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.)?