• by Gavin O'Malley , April 13, 2011

Web traffic to Foursquare has declined for five consecutive months, amounting to a 50% reduction in traffic over that period, reports ReadWriteWeb, citing data from Compete.com. "And while traffic isn't the best indicator of usage, Web visits should be just as likely now as five months ago, and it's certainly not a positive sign of rapid growth in usage," ReadWriteWeb notes. That said, Foursquare just announced 6 million users, which is no doubt impressive. In July 2010, Foursquare had just 2 million users performing 1 million check-ins per day. By the end of the year, that number had risen to 5 million users performing 2 million check-ins per day. "Impressive growth, yet this means check-ins per user declined from 0.5 per person to 0.4," ReadWriteWeb adds. "It also suggests that many of those five million users aren't active." That combined with the less than stellar performance of Facebook Places leads ReadWriteWeb to conclude that the whole business of 'check ins' at best limited, and at worst a total fad. "In 2011 check-ins are going to go the way of the eight-track tape and disappear."