While Foursquare’s apps on other platforms (Android, BlackBerry, and WinMo) have been garnering most of the buzz recently, the company remains firmly committed to the only app it developed entirely in-house: It’s iPhone app. In fact, it recently submitted a new version, 1.4, to the App Store for approval. I’ve had a chance to play with an ad-hoc build for the past couple of weeks, and it’s great. It significantly improves two key areas: Usability and its social layer.
See Who Else Is Here
The most important new feature of Foursquare 1.4 is that it now allows you to see who is checked into any venue at any given time. While previously, you had to rely on your main “Friends” tab to see a stream of where people were checked in, now you can click on any venue, click on the new “People” tab, and see who is there. If you see someone you are not currently friends with, you can click on their name, and you will load up their profile where you can add them as a friend.
On that profile page, you can also see their Twitter stream (if they have hooked up their Foursquare account to their Twitter account) and their Facebook profile (if they’ve hooked that up). What’s great is that the tweet stream loads up right in the app, while clicking on the Facebook profile loads the Facebook iPhone app (assuming you have it). Both of these features should allow you to determine if you want to friend that person or not.
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bviously, not everyone is going to love this ability to see everyone who is checked in at a place. Some will think this is an invasion of privacy, of sorts. But really, it’s a very nice extension of the social capabilities of the Foursquare app. For any social application to work, there needs to be a way to navigate its social graph. Previously, you could only add new friends by either entering their phone number, or looking up account by way of your Twitter friends. Neither of these methods are really ideal, and the idea of friending people that you actually see at places you frequent seems like a good one.
Respect The Mayor
Alongside being able to see who else is at a particular venue, you can also now see who the mayor is at any given time. A “mayor” of a venue is the person who has checked in there the most amount of times in the past 60 days. Battling for mayorships is a particularly fun element of Foursquare.
On your main friend stream you can also now see when your friends are checked in places that they’re the mayor of. With the new app, you’ll see a crown next to a person’s name if they’re currently the mayor of the place they are at.
Better Maps
One of the nice features of both the Android and the upcoming WinMo versions of Foursquare is that they have much nicer map integration than the current version for the iPhone. Version 1.4 changes that, as you can now click on the map in a venue’s “Details” section, and it will load a larger Google Map which you can manipulate just as you would the regular iPhone Maps application.
However, you still cannot get directions to a venue from your current location within the app (but you can do this by clicking through and going to the Maps application on the iPhone). More importantly, you still cannot see where your other friends are on the map. Such a Latitude and Loopt-like feature would be a very nice addition to Foursquare. The Windows Mobile version of the app should have this, I’m told.
Mayor Deals
Mayor deals, which we’ve previously covered, are also now much more visible in this new version. When you’re at a place that has a deal nearby, you’ll see a green ribbon alerting you about it. Clicking on that will tell you what the deal is, and where it is. They continue to extend these deals in new venues in various cities.
Location, Location, Location
A subtle, but potentially huge addition to the Foursquare app is the ability to see tweets nearby. Right now, this feature is a bit crippled, as it pulls them in based on location set in Twitter users’ profiles (what you say you location is in your profile, some people use exact coordinates provided by some Twitter apps). But when the Twitter Geolocation API goes live, this could be an awesome feature. And that’s why Foursquare included it, I’m told.
Basically, on a venue’s Details page, underneath the map there is a button to “View tweets nearby.” Clicking on this will show you a stream of tweets around that venue. When the Geolocation API is working, it should show what people are saying that are currently in and around that venue, which is another potentially powerful layer of social discovery.
Foursquare.com Finally
Foursquare formally announced its $1.35 million seed round earlier this week. Right now, the company only has 3 employees, but they hope to add a fourth soon. They also used some of their money to buy the important foursquare.com domain. Previously, they only owned playfoursquare.com, which obviously would confuse new users.
Interestingly enough, Foursquare is the name co-founder Dennis Crowley originally had wanted to use for his previous startup, Dodgeball (which was acquired by Google). Since he wasn’t able to obtain the foursquare.com domain at the time, he went with Dodgeball instead. He’s been trying for over 11 years to get the domain, so now that he has it, he’s obviously quite pleased.
Soon
Foursquare is still limited to a select group of cities that they’ve rolled the product out in (most recently, Vancouver), but soon they hope to start crowdsourcing cities, meaning opening them up for users to start populating venues. Right now, Foursquare mainly uses third party data for city population before they roll a new city out.
Foursquare submitted version 1.4 of the app for approval several days ago, so assuming there are no problems, it should be available soon. As usual, it will be free. Watch for it to appear here.
Update: The app is now live in the App Store. Find it here.
direct appsto.re URL: http://appsto.re/foursquare
Read the reviews for FourSquare here http://uquery.c.../apps/306934924
Awesome!A new iPhone app version from the Foursquare.The company remains firmly committed to the only this app which is developed entirely in-house. Eventhough all people think it is an invasion of privacy, of sorts. But really, it’s a very nice extension of the social capabilities. Will Apple approve this version ?
awesome. can’t wait to try the new version when it gets approved, which should be sometime in the next 4 to 365 days.
+1
This can be called the social apps era. Friendship becomes global. Making friends with checked-in venues are good. But actually it breaks the privacy even the idea of befriending people at frequent places seems to be a good one. It would lead to disturbances and globalisation of friendship will become irritating.
Oddly, according to Younoodle Foursquare has taken a bit of a dive recently. Seems to correlate very closely with funding. Kind of interesting.
A bunch of features I’ve been looking forward to, I’m excited. Also big ups to Butler and Chef. Tasty brunch crepes.
I see so much potential for promotional tie in with local merchants – coupons, discounts, exclusives, etc. Any talk of that coming in the pipeline?
Also, is London on the list?
discounts are already live in some places, with more coming. don’t believe london is live yet, but i’m sure it’s on their list to happen soon.
You lie !!!
Joi – Centrl, a FourSquare competitor, does exactly what you describe: it provides merchant discounts and coupons around you in a social context where you can also share those coupons with your contacts.
They have content in London through partnerships with Navteq, etc.
And they have a great iPhone app.
Still can’t add pics yet though?
Personally, I’ve been more impressed by what I’m seeing out of Gowalla.
“….the company remains firmly committed to the only app it developer entirely in-house….”
developeR? developeD
Correct now before it lives on in internet history…
Has anyone really been far even as decided to use even go want to do look more like?
Touché
And if you drunk beer, you are me fiend……
How many other people here think Fadsquare is another valley-darling destined to never be used by outside of MG’s circle-jerking friends?
Before they start trying to be the next big thing, maybe they should improve the scroll-speed of the table-views on their iPhone app; it’s just amateurish. Could they perhaps use that 1.3 million to hire an actual programmer?
They are a fad?
Their founders aren’t “actual programmers” that previously worked for Google for a short time?
They raised $1.3M and no longer should have any bugs? Ever?
And, you use it?
You should probably disabuse yourself of the notion that everyone who works or worked at Google is a genius programmer.
And to answer your first question, yes, they’re a fad; and no, I don’t use it, because I found it worthless after trying it a few times.
I never said that. You have inferred it in your infinite wisdom. You have also made poor arguments with little to no substantiation. What exactly were you hoping to gain of “worth” from a game?
Yes well you implied it: my point is working for Google does not make you a credible programmer, it makes you an employee of Google.
As for your second point, you’re absolutely right: I shouldn’t have expected anything of worth from Fadsquare. Virtual badges of mayorship tired on me pretty quickly, as I expect they will with most other people with lives to speak of.
Like Twitter?
Unlike Twitter: as you guys relentlessly report, most Twitter users are “sheep” — or consumers of tweets. On Fadsquare, there is no such concept: you either use the thing, or you don’t — nobody uses it just to consume information. It’s growth is pretty limited then to the minority of users, like your circle-jerking friends, who are so narcissistic they need to have their location known to the world at every moment in time. Limited userbase.
Yep. Heard all the same stuff about Twitter two years ago.
No, actually you didn’t. Twitter has a producer/consumer model, and the consumers have kept it’s traffic high. Fadsquare is just a producer model — the only people are use it are those who check in. Imagine if the only people who used Twitter were those who actually tweet — it would hardly be as big.
@hauser all social networks have a core set of users when they first start, us core users are responsible for telling our friends and getting them to use it too. Which is why foursquare lets you tweet your check-ins, letting my followers see that i’m using this new thing that they might want to use as well.
cool- no tech product hits great success before the haters come a- screamin’!
also of minor note- this is not a Valley co, and only partially Valley-funded. And the users/activities seem reasonably well dispersed for such early days of the offering, via the chart here anyway: http://socialgreat.com/
Nothing on TC gets post without, “the haters come a- screamin’!” so that isn’t much of a success metric.
Yeah it’s a fad….just like google was a fad. I am in mpls and use the service daily so suffice to say it exists outside MG’s silicon valley circle jerk.
Foursquare is the strongest story in social, they have influencers, they have market information, they can influence purchasing decisions at the POP. They can benefit both users and advertisers directly with coupons and special offers to drive foot traffic
This is where both adwords and yelp should be right now!
The only question I have is do they have enough barriers to entry ie IP…seems to me google could turn latitude into foursquare quite easily.
The Foursquare team should work out something with strip clubs. The mayor gets free lap dances.
ha. great idea.
I find the FourSquare iPhone App unstable and extremely slow. By the time it is loaded or I’m about to check in my excitement for doing it has died. After dealing with the app and its pains for 2 weeks I gave up and now it sits unused taking up a few megs on my iPhone.
Sounds cool, but does the search feature actually do search based off GPS?
I stopped using FourSquare because if I was in a town 25 miles from downtown Houston and searched for things, it only brought back downtown locations. The Houston area covers a lot more than just downtown Houston.
If they fix that huge oversight, I might start using the service again.
MG, regarding the “potentially huge addition to the Foursquare app is the ability to see tweets nearby”…
A lot of japanese folks use the GPS + Cellphone + Twitter combo already, so a significant amount of tweets are well localized over there.
I’m playing with heatmaps of twitter usage in Tokyo.
It’s not super accurate but it does give a pretty good idea of where’s the (nerd) action at any given hour.
However, looking at the tweets’ content near a location area doesn’t bring a big insight on what’s going on there … People keep tweeting about anything else.
They should add a tag like #here when they tweet about what’s around them
… and you can have a look at : kurage.kilo.jp/bigheat
(what are the filters for url in this board?? I couldn’t put this in my comment)
I just want them to expand their cities list faster, or get rid of the idea all together and just let you see users within a certain radius of you. Or use gps to just determine the city your in and assign check-ins to their appropriate city.
Come on Ann Arbor!
this thing still can’t passively update, right? call me when that happens.
What’s with you ‘insiders’ promoting this so much?
Apps like Kiss or Miss me or Hide my secret(apps I’ve never heard of) are ranked higher in the app store than this. Why do you keep posting about this app? Is it because your elitist valley friends all use it. Are you trying to make this the next twitter MG? Do you know these guys are something?
It’s big in certain regions, not yet global. So for example alot of people in NYC/San Fran are using it but not many outside. If everyone based their reviews on the highest app rating, we’d have a Top 40 App Radio run by Clear Channel hyping the already-popular mega-apps. Snooze.
We are researchers studying people’s attitudes towards Google Latitude. If you have heard of Google Latitude (whether you have used it or not) and are at least 18 years old, we would like to talk with you. Please email us back at ucistudy@ics.uci.edu
We are conducting this research under the Institute for Software Research at the University of California, Irvine.
All spread new Foursquare motto!
“The game where even the winners are losers”
Honestly, I tried using this. The fact that they have so few cities, and don’t support anything outside of those is a huge turn-off for me. It reeks of pretentious-assholeness. Add in that their website is constantly down, and that they’ve made no effort to support palm products, and it really does seem like it’s something that’s just for the trendy, iPhone-using hipsters no one can stand to be around.
If they wanted to make a go of this, it should have been kept in a closed beta until they could support pretty much anyplace in the country (how hard would it be to link with google maps?), and could keep their website working on a regular basis. Seems like every time I try to go there, it’s full of postegreSQL errors.
I wanted this to work, because it seems kinda neat, but to my mind it has become a total failure due to the lack of broad-based support. Facebook could get away with being limited to college kids because that was still a huge market. Foursquare can’t get away with being limited to the “I’m-better-than-you” crowd in a dozen random cities around the US.
and then I find brightkite.com. Which works, and can somewhat locate me. Yeah, F-Foursquare.
Agreed. BrightKite is infinitely better than FourSquare, simply because *it works in my city*. Seriously, this limited rollout thing makes it worse than useless.
Go big or go home.