Hacker News Reader

Comment by deanCommie | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone still use Foursquare? I was part of a wave of users when everyone I knew was checking in, and trying to earn badges, and race to the top of the weekly charts. In it's heyday, it was almost as popular as Draw Something's peak among my developer friends.

Now? I don't know anyone that uses it.

And the weird thing is, the FEATURES that it offers (menu recommendations, localized pictures) are still great and way better than showing up to some place and trying to find it on Yelp or Google Maps. And yet...I never use it.

I know some would blame the split of the app into two, but most people I knew abandoned Foursquare long before that.

View on HN

It's the classic example of a development team saying "our users are using the product incorrectly!"

Rather than realising that paving the cow-paths / respecting user wishes is an entirely acceptable way to build a decent business, they took the (understandable but wrong) move to try & shift their users' behaviour into a more profitable direction.

Foursquare was a decent service, had a great API, and a loyal following. It wasn't going to be a billion dollar business and that's ok!

IMO the killer use case is for 4sq is for travel. When I'm on the road (most of the past few years) I care a lot more both in recording where I've been and getting recommendations. There are a few things that 4sq could do better in that regard - better romanization/local-English display and better segmentation of the data (locals vs tourists). Also it's hard to create/surface trip logs/lists and todo lists become useless when you have geographically disperse items (it always zooms globally and doesn't track your state).

I use it literally constantly for finding places to eat. Especially when I'm somewhere new and I don't know where the best places to go are.

It's incredibly good at finding those 'hidden gem' type places which aren't busy or popular but do amazing food.

It seems to have been a big mistake splitting Foursquare from Swarm though. While I use both heavily now (I do like doing the check-in thing), and I can see a lot of logic behind why they split them, it doesn't seem to have worked out well.

It's a painful lesson in how difficult it is to shift expectation once a large group of people brand you as being use for x. Its why myspace couldnt be a music company, why Mel Gibson will always be seen as anti semtic and why it took Rob Lowe two decades to escape a sex tape. Its really hard to change peoples minds once their made up.

I wonder if that might be because everyone thinks of FourSquare as the "check into places" app. It's easy to dismiss it based on that.

When you consider the other features you mentioned, it seems far more compelling. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think those features came after the check-in craze, right? So most people are unaware of what it has become, and still think about it as what it used to be.

I still use Swarm. It's pretty fun and me and my friends are always checking into interesting places and posting interesting places.

I found Foursquare kind of useless and uninstalled it long ago. If I want to research where to go I use Yelp.

I use foursquare much more since they removed the badge thing. IMHO, their advices on places are the best.

Does anyone still use Foursquare?

The real question is, does Foursquare still use you?

(If you're not paying for it you're the product.)

> (If you're not paying for it you're the product.)

Yep, that's precisely how GNU Emacs and Linux work.

(I hate trite sayings.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com