few people are using either service. So far today just two of my friends have checked in on Foursquare (one at a bagel shop in New York, the other on the subway in San Francisco), and just one has used Gowalla.
It will take more than that for either to be the next Twitter.
(I’ll be blogging from SXSW through the weekend.)
