Foursquare is planning to split its core app into two
separate experiences, one that provides recommendations and another that acts
as a “social heat map” where users check in and see nearby friends.
The new app is called Swarm, and it is not yet available,
though according to Dennis Crowley, the app takes a lot of inspiration from the
Instant Messenger, where you can see when your friends are online and offline.
Swarm shows which friends are in the area and opens up the opportunity for a
dialog, which is a story we’ve heard from multiple startups but one that hasn’t
been tried out by a more mature company like Foursquare.
On the other side, Foursquare will be redesigning its core
app from the ground up. The biggest surprise is the removal of the check-in
altogether, as the new app will focus on discovery and exploration.
“The point of the company, this whole thing, was never to
build an awesome check-in button,” said Crowley in an interview with the Verge. Yet, when Foursquare launched
five years ago, they needed the check-in button to get data around where people
were going, when they wanted to share it, or remember it, or rate it. Now, they
have all of that data, they don’t need you to check in.
Instead, you’ll be met with a search experience not all that
different from Yelp, but with very different results. Rather than offering the
ten best pizza places in your general area, Foursquare will know where you’ve
been, what you’ve liked before, and what your friends like, so the results will
be tailored to you in an almost predictive manner.
And since Foursquare’s technology knows exactly where you
are, how long you stay, and the route you take to get from one place to the
next, it no longer relies on check-ins to keep track of your taste.
So Foursquare is breaking itself in two, but early
impressions are that this is more like the situation in the movie “Twins” than
the awesome self-duplication powers of Marvel superhero The Multiple Man. The
new Swarm app takes out Foursquare’s vaunted check-in and adds ambient location
sharing, something no one has ever expressed any demonstrated interest in, not
with many kicks at the can in the form of ambient geosocial apps like
Highlight, Circle and many others. Even in the extensive Verge profile, Crowley
seems keen on talking more about how powerful Foursquare is without the
check-in, rather than how great Swarm is with that included.
Foursquare is essentially becoming a direct competitor to
Yelp, which is a logical place for it to go. But this so-called “unbundling”
seems less likely to generate multiple top-quality products, and more likely to
give the company a way to shed some of its baggage while making a relatively
harmless side-bet in case it has managed to nail a formula for ambient location
networking. Facebook’s unbundling is different, I’d argue, with products like
Messenger offering a real possibility at viability, and clarifying the mission
of the core Facebook product; this is much more like jettisoning the cargo to
try to save the ship.
Neither of the new apps are available just yet, but should
be in the coming weeks.
