Back in the Web 1.0 era, I was sure ThingWorld was going to be a smash hit.  The high-concept company offered digital collectibles, like virtual trading cards (but with games, puzzles and illustrations as barter-worthy content) to collect and share.  Lotus co-founder Mitch Kapur, Microsoft and high flying CMGI (through its @Ventures investment arm) pumped in money.  Remember, this was the age of Pokémon, so taking the “collectibles” concept online seemed to make a lot of sense.

Except it didn’t.

There were any number of reasons for ThingWorld’s collapse.  CMGI’s house of cards toppled, and the company’s portfolio of codependent companies became a cautionary tale.  There was never a clear revenue model.  There is a low hum of randomness to what becomes viral, and ThingWorld’s success relied on virality.  And, of course, pretty much every other “new economy” business was Y2Klobbered when the bubble burst.

But here’s another reason: People just weren’t sufficiently tethered to their computers then (or, frankly, now) for the model to work. 

A new class of human/device relationship would be required for a digital collectibles business to take off.  Enter: smart phones.  Many of us have become so dependent on these gadgets that medical researchers say the addiction rivals substance abuse.  Unfortunately for ThingWorld, the “thing” the company needed to succeed had only recently been invented.

This is the insidious brilliance of geosocial network foursquare.  It gives us something to do with that thing that’s always in our hand.  It weds our human fondness for the whimsical (badges, “mayor” social status – the very stuff upon which ThingWorld built its ephemeral business) to the devices through which we relate to the world (our smart phones). 

With the surging popularity of location-based social networks, many experts will try to bolt on reasons (e.g., peer vetted recommendations, local insights, facilitated meet-ups) for foursquare’s remarkable growth.  Both of those are secondary drivers, after-the-fact a-ha’s.  The simple reason for the boom has much less to do with business, and much more to do with sociology.  ThingWorld understood this.  Technology just hadn’t caught up to them yet.