Back when I joined in 2007 until today, Foursquare has been a utility. It is in essence indispensable. I believe in Check-In services so much that I even worked at Brightkite back in 2010 for a short sting before the service was closed mostly in part due to Foursquare’s dominance and compounded when Facebook entered the game. Gowalla was acquired a year later and closed completely in 2013. A side-note, before I left Brightkite, the founders created a web-app called Check.In. It was awesome. The user could check-in to the locations on Foursquare, Gowalla and Brightkite at the same time. It was intended to make this a full-fledged smartphone application but it never occurred.
Looking at Foursquare’s Crunchbase page, they have raised a ton of money even 45 million bucks only a year ago but with 100-200 employees, that sort of money goes fast. Of the 6 products on their company page, the only one I personally care about is Swarm. Foursquare (the app / site) is meant to compete with Yelp and I think they’ve missed the mark in a big way. Swarm is still necessary to feed into the Foursquare data but there’s no overlap between people who just want to check in and those looking for recommendations. Back when the check in & the recommendation were in a single app, I had no issue looking for recommendations. Separately, I just use Yelp + Swarm. I know that Foursquare sells POI data to all kinds of companies. I’m partly in the business of POI data and Foursquare’s name comes up a bit in circles among companies that buy POI data but I don’t think my employer uses their data and I’m not on the POI team so I think I’m okay to write an article like this.
I actually do miss going to a new city and searching Pour-Over and seeing where my friends had been and their photos. Swam is simply a check-in Game w/o those great features.
Either way, Swarm for me isn’t a social network. I check in, add a photo and the photo gets pushed to a Drop Box folder via IFTTT and synced to a Foursquare Google Calendar as well as the location data an XML / KML file. I use the data to plot where I go and have some historical record. I have thousands of checkins going back almost 10 years on the service.
What if Foursquare goes broke? What if their POI, Analysis, Marketing and Recommendation products go belly up and the Check-In aspect is simply discarded or worse, sold to a company who’s ethics toward user data, advertising and marketing don’t align with mine?
The thought of a life without Swarm is pretty rough. I don’t know of any competing tools I could use to keep track of where I go. Any recommendations? Maybe I should start moving now because from what I can tell, Swam is at the bottom of Foursquare’s priorities. There’s little money in check-ins outside of potential data mining and I’m not sure they’re using that too its best potential.