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In 2009, when the App Store was still in its infancy and not every smartphone had a GPS sensor, an application that allowed check ins virtually anywhere, such as restaurants, parks and stores, and then sharing this information with friends gained almost instant notoriety: the foursquare.
The app was one of the first to popularize the concept of gamification, which consists of offering incentives to use the service. The willingness to explore new places or loyalty to a particular location were rewarded through points, rankings, medals and “town halls” in order to engage participants.
In 2014, the scenario is drastically different. Sharing location has become trivial on any smartphone; services such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram combine the 's position with images and texts in simpler and more visually rich ways than Foursquare.
The exponential increase in the base, from 50 thousand in 2009 to 50 million currently, it has made the conquest of city halls and the search for leadership in the ranking of s almost impossible for a large part of the app's audience.
With this reality in mind, the developers made a brave but risky decision: split the check-in and localized suggestion functions between two apps.
Foursquare then transforms into a service focused on personalized recommendations, and a new app, Swarm, takes over the location sharing capabilities.
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Scheduled for release this week on the App Store and Google Play (Windows Phone "soon"), Swarm will focus on Foursquare's gamification features, but with changes to make this experience more intimate.
According to CEO Dennis Crowley, a common complaint from s is that they don't like the idea of having their faces pinned to a map, revealing their exact location. Therefore, Swarm will display a screen with friends nearby, but will not indicate latitude and longitude, only the approximate distance, for example, “700 meters”, similar to dating apps.
Conventional check-ins at specific locations will continue to be ed, but Swarm will go further by tracking and updating the 's location in real time. If you intend to use this application, it is worth cleaning your s so you don't go out sharing your position with unwanted people.
Another novelty will be the for stickers (stickers), which can be used during check-ins to convey your current mood. Stickers will be free and new figures can be unlocked as the explores new locations. Foursquare has not yet revealed what will happen to the badges, but has already indicated that they will be replaced by a new form of “reward”.
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Municipalities will also change. Currently, the who checks in the most in a certain place in the last 60 days becomes the mayor. In Swarm, the title will only be disputed between Friends that frequent the same place, not against the 50 million people who use the app.
Upon becoming mayor, the will earn a crown-shaped sticker. Since Friday (the 9th) all Foursquare town halls are frozen, therefore it is impossible to remove a mayor until the Swarm becomes available.
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The purpose of this transition is to transform Foursquare into a powerful local search, as a modern and personalized version of the yellow pages, which lists the establishments available in the region linked to the opinion of friends, consumers and even experts.
To suggest to the what he is looking for, Foursquare has a gigantic database fed by 6 billion check-ins that allowed the service to map 60 million locations around the world, a great differential in relation to other applications of the genre.
In theory, any app can request a person's positioning via their smartphone, but thanks to check-ins, Foursquare is one of the few that knows or that there is in the place where the subject is, be it a restaurant, a shopping mall, a school, etc.
Foursquare's main competitors in this regard are Yelp, which arrived in Brazil last year, but doesn't have the same popularity here as it does in the USA and of course, the Google.
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However, Crowley believes that neither has the contextual ability that Foursquare has thanks to data collected from the individual and his or her friends. One of the companies attracted by this capability was Microsoft, which will use the Foursquare recommendation service in the digital assistant Cortana.
The CEO also claims that the new strategy will make the service more attractive to a greater number of people, as many were not comfortable with the check-in concept. One of the comparisons the company makes is with Twitter, which does not require s to tweet to obtain information available on the network.
This new Foursquare, no check-ins and focused on recommendations should hit the app stores only on next quarter. To be alerted about Swarm availability, enter your email on the app's official website, using this link.
