Latest Changes to Foursquare

Even though I am an avid Foursquare user I have been hesitating to spend the time writing about it for one reason and one reason only – I suspected it was about to die out!

This was mainly because Foursquare wasn’t making any significant revenue and while the company was seemingly well supported by its venture capital investors it just didn’t have a sustainable take-up rate.

I am very pleased to say, however, it looks as though I was wrong. For now.

I’m not a gamer. The closest I get to gaming is challenging my mum at Wii tennis when I visit her for Christmas.

So when I downloaded the Foursquare app a few months ago, I began to understand how mobile gaming in particular can become addictive – and Foursquare isn’t even a real game!

It was the competitive element that got me hooked.

I wanted to be Mayor of EVERYWHERE and I wanted to kick my mates, and strangers, puttuttis!

I was curious as to why Foursquare wasn’t more popular? It only has a mere 20 million users compared to Facebook’s 900Mil and the exponential growth of Pinterest, especially, since it provided such fantastic opportunities for retailers and even service providers such as real estate agents (I’ll tell you how in another post).

And, it was user-friendly, providing geo-targeted advice, discounts and shared recommendations from other users.

But the uptake was just not happening..??

And so rather than just wither away like so many B+ Apps it has been reshaped, restructured and re-invigorated.

The New York-based company has finally unveiled the newest version of its popular location-based mobile app, Foursquare 5.0.

It’s a big overhaul for the now three-year-old Foursquare. The app has been totally rebuilt from the top to bottom in a way that makes it both simplified and more fully-featured.

Foursquare 5.0 is the company’s biggest and boldest step yet toward becoming a complete recommendation engine and standalone social network, a bid to move well beyond its reputation as a fun “check-in” app.

It is surprising that the new version has been designed with less emphasis placed on the “check-in” function that in many ways Foursquare pioneered. According to Foursquare co-founder and CEO Dennis Crowley this is due to data indicating that user-behaviour gravitates more towards the functions of recommendations and looking up tips, exploring localities and finding where their friends are hanging out.

Foursquare have done their darnedest to bury the fun features such as leaderboards, badges and mayorships, they’re still there but you really do have to go digging for them.

I also have to say that I find the new check-in interface cluncky when it comes to Twitter and Facebook integration. Often if I do not wish to take a photo, I forget to scroll down further to nominate whether or not I wish to link to a tweet or post to my Timeline. The old Foursqare made it really easy and I appreciated them giving me the option to link each time I was checking-in (unlike Twitter and Facebook, who assume every update needs to be posted to the other platform).

Just one other complaint I have about Foursquare 5.0 is that it pulls all the updates from your friends on the app into the same activity feed, whether they’re close to you or not. Hopefully this is something the team take into consideration when launching Foursquare 5.1

I congratulate Foursquare on their courage to experiment and track and monitor everything; letting-go of what doesn’t work and re-adapting what is most popular. Crowley admits that there is more changes to come…”[we’ll be] trying to connect people to places, and places with people, and I think a lot of those things will probably be revenue-generating for us. I don’t know when we’re going to flip the switch on monetization, but we’re already well on our way to doing experiments and finding what works and what doesn’t work, what users like and what they don’t like.”

Foursquare is still not making any significant revenues as of yet,  it is now closer than ever to making its own money — most importantly, in a way that does not turn off its user base:

“We don’t want to be that company that tacks on monetization at the end, like ‘Hey we’ve built some cool stuff, now here’s some ads.’ That’s never been our thing.” ~ CEO Dennis Crowley.

I wish them all the best and look forward to seeing their new features.

Are you on Foursquare for Business?

How do you use it to attract leads?