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It doesn't matter that Foursquare added photos later, people have been seeing boring foursquare links on Twitter / Facebook for years now. I don't even notice the [pic] tag because I've been trained to mentally filter out those links because they're boring.

Path is inherently about the photo first, I'm never clicking through to Path to figure out where the person is, only to look at the photo.

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This underscores how important it is for companies to get as close to right early on, no matter how MVP.

Arguably if 4sq. started including photos sooner, or had a less boring UX on those UGC landing pages in the first place even if they lacked photos for a while, they could have counteracted this sort of apathy towards their links and avoided, or altered, the mental filter you mentioned.

Yes, without a doubt. Look at how few people use their lists feature. It was months before I even realized it existed, and I check in constantly. People have a very clear picture of what Foursquare is and what it provides, and that makes it incredibly difficult for them to break out of that mold.

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