Foursquare, a start-up focused on local business recommendations and discovery, has finally started to find itself.
The company on Wednesday planned to show off its completely overhauled smartphone app, the fruits of a multiyear rethink of how people should interact with the location-based service.
Longtime users of the app will be shocked by the dramatic changes. Photos of local spots are full-bleed across the screen. The four different areas of the app — profile, tips, “here” and “find a place” — are neatly sectioned off and clearly marked. Even the company’s signature light blue design flourishes have shifted to“watermelon” pink accents.
Foursquare rose to pop culture consciousness in 2009 on the premise of the check-in, a digital version of sticking a pin in a world map to show where you are, using the company’s extensive collection of location data, consisting of more than 60 million known places. Power users gained awards, or badges, for checking in to specific locations frequently.
Over the years, however, the check-in has lost some of its sheen. Facebook and Instagram have bundled a similar check-in feature into their own main apps, for instance, making a stand-alone app for checking-in less necessary.
Recently, Foursquare’s check-ins have been spun off into Swarm, a companion app. Swarm is, in a way, the last lingering remnants of what Foursquare originally was: a way to broadcast to others where you are and what you’re doing.
It is clear, however, that future efforts are focused on the new and improved Foursquare app, which does not require people to check-in at all to use it.
“We’ve just got so much data on where people want to go and what they want to do, and we haven’t really been able to flex that in our original app until now,” said Dennis Crowley, Foursquare’s chief executive.
Consider the revised app something like a digital Fodor’s travel book. Users are urged to explore their surroundings using the app as their guide. It’s based on Foursquare’s database of 10,000 “tastes,” essentially a taxonomy of foods, characteristics and things to do that the company has collected from its users’ tips and restaurant recommendations over the past five years.
So if it’s 11 a.m. on a Sunday, for instance, Foursquare could draw on your past check-ins to point you to a restaurant that’s a mile away, has good eggs Benedict and is serving brunch for the next two hours. It could also show you short tips and recommendations that your friends who use the app have written about the place you’re visiting.
That idea isn’t entirely foreign. Type “brunch” into a Google or Yelp smartphone app on your phone, and you’ll be served a list of local results as well.
But Foursquare says those results are not good enough.
Right now, local search is a poor user experience, according to Mr. Crowley, with the same list of the same results being returned to everyone, regardless of their personal preferences. But because people don’t know any better, he added, they’re unaware of how bad local search is.
Ultimately, the goal is to develop something that appeals to the 50 million registered users of the company’s apps and website, while jump-starting Foursquare’s user growth and business prospects.
And to do that, Foursquare hopes to hone in on a market similar to what Google has done with desktop search. If Foursquare can properly draw on its knowledge of your interests and locations, it could deliver relevant advertising for local businesses with every search you make.
“People are literally opening up Foursquare to find a place to spend money,” said Steven Rosenblatt, chief revenue officer at Foursquare.
The company’s biggest challenge? Convincing consumers that the app is about far more than broadcasting where you are — the very thing that helped the company’s rise to prominence.
Link: NY Times
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