Filip Novotny Foursquare has always focused on two different activities – tracking your friends' check-ins and discovering new places. Yesterday's update completely abandons the first half of the previous equation and is fully dedicated to recommending good businesses and restaurants. And this is the biggest leap forward in Foursquare's history.
To be precise, the check-in-where-we-are-now feature disappeared from Foursquare earlier. This happened as part of an ambitious plan to split the social network into two different applications. While the original service was transformed into the aforementioned assistant for discovering good restaurants, the social functions were inherited by the new Swarm app.
This grandiose plan may have seemed a little pointless at first, and it must be noted that the Foursquare operator didn't do the best with its explanation. For some time, the limitation of the functionality of the original application was very confusing, and the nature of the separate Swarm was also not completely clear.
But all this changes now with the arrival of the new version of Foursquare with serial number 8. And you can tell from the first welcome screen – gone is the list of your friends' movements, there is a big blue check-in button. Instead, the new app focuses entirely on discovering good businesses and doesn't cut corners.
The app's main screen displays a list of recommended places, intelligently based on the current time. In the morning, it will offer businesses serving hearty breakfasts, in the afternoon it will recommend popular restaurants for lunch, and in the early evening it will show, for example, where to go for quality coffee. All this, moreover, sorted into practical sections such as, for example Your friends recommend, Live music or Perfect for a date in case of evening events.
At the same time, the new Foursquare places great emphasis on adapting the places offered to your individual needs and tastes. In fact, the very first welcome screen is proof of that. The application will look at your history and, based on the places you've visited, offer several dozen tags called taste. These "tastes" could be the types of businesses you prefer, your favorite foods, or maybe a specific thing that's important to you. For example, we can choose from the following tags: bar, dinner, ice cream, burgers, outdoor seating, quiet places, wifi.
Your personal tastes can be added at any time by clicking on the Foursquare logo (newly shaped like a pink F) in the top left corner of the app to further customize it to your own needs. What is this tagging good for? In addition to automatically customizing results based on your tastes, Foursquare also prioritizes user reviews on business profiles that mention your favorite food or property you want. At the same time, it highlights the tags in pink and thus makes it easier to find your way around the reviews, which are sometimes not enough even for Czech businesses.
You can further improve the customization of the results for you and the quality of the service for other users by writing a review and rating the business. Realizing the importance of this part of their network, Foursquare placed the rating button directly on the main screen, in the upper right corner. Ratings are now much simpler and more efficient, thanks to questions like "What did you like about XY?" and answers grouped into aforementioned tags known as tastes.
Foursquare will also help to get to know our current location better. Just click on the Here tab in the bottom menu and we will immediately be transferred to the company profile, where we are currently located according to GPS. Labeling according to taste works there too, and thanks to it we can easily find out what is popular and high quality in which place. To facilitate cooperation between the two foursquare applications, a button to check-in via Swarm has also been added to the profiles.
The eighth version of Foursquare is very pleasant despite the initial skepticism, and after a long period of awkward updates with a strong emphasis on check-ins (the blue button was getting absurdly bigger and bigger), it finally went in the right direction. The new, fresh concept of the popular application completely gets rid of check-ins, which may represent a certain psychological barrier and fear of the new for many users, but on the other hand, it allows better use of massive reserves of user content. Paradoxically, the check-in page has always dragged Foursquare down with fifty-five million reviews.
Although we can consider her disappearance and move to a dedicated Swarm very desirable, it also raises one important question. If Foursquare benefits mainly from user content, but at the same time makes it difficult to check-in, isn't it preparing itself for the future by losing its most valuable commodity? Won't the referrals from Foursquare become less and less good over time? It can be assumed that with the division of the service, the number of logins in companies will decrease rapidly.
Of course, Foursquare can rely on user ratings. The service could also focus on their improvements in future versions. At the same time, they are also betting on the constant monitoring of users. Thanks to Pilgrim's built-in localization engine, both split applications can check-in users de facto invisibly (within the system, none of your friends will see these check-ins). Even without the big blue button, Foursquare can know where you are right now and adapt the businesses or reviews offered thanks to it.
In addition to improving the user experience, Foursquare will also have to explain to its customers that the constant activation of location services is desirable for them. If it succeeds, the promising social service will open a completely new and even more interesting chapter for itself.
[app url=https://itunes.apple.com/cz/app/foursquare/id306934924]
I didn't see trending anywhere, where the most people are currently checking