Travel social network WAYN has been through a number of incarnations over the years and is now considering a move to add gaming functionality as a result of seeing FourSquare's early success.
WAYN completely overhauled its user interface and proposition in April 2009 as a result of a wide-ranging review of the entire business in the face of competition and growth from the likes of Facebook.
Now, co-founder Jerome Touze admits that the concept of adding some kind of gaming element into the WAYN system has become attractive following the rapid growth and broadly positive critical reaction to FourSquare in late-2009.
Touze says WAYN doesn't see FourSquare as a competitor - FourSquare is a far narrower service based on location, rather than WAYN's wider remit of a lifestyle tool - but it is seeing the benefit of broadening its own platform.
"What Foursquare is proving well is the benefit of an exciting gaming platform where the fun comes from the number of places you have checked in and the status you get as a result of that - ie mayors etc."This is actually opening our eyes to broaden our horizon to adding a gaming feel to WAYN's world where users feel more encouraged to contribute and rewarded as a result of that.
Although Touze and his two co-founders appear to be keen on making something work for WAYN members, gaming looks like it'll come as a revenue-building opportunity rather than something at the heart of the service such as with FourSquare.
"Executing this vision well means we will be able to further unlock commercial value from our users as the micro transaction combined with an engaged gaming environment focused on location based services can be a powerful proposition if done well."
Touze says WAYN is currently adding around 10,000 new registrations every day to the system and is also seeing healthy growth to a new "activities" element added to the site in December 2009.
Around 35,000 activities are added to the system every day, he says - activities being broadly defined as places or things to do that members suggest while using the system.