Foursquare: 'The way people explore the world is going to change'

First Foursquare split off Swarm - now the company is relaunching its flagship app. Can it win back the deserters?


In May, location-based social network Foursquare announced a surprising new direction. It was ditching the check-in - the core of the app throughout its five-year history - and hiving many of its social features off into an entirely new app, called Swarm.


“We’re at the end of the beginning, but not the beginning of the end … We’re no longer the check-in service, we’re about discovering places you’ll love anywhere in the world.”


When Churchill made that speech, of course, Britain had stared down potential destruction in the second world war, and barely made it out to tell the tale. Things haven’t been quite so bad for Foursquare, but the launch of Swarm hasn’t gone as smoothly as it could have.


The impetus behind the relaunch was to clear the association Foursquare had with “checking in” to a particular location. For years, the core of the app was built around that action: users would open it up, and be presented with a big button that let them tell their friends where they were. It was an idea that grew out of Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley’s previous company, Dodgeball: helping you find where your friends are in a busy metropolis.


As Foursquare grew, it changed. The reams of data gleaned from the checkins let it expand into recommendation services, eventually building software that rivals leaders such as Yelp or even Google at helping users discover new places to explore. But the public perception stayed the same.


So the company took the drastic option, and split the checking-in functionality off to a new app. Ideally, that would have let the company focus on relaunching its brand with a new focus, while providing the checkin functionality to those users who still wanted to broadcast their location to friends.


“The central insight is that there are two different types of behaviour that people have,” Steinback explains. “When you’re looking for a place for dinner, you’re looking for somewhere that matches your tastes. And when you’re looking for a place to get drinks after dinner, you’re looking to meet up with your friends. And those are really, like, the story of Swarm and the story of Foursquare in a nutshell.”


But when the Swarm app was released, it felt incomplete, not least because it was fairly prone to crashing. In fact, the apparently unfinished state of the app prompted an angry “breakup letter” to the firm from David Weekly, a product manager at Facebook, who wrote that “Swarm sucked. It crashed. All. The. Time. On iOS. On Android. It introduced extra steps before checkin, force-prompting me to say something witty or attach a picture. It was slow. It hung. It consumed lots of data. And I couldn’t go back.”


Steinback accepts that Swarm required a lot of work after launch. “Honestly, we’ve been spending more time than we’d hoped just like fixing some of the core stuff after we launched, cos instead of a couple of hundred testers we have a few million people all around the world, and that’s exposed a lot of stuff we have to fix.”


But some of the flaws that Weekly highlights come, not from Foursquare moving too fast, but from it taking a breather halfway through the relaunch. While Swarm is co-existing with the old Foursquare app, inconsistencies are everywhere – not least a checkin button that does nothing but boot the user into a second app. All that should change once the new app launches. Hopefully, the new features will ensure that all is forgiven, and erase the rash of one-star protest reviews breaking out over the app store pages of the two apps.


With the service split in half, the Foursquare team can focus in on what they had always intended the app to be: the best way to find new places that you would like to visit. (Meanwhile, the Swarm team focuses on helping you find and hang out with your friends). For Steinback, that’s epitomised by the new tastes feature.


“It builds off this idea: what are the most easy to share pieces of information, that can help us deliver a totally customised decision for you? For us, that’s taste. And that’s because we’ve got tens of millions of tips that people have written.


“We’ve done a lot of Natural Language Processing on top of that, to extract the tastes that are relevant to a location. When you download the new Foursquare app, we’re going to ask you to add a few tastes, really simply. And then from that, we totally customise your experience.”


While accepting that there’s going to be a lot of “re-education” required in teaching existing users about the rationale for two new apps where one used to do, Steinback is convinced that the outcome will be worth it. “We think that the way people explore the world is going to change. This is the way that the industry is going to go, and we’re just kind of excited to push it forward.”


The guardian.com