Foursquare Growing Just As Fast As Twitter Did In Its Early Days

Dennis Crowley at Where 2.0
<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/oreillyconf/4480545164/in/photostream/">O'Reilly Conferences</a>

Location based services like Gowalla and Foursquare are still used by just 4% of the online population, according to new data from the Pew Research Center.

It might sound small, but we assume it was closer to 0% last year. So, it's actually pretty good.

(Although, Pew ran the study in May and 5% of adults had tested the location services.)

Pew also says 7% of adults that go online with their phones used geosocial services and 8% of adults aged 18-29 use these services, more than any other group.

Further, Pew reports that a two years after Twitter launched it only had 6% of the population using it. This suggests Foursquare (and Gowalla, to a lesser extent) are growing just as fast as Twitter did in its early going.

If you're a Foursquarer user, you're probably on Twitter

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Here's the demographics on who likes these services.

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No surprise here, but if you're in the city you're more likely to use it.

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You can see the growth of Twitter. It looks good for Foursquare, since it's on track to hit these same numbers.

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