A brand new Foursquare, with a brand new logo and look
blog.foursquare.com
blog.foursquare.com
Foursquare has huge brand recognition, and it would take a long time to build that up for their new app (which will be the way 4Sq makes money going forward).
EDIT: Put the word useless inside the quotes rather than outside — I like 4sq!
This is how I've been using Foursquare for the last two years and have found it to be a more enjoyable experience. The like it or don't like it review model just works better for me, not to mention the reviews on Foursquare are not nearly as painful as ones on Yelp. I think they could have done it without creating such a jarring experience, but I feel they waited too long and now are trying to force it too much.
It's because check-ins don't work. After the novelty wears off, nobody wants to check in. Nobody. Like those stupid plastic awareness bracelets, check-ins were a fad that flared briefly and is now completely, 100% over.
So if you're a company whose entire product identity was based on check-ins, you have two choices:
1) Come up with something, anything else that can be plausibly jammed into your app, and run with that; or
2) Go out of business.
Unsurprisingly they went with #1, even if from the perspective of retaining some shred of dignity #2 would have been the better choice.
But that doesn't really matter, because we can resolve the dispute with a simple question: if check-ins were a mass-market thing, would Foursquare (and everyone else who tried them, like Facebook) be running away from them?
The answer is no, obviously. If they worked, companies would be piling in, not checking out. But they don't, so they are.
No, it's not. But neither is
> After the novelty wears off, nobody wants to check in. Nobody. Like those stupid plastic awareness bracelets, check-ins were a fad that flared briefly and is now completely, 100% over.
</Hacker News>
On a similar note, I could list the reasons why checking in is, in fact, nothing like "those stupid plastic awareness bracelets". But that would be a waste of everyone's time.
But since my use of hyperbole (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperbole) clearly touched some deep vein with you, how about this:
"An insignificant number of people, too small to provide a VC-backed startup with even a minimally acceptable exit, want to check in anymore."
Feel free to mentally substitute this version for my earlier, more-fun-to-read-while-still-making-the-same-point version whenever you browse this thread.
You're welcome.
"Literally" also had a second meaning of "figuratively" for the last century or two. So your attempt is, once again, ambiguous.
'Coz there's a huge difference (inasmuch as the Valley might want to forget this).
But the problem, 4sq currently piss off those people who like to check-in. Most of the people I know, don't like Swarm and either have not made the move or stopped using Swarm. I myself, also almost stopped using Swarm. Because they reduced and modified the gaming aspect so that is no fun anymore.
The problem here is, if those people with the check-ins are going missing from the platform, because of those issues. Then the people fulling the database and as such the recommendation engine are going lost. That is long term problem.
The thing is, there was no need to separate it. They could have implemented the personal search the same way as they do it now. They even could have changed to hide or show the Check-in depending on how I have signed in.
There's a lot of merit to this IMO. Foursquare the brand is completely and 100% associated with checking in to places. It seems silly to break the checkin feature into a completely new app, under a completely new brand, while trying to convince everyone that Foursquare is no longer Foursquare but is stilled called Foursquare.
IMO the better move was to keep Foursquare around but launch a separately-branded app for the discoverability.
The number of active people checking in is certainly low, but general mass-market awareness of their (former?) line of business is quite high.
So on top of convincing people your discoverability features are great, you have to first convince them that your app isn't what they already think it is. Personally I think this is very poor branding.
Everything I've seen anecdotally points to Foursquare having a small core of highly active users (people who check in multiple times a day), with a very, very, very long tail of infrequent/never users.
I have no inside information on this, but I'm also willing to bet that their current daily check-in rate is lower than what it was at their peak. The whole checkin phenomenon came and went, and while it's not gone entirely, it's simply no longer relevant to the mass market. "Millions" of checkins a day is, frankly, very low for a consumer tech product that has existed for 5 years and taken $160mm in funding.
But check-ins are very much still a thing here in Rio. Of course, I only do check-ins at interesting places anymore (who has the time to fill up their meals in My Fitness Pal or whatever), and so do the four friends I have on Foursquare. It's a more intimate thing.
I'm not convinced that's ever going to be mass-market behaviour, though.
Let's look at the upside of all of this though. And this is an important lesson which shows in part why it's not good to be to smart and know to much. Someone who knew better would know not to even try doing a foursquare type app. To much friction, little reward (long term) and "check-ins don't work". Someone who doesn't goes ahead and gives it a try, builds a company, and now pivots to something else which may very well work. Which kind of dovetails with the VC model. Don't try to hard to think what will work just make a bunch of bets on a team and keep your fingers crossed that something good will happen along the way to failure.
I find the new logo quite good looking and communicative, and this "new" Foursquare app is finally something I can see myself using. I have absolutely no interest in the whole check-in thing, but I'm not against good recommendations, so there's a good chance I'll be in the target market for this app, and I suspect I'm not alone in this case.
(For size reference, I live in Baltimore, MD.)
Edit: I'll add, too, that "check ins" that get posted socially seem to be viewed increasingly as self-indulgent "look at me and my lovely life" signals.
There was a time that such posts, along with "pics of my delicious dinner at trendy restaurant", etc., were regular and acceptable. That time is quickly passing, I think.
The analogy is talking about how much money you have, or how cultural you are, etc. This isn't really polite and most people secretly roll their eyes in response to it. It appears either calculated or in incognizantly bad taste.
This is just an anecdotal observation, of course. But these kinds of things have basically disappeared from my feed, which might just be an effect of an aging list of friends rather than a broader usage pattern. I suspect it's a generally emerging standard of social media etiquette though.
I was in Zagreb, Croatia for the very first time last year and wanted to eat dinner somewhere other than my hotel. I tried Google Maps and it was worthless. I pulled out Foursquare and found a restaurant a few streets away that turned out to be incredible! (So much so that when I went back a few months later I went back to the same place instead of exploring.)
And now that I mention it, same thing happened to me in Tallinn, Estonia, too. Found a great brew-pub-ish restaurant that I would have never found on my own. And again, went back a few months later on my next trip.
I mean, do I really have to give a full report in order for me to be satisfied with the product?
I kind of assumed from this experience that Foursquare has better adoption in some areas of the world, but I'm not sure.
You want to look at the websites for newspapers and the like. Rio Show, Veja Rio, etc.
It also works globally as long as there are some users there, while Yelp only supports a few countries.
But two apps? Why? Granted I don't check-in on Yelp very often. But if I feel like it, and it wasn't integrated, I'd never do it. It's a missing but seemingly trivial feature for the main Foursquare app and puts me off a bit.
Enough that I probably won't bother with it.
The whole idea feels incredibly poorly thought out if they were looking for conquest usershare from Yelp.
I do like the new logo though.
I suspect Foursquare want to slowly kill off checkins in a similar way.
Do the app stores need to get better at transferring users between apps for situations like this?
I don't think so. They chose to fragment their user-base. Presumably, they've already got the eyeballs inside their own app to handle the transition. To me - it doesn't seem like something an app store should be expected to accommodate.
EDIT: I see now. The rest are non-western comments and ratings a la "good app", 5stars. Totally pointless.
Personally, I don't want to feel like I'm part of a "userbase", to be "transferred between apps" when convenient.
I guess all that anger and disappointment users express (no matter if they stay like with FB or leave) is due to the fact that they expect someone on the other end who built the app out of passion and maintains it as a service to the community.
How am I supposed to become a loyal user/customer, invite my friends to that service and provide all that data if it's all subject to some corporate strategy, if any middle manager can shut it down if the metrics aren't going up?
And then there would have been a slew of articles and criticism about how once again a big company has squandered an opportunity.
Instead we get to see what really happens when the founding team executes a pivot on what is already a pretty successful product and service that has not yet fulfilled the Yelp sized aspirations of its founders, investors and employees.
The pressure to keep on growing and have viral growth and turn into a destination app means that app like Foursquare with less mainstream gamifications sadly don't get the respect they maybe deserve, and are forced to try to go viral, etc. which is not a natural path for every app, and there should be a way to fund and let these apps achieve their natural success.
Foursquare location data was great (used by Uber) and it's sad they're alienating the users who provided them this value.
Now I presume they want to broaden the appeal of Foursquare beyond those people that like check-ins, but does that now mean that the check-ins from Swarm continue to power the recommendations in Foursquare? Is it relevant to use the data from early-adopter-types for an app that is meant to have mass appeal?
EDIT: Looks like location data as well.
I envision an experience where it knows my friends and I are in a new city together, and because it's early evening, we're probably trying to figure out where to go out for the night.
Bam, notification letting me know the best nightlife spots based on my preferences and those of my friends.
That was so COOL! Much cooler than "personalized local search". Maybe they could go back to that? I can get recommendations for just a restaurant from lots of apps, but "go to this restaurant and order this dish" is currently underserved, and more useful.
If "x" is how much better Facebook was than MySpace, or how much better Google was than Yahoo search, then "x" is how much better you need to be than Yelp to beat Yelp.
Right now, it is debatable if you are even just better than Yelp.
I've spoken to numerous business owners in NYC who, after having turned down Yelp's super deluxe premier service^, begin to receive negative reviews that make no sense ("terrible service!" during a night the business was closed) or reference nonexistent items ("terrible apple pie!" for a bakery that doesn't offer apple pie).
^ Not the name, but they offer analytics and other services to businesses.
I guess I find Yelp's more in-depth reviews helpful for researching and planning, but too cumbersome for finding things to do on the fly.
Plus you can order food, reserve a table, see the menu, know if credit cards are accepted, if there's outside seating etc. just to name a few.
I can think of more than a few apps that are more useless.
These "pay attention to me" type apps all seem to do well.
I never used it when it was "hot" (~2012), but in the past few months I've really come to like it for finding places (restaurants, etc.) & making lists. Also, their tools for making edits to the DB are quite impressive, and they do a great job of leveraging superusers to moderate those changes.
I've been able to make a list of bars in big cities such as NYC and rank them by rating using Foursquare data.
SF: https://www.icloud.com/iw/#numbers/BAJgIU7STmBNBkW_ziOBmn5BY...
NYC: https://www.icloud.com/iw/#numbers/BAKlTrL5ohjtIDpPkrOB3UW9G...
So you create an awesome successful grind game. Cool. Next step, either create a new grind game (and hope lightning strikes twice LOL), or find a new line of business to pivot into, or go out of business.