Foursquare and Seven Years Hence

I asked a question on Saturday on Twitter: “Do you think blog post frequency has fallen off with the introduction of Twitter?” I feel that the many bloggers out there tend to not post as much now, because if they see a link or two that is interesting, instead of writing a blog post about it, they tweet it on Twitter. I searched the web for awhile to see what people thought (I could not find much) but it did get me thinking of how have changed the way we communicate, and how it pertains to racing.

In the late 1990′s we saw the rise of the chat boards – which I would argue are just like Twitter, only worth less money. There we communicated with like-minded folks on whatever topic we chose to. We learned words like “troll”, learned acronyms (some for some really cool swear words), and built friendships. A little later came the blogosphere, where again interaction was paramount. Not soon after – social networking like Facebook, Twitter, and hundreds of other sites and avenues were here to stay.

That was all fine and dandy, and we have discussed here and elsewhere how late racing is to the party for much of this. However, I wonder if we can look forward. What is next, and can racing do anything to be ahead of the curve instead of behind it? I am notoriously bad at predictions (my 6th race “can’t miss” key at Turfway today is evidence of that), so I won’t do much more but bring up a  few things that crossed my desk …..

1. Youtube TV: As Jessica said via twitter last week, Youtube is going to broadcast live cricket games via their medium for the Indian Premier League, in an exclusive deal. This is clearly a first. And it does fit in with a prediction for television for the next ten years, here. The author believes that TV will become less and less relevant this decade and “global communities will dominate the media”. Churchill signed a $2M deal with television recently. Should we be doing something different instead?

2. The Ipad: I must say this looks cool. Since I have a netbook, Blackberry, laptop and desktop I need one like a hole in the head. However, what if racing video could be really, really cool on this? I would probably buy one. In addition our older demographic seems to be married to the past performances. I bet they would look great on this and maybe an enterprising daughter or son could convince their father or grandfather to give it a shot? The bright interface with flippable pages sure would be neat at the simulcast center.  And the first time one of these guys click a horse on their Ipad and get a video replay of the horse’s last race via quick wifi, it might be infectious.

3. Foursquare: Them damn kids today are always doing something new. This time it’s using Foursquare. Foursquare is a social networking system whereby people connect with friends and “check-in” to various venues. For people who check in the most frequently, they get badges. Super-users become “mayor” of a particular venue. Sound strange? Well, someone likes it – they recently received $1.35M in start-up capital and their traffic has gone from zero to 400k uniques in a few months. Businesses are just starting to get in on this by offering deals to foursquare-ers (I have no idea if that is a word, but I am sure it will have one soon) and something is brewing here. Although things like this do not sound plausible for racing now, especially with the demographic, perhaps they will (or should be) on the radar. I don’t think it is a terrible idea to offer foursquare deals to folks who might want to be mayor of the track.

It seems each month something new comes along. Winning companies have paid attention to the way we communicate and I think its best we do too.