Pete Nofelt from Foursquare made an appearance at the BBM Hackathon with some interesting data to share. BlackBerry is a huge part of Foursquare’s success and Pete was backing it up with numbers. Their implementation of the BBM Social Platform has been a HUGE hit and really skyrocketed their user engagement along with bringing a record number of users. Here is some of the data Pete shared:
- 30% of overall foursquare usage is from BlackBerrys
- Active usage is much stronger on BlackBerry than any other platform
- BBM integration took Pete 2 days using RIM’s provided plugin code.
- With BBM Integration BlackBerry is now beating Android and iPhone for new user signups
- Huge spikes in downloads for Foursquare when each BBM release was put out as you can see in the graph above
Pete had a couple of tips for developers. Mainly don’t be spammy and respect a users trust they gave you when installing the app. He said that BBM helped users share data outside Foursquare and lets you share data outside your graph. He also said that developers should change the package name to avoid conflicts if you use RIM’s plugin. He mentioned that the RIM provided code degrades gracefully so it wont throw exceptions if a user is using a non BBM6 supported OS or does not have BBM6 and installs your BBM powered app. Last but not least he recommended throwing in extras like a nice bright color scheme and start up screen which users appreciate from Foursquare.
Let us know if you want us to ask Pete anything else!
