Foursquare to close, but Swarm game will live on Foursquare Labs is closing its venue-finding app, rather than the mobile game – but it's open sourcing the worldwide database it built. Foursquare Labs, the company behind both the Foursquare City Guide and social-media location-based game Swarm, is shutting down one of its apps… but things are not going the way that we …
> Did anyone use it seriously for a sustained period of time?
Yes, I still use it when I want to record my presence somewhere quickly; it has a vastly simpler UI than, for instance, Yelp’s check-in. Until a few years ago, check-ins were available in the Mac Calendar app; since then I’ve been downloading my data and asking ChatGPT to convert to a calendar file (which is does badly).
Foursquare licensed their database to Garmin, who put its data in my car's GPS. It's typically more useful than Garmin's results, at least in my part of the USA. I bet they pull in some good money licensing their database. I'm surprised and happy they're open sourcing that data!
I think the big mistake they made was moving swarm out to a separate app. It removed the incentive of people like me to use the city guide, and removed a potential user base for the city guide. To be honest, I stopped using the city guide after the FourSquare/swarm split, and started using Google Maps - I already had that installed and didn't want to install a separate city guide app when I used to have it built in.
To be fair, I did see it coming when they ignored my changes for three years and suddenly "woke up" approving a load. Probably one last push to get the city guide up to date before stopping maintaining it. And now they won't maintain the places, swarm will get out of date, so it's probably the death knell for that too.
"That’s a NZ institution bro! https://foursquare.co.nz/"
I didn't realize it was still a thing in NZ. I don't remember seeing any on a visit in 2016 to the Mainland but I do recall one as a kid, in our township in the '60s.
Lemon & Paeroa after my time. I was imaging it was a lemon and shell fish cordial a misconception probably not unassisted by the following chocolate covered fish. ;)
Four square also means with boldness and conviction or forthright which according to wiki is how founder Heaton Barker decided on the name in 1922, claiming his new buying group "would stand ’Four Square’ to all the winds that blew."
