The Foursquare weening process has been a slow one . First , Swarm appear . A few months afterwards , it took our tab - ins . And now that the original , watermelon - adorned app overhaul is last here , it ’s a spot of a disappointment .
Of course , the most obvious change is Foursquare ’s decisiveness to jump on the ever - democratic ( although unfortunately innuendo - less ) rebrand bandwagon . Gone is the companionship ’s trademark reverberate ball , replaced with what Foursquare refers to as “ a mixture of single-valued function pin and superhero emblem . ”
But Foursquare ’s changes go far deeply than just color scheme . Now , Foursquare Proper is first and first of all a discovery engine . One in which personal taste set up the picture while Quaker take a backseat , relegated to the Swarm . The app actuate you to tap on the sorts of foods , ambiances , and venues you like ( referred to as “ perceptiveness ” ) , allowing it to suggest nearby places you might revel every metre you start the app .
In other word , it feels an awful lot like Yelp .
To Foursquare ’s credit , the nonremittal recommendations you see upon start the app are more personalise , as they ’re largely base on the “ taste ” you ’ve pick prior . Which is a nice feature , certainly . But in all the time I ’ve used Foursquare over the past few years , the one discovery feature I favour over all others was the ability to only search places where friends had previously see in . Now that that filter is gone , the well you could do is impotently scroll through plaza the people you follow have “ recommended . ” It may sound like a technicality , but the lack of ascendency makes the full process feel more distant .
In its announcement , Foursquare tries to punctuate that , despite the fact that your friend have been all but banish to Swarm , this newest iteration really is more personal :
The newfangled Foursquare absolve you from ingest to read long , random reviews , wondering if those people apportion your predilection . With Foursquare , find matter free-base on your tastes , the blank space you care , and the friends and experts you trust most .
Ignoring the fact that the longest reviews we ’ve go out on Foursquare would barely qualified as Tweets , the app ’s creators seem to be missing the point completely .
Half of what made Foursquare so much playfulness in the first place was the fact that it manage to gamify the act of fun itself , and all your acquaintance were there to play along . peak , leaderboards , mayorships , badges — it may have been shallow as blaze and not all that utilitarian , but that is n’t an inherently bad affair .
And though Swarm , seen above , seemed poised to allow that aspect of Foursquare to live on , in execution , it ’s little more than the vaguest of tracking devices . Everything that made it a plot ( and consequently exciting ) is go , leave us with a ( very likely decent ! ) good word engine we could have find on any figure of other apps , and a few pang of nostalgia for the Foursquare of yore .
The overhauled , redesigned Foursquare is fine — which is bad , because it used to be capital .
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