Am I the only one who looks at foursquare and goes, "Meh?" I know some people love the service (the reason I checked it out was because Woz uses it all the time), but I just can't find a use for it.
Regardless, the redesigned application is really slick by any standards; awesome job to the team for making the UI much better than before (maybe that's one gripe I had that ruined my initial foursquare experience).
I personally like to use it to read what others say about a place I am visiting. I find it most useful when I am traveling to a place I have never been before. Specifically, Airports often have good comments about which security lines to take, where the best food is, and other interesting/useful comments.
I live in NYC, I use foursquare almost daily for keeping up with friends, and for getting venue recommendations. Specials are a nice bonus as well. However, I've tried using foursquare in smaller towns and it wasn't nearly as useful.
I see foursquare as having a few main use cases. Not every use case is for every user, but I think there's something for almost everyone.
1) Social utility/friend finder: Where are my friends and what are they doing? Can I go hang out with them? Where the party at? If your friend is around the corner at a bar, maybe you want to stop by and say hi (but not if it's a date!). If a friend you haven't seen in years is in from out of town, maybe you can catch up.
2) Recommendation engine/city guide: Foursquare knows what places you visit, what places you come back to, and what places you recommend to your friends. It can use this information from you, your friends, and the population at large to recommend places that you might like to visit. This is useful to find new things near your old haunts, or to get to know places you've never been to before. It works remarkably well.
3) Game: Foursquare encourages you to do things in the real world that you wouldn't otherwise do, and recognizes you for your real-world achievements. Whether you've got a great gym streak going, or you're catching up with all the friends you haven't seen in a long team, or you're visiting lots of new places you've never been to before, Foursquare wants to reward and encourage this behavior. It's not for everyone, but some people get really into the game mechanic and sometimes even really change their behavior to do well in the game.
4) Money saver: Local merchants can give you discounts, VIP treatment, and other special perks for visiting their business for the first time or for visiting repeatedly. This is a win-win-win for merchants, users, and Foursquare, and we're excited to enable these kinds of interactions between people and the local businesses they frequent.
5) Personal journal: I have a log going back three years of practically everywhere I've ever gone, what I did when I was there, and who I was hanging out with. This is a rich trove of information that I'm glad to have just for my own records. But once you add a rich ecosystem of apps that use our API (http://timehop.com/ is one of my faves!), the potential is almost unlimited.
Maybe your reaction is still "Meh", but I think there's quite a few reasons to use (and love!) foursquare.
As a foursquare user, I totally agree with all of these points. The personal journal point is especially cool. I didn't realize it until I tried looking at my past checkins, but it was actually really interesting to look back at what I was doing last summer, what I did when I went downtown with some friends last winter, where we went on vacations, etc.
This update looks awesome, nice work! I especially like the new Friends tab - much more useful now that it's actually possible to view multiple prior checkins rather than just the most recent.
Timehop is why I signed up for foursquare (back when it was 4square and 7 years ago). Before that I was a skeptic, but I've since convinced a few friends to join. It's an interesting service with a lot of potential.
I'm curious if you guys still use Scala (yay!) and Lift (meh.)?
Headline should be rewritten to include "aims to." I'm not sure how you can claim a redesign does something before it actually does something. This writer's opinion is not evidence that the design is working to keep users around or make them more social.
As much as I liked foursquare: they jumped the sharks years ago and I do not get why some still use foursquare. One missing feature was so obvious and I wonder that they haven't implemented it:
A quick overview showing trending places right now (and that's all about).
This is what we're trying to go for in the new explore tab. Before you even do a search give you some interesting information about things nearby (including things that are unusually busy) with the option to drill down and get more results if any of the categories are interesting to you.
We've found that trending places on their own aren't very interesting (they're often just train stations & airports). What you really want is places that are busier than they normally are.
Hrm, I guess it's a bit ambiguous. Some folks say trending = busiest places nearby, others say places that are /unusually/ busy. Regardless of the semantics we've definitely found that the latter is more interesting.
This's clear that there has to be some algorithm sorting out the boring stuff like train stations and airports—some kind of 'movers & shakers' (trending), should be easy to implement.
I remember so many times when being out checking FS with friends and really ALL my friends said that it would be great to see where all the people are tonight, is it this party, or this bar, etc. (until everyone I know finally stopped using FS).
Such a feature had to be there when FS was at its peak. Why do you come up with something so obvious after years? I don't want to sound harsh but that ship sailed a long time ago without you guys, FS lost any relevance and gambled away its chances.
It may not be a huge feature, and I may even be missing it somewhere in the app, but there also doesn't appear to be a way to simply get a list of check ins from a given user.
If you go to the user screen for a user that you are friends with you can scroll down to see a feed of all their actions on foursquare (checkins, tips, lists, everything).
Explore looks more and more like a killer feature and foursquare seems to be touting it up front nowadays. I really like the direction they're going with it combined with tips. There's something to be said about reading what are essentially tweets about a certain place instead of a long-winded review on Yelp. Explore + tips is probably going to replace searching for random venues on Yelp when I want to try something new in the vicinity.
That being said, I'm still wondering how they'll monetize despite how very useful it is. I know Amex has been in bed with them lately and even after talking with a friend at Amex I still don't know where the money would come in.
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Regardless, the redesigned application is really slick by any standards; awesome job to the team for making the UI much better than before (maybe that's one gripe I had that ruined my initial foursquare experience).
I see foursquare as having a few main use cases. Not every use case is for every user, but I think there's something for almost everyone.
1) Social utility/friend finder: Where are my friends and what are they doing? Can I go hang out with them? Where the party at? If your friend is around the corner at a bar, maybe you want to stop by and say hi (but not if it's a date!). If a friend you haven't seen in years is in from out of town, maybe you can catch up.
2) Recommendation engine/city guide: Foursquare knows what places you visit, what places you come back to, and what places you recommend to your friends. It can use this information from you, your friends, and the population at large to recommend places that you might like to visit. This is useful to find new things near your old haunts, or to get to know places you've never been to before. It works remarkably well.
3) Game: Foursquare encourages you to do things in the real world that you wouldn't otherwise do, and recognizes you for your real-world achievements. Whether you've got a great gym streak going, or you're catching up with all the friends you haven't seen in a long team, or you're visiting lots of new places you've never been to before, Foursquare wants to reward and encourage this behavior. It's not for everyone, but some people get really into the game mechanic and sometimes even really change their behavior to do well in the game.
4) Money saver: Local merchants can give you discounts, VIP treatment, and other special perks for visiting their business for the first time or for visiting repeatedly. This is a win-win-win for merchants, users, and Foursquare, and we're excited to enable these kinds of interactions between people and the local businesses they frequent.
5) Personal journal: I have a log going back three years of practically everywhere I've ever gone, what I did when I was there, and who I was hanging out with. This is a rich trove of information that I'm glad to have just for my own records. But once you add a rich ecosystem of apps that use our API (http://timehop.com/ is one of my faves!), the potential is almost unlimited.
Maybe your reaction is still "Meh", but I think there's quite a few reasons to use (and love!) foursquare.
This update looks awesome, nice work! I especially like the new Friends tab - much more useful now that it's actually possible to view multiple prior checkins rather than just the most recent.
I'm curious if you guys still use Scala (yay!) and Lift (meh.)?
A quick overview showing trending places right now (and that's all about).
Something like wherevent.com for now.
We've found that trending places on their own aren't very interesting (they're often just train stations & airports). What you really want is places that are busier than they normally are.
Is that not the definition of trending?
I remember so many times when being out checking FS with friends and really ALL my friends said that it would be great to see where all the people are tonight, is it this party, or this bar, etc. (until everyone I know finally stopped using FS).
Such a feature had to be there when FS was at its peak. Why do you come up with something so obvious after years? I don't want to sound harsh but that ship sailed a long time ago without you guys, FS lost any relevance and gambled away its chances.
That being said, I'm still wondering how they'll monetize despite how very useful it is. I know Amex has been in bed with them lately and even after talking with a friend at Amex I still don't know where the money would come in.