Back in college I used to love Foursquare (about 9 years ago). It was fun, lightweight, addicting (competing to be 'mayor' of my apartment building). Actually I feel like all social media was fun back then. When they split off the actual fun part into it's own app, I knew the fun was just dead. Sure Swarm was more polished, but I didn't really understand why would I move out to another app to do what I was already doing in the Foursquare app. I think a better product owner could have kept it unified somehow.<p>But alas, Foursquare simply had no way of making money. The often quoted 'How Not to Die' by pg seems especially relevant to foursquare. Compare the company they started out as, to the company they are now. They may not have 'died', but they sure as hell aren't the same company, product, or userbase. They figured how to not die by pulling a Ship of Theseus, replacing fun with features, features with ads, replacing ads with 'tools'.<p>Is there a way for social media to stay fun and profitable? I guess Instagram is probably the closest thing to staying fun, though for some reason I never latched on to Instagram. Perhaps it's focus on vanity never really resonated with me. When I think of goofy fun, I don't think of Instagram - Instagram is for the beautiful and that's not what I think of myself as.<p>Reading the line 'Foursquare is No. 1 when it comes to attribution and ad effectiveness, when it comes to app developer tools' is so the opposite of what I considered Foursquare to be when I used it.
It's sad how many mistakes they've made with foursquare along the way. The checkin thing was fun, then they moved the only fun part of the app to a mostly neglected junk drawer secondary app (Swarm) and turned the name brand app into just another yelp.<p>Now it seems it's just going to double/triple-down on the data mining part, and there's no clear indication of what value this adds to the user.<p>The only thing I really use Swarm for is to keep a little calendar-integrated diary of places I've been (with an IFTTT), but I can do all this myself much simpler and with less data mining. So long, 4SQ.
(EDIT: Hmm, WSJ frames it as a Foursquare merging into Factual, but both companies are framing it as Foursquare "purchasing" Factual. <a href="https://www.factual.com/blog/factual-joins-foursquare/" rel="nofollow">https://www.factual.com/blog/factual-joins-foursquare/</a>)<p>I started using Foursquare the day it launched over a decade ago, and still check in to every single place I go... and I don't know why. It might literally be the only habit I actually have. I love having a log of everything I've done over the past decade, it's amazing. It's also so great to see where people I know have been in random countries or cities. It makes the world feel a lot smaller.<p>I was glad they found a way to monetize it with data, and I really really hope Swarm never goes away :) Great job Dennis and team!
The business model of these companies seems in question long term given that they rely heavily on location data “opted in” from users that honestly probably didn’t realize they “opted in” to share their data for such uses.<p>As more efforts continue (by Apple, Firefox and others) to crack down on that sort of thing the proportion of reality represented by the data such companies hope to sell gets smaller and smaller.<p>It’s increasingly not “people shop here” but “people with bad privacy settings on their device shop here.”
I love foursquare so much. I still use it all the time and in every country I visit. The community is unique and always delivers solid recommendations. There's much less noise when compared with yelp, tripadvisor, and google.
How crazy is it that at one point there were 5 or 6 check-in apps, it was all the rage and now there is essentially 1 (which itself is neglected). There were startups that were getting serious funding with the hopes of being 3rd place in the check-in category.
Where does Factual get their data from? They've got tons of big name partners, who I assume share it with them, then combine it to get a wider view:<p><a href="https://www.factual.com/company/partners/" rel="nofollow">https://www.factual.com/company/partners/</a><p>Since Foursquare seems to be caring less about their consumer-facing products I'm guessing they'll shift more towards a collection + analytics style product? Where they integrate with other popular apps instead of collecting their own data.<p>But I'm just speculating.
I lived in New York for a good chunk of Foursquare's life, and while it was magical, at least half of the population hated the concept, for good reason. Every woman I knew who had used it was terrified by the privacy and safety risks engendered by making their location public. The ones who did check in somewhere would typically only do it as or after they'd left. The "magical power" to see through walls that Dennis touted was a nightmare for women, who already deal with constant harassment and stalkers in the city. Which was a shame, because it really could feel magical to meet up with friends because of where you'd checked in.<p>For a while, Foursquare also had the most reliable review data – or at least its users tastes better aligned with mine. It was refreshing to get useful content about a restaurant without reading through paragraphs of self-indulgent drivel on Yelp. But after the launch of Swarm, the reviews more or less rotted over time.<p>The founders of Foursquare got to take a lot of money off the table in a relatively early round, ($8M each? Series C?), which is something I'd love to get the present perspective on from investors and employees who were there along the way.
Whoa! Congrats to Gil and the rest of the team back at Factual. I'm eternally grateful to them for giving this ex-bioinformatician a shot and starting my career as a data engineer, I learned from some of the very best. They were doing some brilliant stuff, both from a technical standpoint and an organizational standpoint, so I am glad to see them continuing forward!<p>Gil is also responsible for bringing Google to LA when they bought his previous company Applied Semantics so he had a lot of cultural imprint on that office as well.
Apple needs to deprecate IDFAs and the business models of all these location tracking apps will come crumbling down. If you can't identify users, then the point is moot.
I was just thinking about Foursquare when I crossed a foot bridge I (and others) used to check in at all the time.<p>I remember liking it and then they turned into something(s) else and I'm pretty sure I remember not really understanding what they were supposed to be and I sort of gave up / couldn't figure out why it got so much media talking head attention after that and then ... I don't think I heard anything about it again.<p>The whole process of "Do a neat thing that isn't really profitable (or at least not a unicorn profitable), then pivot into something else / away from users." thing happens time and again.<p>Honestly I think I try / don't install as many apps anymore because of such things.
AFAIK, Foursquare was also the first mobile app to start the if-you-think-there-are-tabs-your-users-don't-use,-now-they'll-really-never-use-them-again-in-a-separate-app trend.<p>I thought they still had a pretty good differentiator making an effort to make recommendations in the main app based on your specific food tastes etc. Too bad they were a bit half hearted focusing on it.
I've used FourSquare/Swarm a lot but I have also developed apps using their API. I've been watching their documentation stagnate and I was worried that the API might get shut down entirely due to 4sq shutting down. Glad to see they are still alive. Hopefully this gives them incentive to improve their docs, and support.
Some years ago a foursquare founder got forced out of the company (cant recall why) and was bought out by the investors iirc. I suspect he cashed out the most from this whole saga despite how it must have felt and looked at the time.
Long live Gowalla!<p>But seriously, Foursquare pivoted away from consumers and went down the data broker path many, many years ago. 2011 maybe?<p>As much as I despise both of these companies and their business models, the merger makes a ton of sense.
Wonder what this means for Swarm? It's still a fun game, even all these years later (although seeing lower use I'd imagine during this pandemic).
the split of the apps wasn't detrimental.
Swarm is for your daily/weekly checkins to places - acts as a diary/bumps up the activity on restaurants etc<p>Foursquare is great when you're away/on trips/in a foreign city - to look up places to visit, get recommendations, make planning lists etc.
Proven useful for me for many years.
Can anyone here explain how Foursquare's business works? It seems like they are capitalising on location data that they gather from devices, but AFAIK the Foursquare and Swarm apps are pretty much dead.<p>So how exactly are they getting possession of the location data? Or is that not even their biggest source of revenue?<p>Just genuinely curious.