Foursquare Gets $45M and a New CEO to Build Out Enterprise Business

With all this criticism against checking in, if Foursquare was still the app it used to be with Check-in built in, I'd still be using it.

The best part about Foursquare for me was a personal diary of things I did, the ability to share and gamify that diary, and only as a headfake, get location info. Swarm, not so much. They should have just made two apps -- one, the present day Foursquare, and another for Foursquare check-ins. They didn't have to create another brand. See how FB split itself into multiple apps.

Also, they killed the diary, the mayorships, the accomplishments. It's very hard to trust them with even an icon space on my phone anymore. Foursquare wanted a bigger toy, it threw what it had under the bus, and it wound up with neither.

Foursquare has to dangle a carrot for people to actually install and then use their apps. What's in it for them? Two+ years ago, I would see Foursquare check-ins on my social media feeds daily. Lately, not so much. As the novelty of checking into places continues to wind down, their data will get more and more stale.

Why should a user click "Allow" when the app asks to "access your location even when you are not using the app?"

    We’ve heard that this latest round of
    financing cut the company’s valuation
    roughly in half. Foursquare declined
    to speak to valuation, but its previous
    round in 2013 put it at a reported
    $650M valuation.

In other words, if you joined Foursquare in the last two years, your stock options are now worthless.

I would've spit my coffee up as an investor back when they told me they're ditching check-ins. That was such a terribly bad move, caused so many users to forget them, really Crowley should've moved all the way out.

It was one of those "we're going to be like steve" and do some jerk product design move, but it wasn't like steve in that it failed.

Rule #1 for the net: if you ever get so incredibly lucky as to define a verb (like google it, or tweet that), like they had with check-ins but we just didn't get to fully grok it and then they whacked it ... grow that like gold.

They should've built out check-ins as this powerful "where am i now" related kind of thing .. it could've been a real mobile local gem beyond anything today. Think the star trek moment where you scan where you are and it tells you all sorts of interesting things, useful utility links, cool data.

But instead they called it "swarm" and made it all about your bro's ... maybe that says something about Sf? oh wait they're in NY.

Keith Rabois in 2013 to Dennis Crowley.

   Maybe Hail Mary Bebo-style acquisition will bail you out.

https://twitter.com/rabois/status/312974304155422721

http://www.businessinsider.com/keith-rabois-bashes-square-on...

Almost everyone on this thread is referring to removing the check-in functionality as the death of Foursquare as a consumer product. Y'all - Foursquare did that because it was not just dying but basically dead. The change allowed them to be more flexible in the new phase of the company. It might not have worked the way they dreamed (I don't know) but Foursquare was crashing fast at the time of the split.

The main issue I see with this new enterprise business is that it depends on people using the Foursquare / Swarm app. And few people seem to be using it lately. In the past, I had tons of friends using it. But checking my friend list, no one is using for quite sometime.

-- edit I had to download the app to check as I did not had it installed anymore.

I wonder what if Foursquare did the opposite of what they did with Swarm. Keeping Check-in in Foursquare and creating a new app to find places (like yelp), people will leave the notion of check-ins behind in the Foursquare app and the new app will be a clean slate for a discovery app.

Foursquare has an enterprise business?

"Congrats, you're the Mayor of Conference Room 3C!"

I have a friend that's worked at Foursquare for a long time. Hopefully this new pivot works out for them.

I'm not sure I understand what they've pivoted to though. It seems as if they're providing location data to customers like Apple?

How is 4sq worth millions but yelp is worth billions? I find them both to be very similar services. Should there really be that much of a difference in valuation between the two? Seems like one is either over-valued or under-valued.

All the great lasting products come with a strong sense of community, no matter the mechanic. Foursquare had that with its friend list and checkin scores.

Once they removed that from the core app, it became this faceless product that left me in the uncanny valley of trust. Where is this score coming from I would ask myself everytime I launched the app?

Maybe it was the failing of branding not to follow back up with OkCupid style of "hey did you know??" blog posts.

Swarm was a cute project, reminded me a little of Gowalla but without that digital diary/passport that Gowalla had. So it felt like it was missing the other half of my life story. It's not JUST the weekly checkin score, but my entire journey I want easy access to.

Just a casual Foursquare user here - I actually like(d) the app and found check-ins kind of fun; an interesting location is kind of like a hot selfie on Instragram for padding one's ego.

But from what I gather, check-in feature was removed? I must be using a rather outdated version of the app cause I had checked in to a few places recently.

This new focus on 'enterprise' ie- selling my data is a bit troubling.

Sooo... yeah, not intending to update the app - and will looking forward to an alternative or perhaps a more private geo app that isn't focused on 'enterprise'.

Used Foursquare almost daily until they forced me to install that awful Swarm app - have barely used it since.

One of the worst product decisions I've known a `mainstream` tech company make.

Foursquare is dead. Social-based sites were a bad investment in general.

The Advent of the Algorithm is here aka real technology companies on the horizon.

I hope they do succeed. I find their recommendations more useful than Yelp.