Swarm: Foursquare's ambitious plan to split its app in two | Hacker News Reader

Swarm: Foursquare's ambitious plan to split its app in two

theverge.com

103 pointsjeremylevy42 comments

This feels bad to me, but I'll reserve judgement until it happens.

I use 4sq for two things -- keeping track of where I've been when I travel, and letting people know where I am when I travel in case we're near each other.

From this description, it sounds like I'll need two apps for that now. In which case I might as well just use a Facebook checkin and not use 4sq at all, since Facebook serves both purposes.

Those are actually the two use cases supported, and enhanced, by Swarm, since they both revolve around checking in. There's a new, more concise view for seeing proximate friends and a more powerful profile page for browsing your past check-ins.

The problem is that unless you live in a major metropolitan area no one you know in real life uses Foursquare. So it's really only useful to track your own check-ins and find places to go. I was always ok with ignoring the social aspect of Foursquare (Oh, hey, a guy I used to work with 7 years ago is checking in to some place, great to know).

But now the thing I use Foursquare for, checking in and finding places nearby are in 2 apps. Before it was ok if each part was good not great because having them both together was a win. But by splitting them the places nearby app is now directly competing against Yelp and Urbanspoon and others.

I'm not installing 2 apps for this, so the check-in part will likely not be done by me anymore. I might still use Foursquare proper, but only if it is better than other similar apps.

Interestingly - I'll probably go the opposite way, installing Swarm for checkins, uninstalling Foursquare and just using Yelp. Yelp is horrific for discovery , but it's still orders of magnitudes better than foursquare for my uses.

By way of comparison: I live 2hrs from the closest big city. Yelp is the only game in town for discovery, and its data is 95% complete in the food & drink category.

So was CitySearch 10-15 years ago. Yelp has been stale and their recent "zoom-and-hide" changes to their map-search has made Yelp fairly useless for discovery to me. Yelp has long needed to hire new UI & UX leadership, like years overdue.

If that's the case, then I might just switch to Swarm, and it will be an improved experience, and I'll be happy. :)

Swarm does both of those things, and more for the use case of keeping up and meeting with people.

The two apps will also work seamlessly with each other, for the moments when you are making a plan for dinner with friends in Swarm app, you can click an icon which takes you to Foursquare app for search. And many more such interfaces.

Hopefully, AppLinks will make the transition more seamless :)

This seems risky, but interesting. If the core foursquare app becomes focused on location discovery and exploration, they instantly become the most viable mobile competitor to Yelp, which is something I (and I think many people) would be interested in.

They're recognizing that the location browsing/discovery UX is fundamentally different than their social UX, and de-coupling them, while presumably using the same infrastructure under the hood. Hopefully, this will allow UI/UX development that diverges and serves each user group better.

I want a better, more usable location database on my phone, I would use it all the time. Yelp is unfortunately the default, I think because through crowd-sourcing data validation, they just have the most accurate listing of addresses, phone numbers, business hours, etc. But after that, Yelp is social features I don't care for, review writing that make me sad about humanity, and very likely bully-esque business practices (but I do like the pictures). Foursquare has the second best location DB that I've used, but historically the app has been more aggressive about pushing it's social features, which I do not want. So, I am curious and cautiously optimistic.

From the comments, it seems like what may be missing is the ability to check-in via the core foursquare app. This would be a problem if the life-tracking-but-not-social subset of users is as high as the comments suggest, but also may not be a problem if the "I was here" feature still exists in the core app and just has been messaged incorrectly.

So in a nutshell, they are:

-- Removing the check-in feature from the Foursquare app and putting into a separate app called Swarm.

-- Making Foursquare 100% about exploring and recommendations, a la Yelp.

This seems like a bizarre move. Unless I'm mistaken, all of their data comes FROM check-ins. People write tips, answer questions ("Is this place good for kids?") and generally contribute their info to the web of data that Foursquare uses to intelligently recommend venues. Couple that with the network effect of having access to friends' check-ins, which to me is probably the strongest signal of a particular venue's quality.

So all that being said, it seems like receiving a high volume of check-ins is critical to Foursquare's recommendation success. They don't have the broad review base of Yelp or an editorial team, so check-ins are all they have. By splitting this functionality into a separate app (outside of the Foursquare app itself), they are explicitly going to lower check-in volume, because SOME percentage of people simply won't download "Swarm". And then if they lose some of their user base, it decreases the utility for all Foursquare users as (a) the recommendation data won't be as solid, and (b) users will lose valuable friend check-in data.

Maybe I'm overplaying the slippery-slope angle, but when your business largely relies on a particular user action (check-ins, in this case), it seems unwise to split that functionality outside of your core product in a move that will unquestionably make taking that action more difficult.

Worth reading their interview today on The Verge[1]. Seems like automatic tracking is providing far more valuable data than check-ins.

[1]: http://www.theverge.com/2014/5/1/5666062/foursquare-swarm-ne...

By no means am I going to say that what I write is true for the majority of 4sq users, but I and most of my friends use it to mostly keep track of visits abroad and occasionally search for a restaurant/bar/new place to check out. So splitting these features into two apps is not something I'd enjoy too much.

From the verge article - outlining the data behind the decision: http://mobile.theverge.com/2014/5/1/5666062/foursquare-swarm...

We looked at the session analysis and saw that only 1 in 20 sessions had both social and discovery," says Noah Weiss, Foursquare’s vice president of product engineering. In other words, just 5 percent of Foursquare’s users were opening it to find friends and find a restaurant. "Why not actually just split those apart, because 19 out of 20 times, tapping on one icon or the other, you have satisfied your need completely," says Weiss.

"And as mobile usage has broadened and evolved you get individual experiences instead. You open an app to do a specific task and not as a gateway to a large complicated experience."

Having the check-in button as the main interface every time users opened the app created a noticeable hurdle for engagement. "Imagine if you opened up YouTube and the first thing it asked you to do was create a video. That would scare off a lot of people," says Bijan Sabet, one of Foursquare’s early investors and a current board member. "Just like you don’t need to tweet to enjoy Twitter, splitting the app in two will help make it clear to a big audience that you don’t need to check in to find value in Foursquare."

≠=================

BTW a lot of the reasoning of the unbundling of features in the mobile app world is very nicely outlined in bill gurley' 's post: http://abovethecrowd.com/2013/07/17/transitioning-to-a-mobil...

Ha, just this morning, via the HN discussion on "Putting the Chat into Snapchat", I learned of jwz's axiom, which was modified for the sake of discussion: "Every program attempts to expand until it implements user-to-user messaging. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones that can." (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7679031)

Looks like Foursquare was thinking along the same lines:

> We built Swarm because you’ve told us how often you still have to text your friends: “where are you?” and “what you up to later?” We wanted to build a quick way for you to know these two things for all of your friends.

Another year, another Foursquare pivot.

Not sure why this is downvoted. Those 5 words sum up FourSquare in its entire 6+ years of existence. Let's face it: they don't know what they're doing.

I am sure they know what they're doing, but what they're doing probably doesn't make enough money!

now if Yelp bought them for cheap..

OK, so I think I understand Facebook un-bundling into separate apps. But this feels like an extremely focused app slicing even thinner. (We've moved from selling albums to selling singles to selling guitar solos.) I'm just not sure there's enough utility here to replace Swarm's primary competition: group messaging.

I'm still trying to get my head around Facebook unbundling. Why is Messaging a separate app? Why is Paper separate and not just improvements to the main Facebook app?

Prior to the unbundling, responding to a Facebook Message requires the overhead of loading up the news feed and at least one extra tap to see messages.

I suspect this also has to do with internal development mechanics as well. Unbundling lets the Messenger team push app updates out more quickly, without having to worry if their changes broke the main Facebook mobile app.

Not sure what's up with Paper, but I'd guess it's about letting the Paper team experiment with new UX ideas without fear of upsetting the majority of users still using the current app.

I don't think the unbundling is succeeding (or will succeed). I like them all in one place, though fb mgmt seems to have convinced itself that unbundling is a better user experience somehow..

I'm probably not the most common user, but this completely breaks Foursquare for me. I use 4sq to keep a list of restaurants I want to check out, keep a diary of where I've been, and look for nearby places.

Back to synced plaintext files, maybe?

Foursquare & Swarm will work seamlessly with each other. I think you'll find that by giving things a bit more room to breath we're able to make all of these actions easier & better for you.

but by the sounds of it you'll still be able to do exactly that with 4sq.

It doesn't look like any functionality is being lost from the standalone 4sq app as it is now, just separated because people aren't using them together anyway.

I use Google Maps with stars to do this. Try it out!

We changed the url from [1] because although that's a more original source, the Verge article seems a lot more substantive. We then buried [2] as a duplicate.

Those of you arguing for a thread-merging feature on HN will find this a juicy example for your cause. (Edit: which I'm also slowly becoming convinced of.)

1. http://blog.foursquare.com/post/84422758243/a-look-into-the-...

2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7679771

I'm having a hard time understanding this, but comments here and other places make it very apparent that most users use Foursquare in different ways. That makes growth and innovation quite the challenge.

What doesn't make sense to me: at the core, users that (still) use Foursquare use it to check in. From there we vary, but we check in. More importantly, that's the perception around the app. Changing perceptions with an existing brand is difficult. Why move the existing user base to a new app built around checkins (Swarm) and try to rebrand the checkin app (Foursquare) to attract new users and compete with Yelp?

Confused? Me too.

Did they honestly not what happened when Netflix tried to spin off "Qwickster"? It was a debacle.

The logic of this split to makes sense to me - as long as people associate foursquare with checkins rather than discovery, it'll be hard for them to go head to head with Yelp.

But it's odd that they'd create a new app around checkins and continue trying to associate the foursquare brand with discovery. Wouldn't it be easier to keep foursquare as "the checkin app" (how people already see it) and create a new brand identity for "the discovery app"?

You make valid points. The branding is hard fo 4sq. I think 4sq discovery is the best out there. But they're having trouble selling it. However, their approach is totally broken. 4sq is good because everything is in one place, and now they're trying this gambit to get more attention. Let's see if it works...

I'm always suspicious of moves like this because it makes me suspect that they're going to kill off one side.

That said, Swarm looks really smart - in fact, it's something I'm amazed FourSquare haven't done before now. I want to be able to post a status saying "Lunch?" tagged with my location and let my friends who are nearby with no lunch plans reply.

Quite the opposite actually.. we wanted to do many things for the two use cases, but were holding back, trying not cram features in a bundled app. Now with two apps, we can go full steam ahead with all the ideas for each of the two use cases.

"Full steam ahead" in two different directions, that maybe... MAYBE compliment each other.

To me it seems you've just split your focus. And for a start-up that has pivoted a million times and was "featured-out" by Twitter and Facebook, I'm saying you guys have it cut out for you.

Are you a messaging service? Are you a check in yelp thing? Two different problem domains, which will make swapping resources in between apps difficult.. communication between development teams across both products will begin to break down and tenets/design philosophy/code quality will begin to diverge. There will be a "better app" and a "crappy app," which will do wonders to swiftly destroy the culture on the team that is getting less love.

Good luck to you.

Somehow the idea of calling an application that tracks and monitors your friends 'Swarm', seems like a poor choice.

The Verge has an in-depth article about Swarm including photos and a video: http://www.theverge.com/2014/5/1/5666062/foursquare-swarm-ne...

Question (I have never used any app or service that allowed for checkins):

Is there any app that allows one to place a digital file onto a map's geocoords - whereby you can ONLY access that file if you actually go to that geocoord and then can open/see the file?

I've never actually found much value in foursquare even when I tried to use it. Nobody else I know uses foursquare, so it just seemed like something that took effort and did not add much value.

Getting webmasters to migrate is going to be tough.

Lately there is so many companies and startups with "Square" in name. Again I misread article and I thought Squarespace is up to something, then it turned its Square. No, wait, its actually Foursquare...

Is it only me getting confused with them? (I dont live in US so I dont have access to most of those services thus I am not really used to their names but so many "Squares" lately).

Foursquare is about 6 years old, so it's hardly 'lately' - perhaps that's why you're being downvoted. (I didn't downvote you, someone seems to have done so without replying.)

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