Foursquare City Guide

» see foursquare.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

foursquare launched 11 march 2009 out of new york, built by dennis crowley and naveen selvadurai. crowley had already made dodgeball, an sms check-in service that google bought in 2005 and shut down in 2009. foursquare was dodgeball rebooted as a mobile app with points and badges welded on. you tapped one button when you arrived at a venue. your friends saw it. you got a small badge for your first visit somewhere new or your third to the same spot in a week.

the mayor mechanic came in almost immediately. check into a place more than anybody else within 60 days and you owned the mayorship. bars printed "our mayor gets a free drink" signs. this was 2010, when nobody had figured out how to gamify mobile behavior yet. foursquare was the first product to do it at scale. by february 2011 it had seven million registered users. peak was around fifty million.

in may 2014 the company split. swarm took the check-ins and the social layer. foursquare city guide, the original app, became a local search product recommending nearby restaurants. this looked strategic. it was also the beginning of the end for the flagship brand. the check-in was the reason anybody had installed foursquare in the first place. once it moved to a different app, the main app was just another yelp with worse coverage.

on 21 october 2024 the company announced the mobile app would sunset 15 december 2024. web version got until 28 april 2025. swarm continues. it is the actual foursquare survivor.

i had foursquare on the phone for a few weeks around 2011. the mayor game never landed. ankara nightlife did not use foursquare and my friends were on facebook places when they were doing anything at all. no bar in çankaya was going to give me a free drink for holding a mayorship over the same lokanta three visits in a row. i uninstalled after two weeks and did not go back.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the swarm split ~

by 2014 the company had a problem. check-ins were dropping. instagram and snapchat had eaten the "here i am" broadcast. yelp had taken the venue-search side. foursquare was stuck in the middle. crowley's answer was to split the app in two. swarm shipped in may 2014 with the check-in loop plus a friends-nearby feature. city guide (foursquare 8.0, august 2014) dropped check-ins entirely and pivoted to search.

this looked like a hedge. it was actually a wind-down of the flagship consumer brand. by 2016 the venture funding had shifted toward enterprise data (pilgrim sdk, places api, developer platform). the consumer apps were maintained but not really invested in. the money was in selling location data to third parties.

~ what dodgeball built ~

crowley did the same trick twice. dodgeball was the check-in-by-sms product that predated smartphones. foursquare was the mobile-native version. both got acquired or reorganized inside three years of launch. both had a huge cultural moment before commercial reality caught up.

~ how it landed for me ~

by early 2011 i had a symbian nokia and the foursquare app on it. the client was slow and battery-hungry. two friends of mine were on it. neither of them checked in enough to build a leaderboard, and i was not the person who was going to check in at a market or a corner cafe. the whole product depended on a critical mass of your local social graph running it as a habit, and that never happened in ankara.

i uninstalled around april or may 2011. tried swarm briefly in 2014 out of curiosity and had the same experience. the network effect never made it to my side of the planet at meaningful strength.

~ where the brand went ~

swarm is still up in 2026. foursquare the company is still selling location data as an enterprise product. the consumer check-in category is basically dead. gowalla shut down in 2012 after a facebook acquihire. brightkite before that. yelp is a review site now. the whole 2009-2013 wave of "check in wherever you are" apps ended with swarm as the one live remnant. city guide going dark on 15 december 2024 was the closing note on the flagship brand.

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