Essentially, Matchbook is like Foursquare or Yelp, minus the check-ins, reviews, and social networking — just a simple bookmarking feature for favorite places. While this may sound a bit too pared-down for the taste of tech enthusiasts, you have to remember that there are a lot of people out there who don’t use Foursquare, who aren’t comfortable or used to checking-in at every place they visit, or voraciously social networking while on the go. So Matchbook offers users the ability to organize all of their to-dos by neighborhood on a map layout, search bookmarks for date spots, find the best of those bookmarks, along with top places flagged by other users — to name a few.
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Happy to take part in Matchbook and investing in it. This paragraph pretty much nails why I’m interested.
I am obsessed with Foursquare, that’s why I invested in it when Dennis invited me. I love it to death. I think that it’s basically becoming a better Mobile OS. But part of what is frustrating for me is how good some of the features are of it, and how people don’t necessarily realize. For example, at this point, for me, Foursquare’s location database and mapping is hands-down better than Google Maps. I use mapping almost exclusively to find businesses, and Google Maps is becoming almost useless for it. An obvious example here in New York is General Assembly which, after a year of being in existence, is still hard to find in Google Maps. I was in Atlanta last year looking for a particular burrito establishment. I checked Google Maps, and started driving towards the closest location. Less than halfway there, I passed another location that wasn’t even IN Google Maps! But of course it was in Foursquare.
Sometimes, though, it’s just too much work to go into Foursquare and use some of the utilities in non-traditional ways. It’s a bit of a pain to use the mapping feature - you have to pretend to be checking in.
And ditto for the lists. Matchbook, which runs on the Foursquare API, is a drop-dead simple list management tool for people who just want to use one feature. For those people who aren’t techies. For people who still like drop dead simple interfaces and single features. And believe me, they’re out there.
I also think companies like Matchbook reinforce Foursquare’s new trajectory of providing utility beyond gaming and socializing. Matchbook is an extension of that, to me: location software for those who are less enamored with gamification and talking about where they are. It’s pure exploration.
