With foursquare now “Everywhere” there’s been a surge in usage (apparently) as witnessed by Twitter check-ins from around the Globe. According to the Foursquare blog, the team is about 95% there and now, users anyplace can check-in to places and earn reward badges.
The recent updates from the social app include:
no more city buckets (ie. using the closest official foursquare metro area as your home location)
New city badges (yes, the badges are cool, although I’m still unsure how one goes about earning the “DoucheBag” badge)
Improvement via GPS when adding new venues
new leaderboards
now on Blackberry and Palm OS
changes to the point system
more!
No doubt foursquare has momentum but will the service be able to retain users. Myself, I find the stickyness of the app wearing off and I know that some connections of mine are also checking-in much less. I still notice some issues via iPhone where foursquare doesn’t not recognize the POI where I am even though I have already checked in there many times (like my local gym and coffee shop), so then I have to search, enter details etc… Also, the badges and rewards are getting a little boring and so I ask myself, why am I continuing to do this? No surprise as the initial hard-core users of foursquare are mobile geeks, social media nuts, and those heavily into social location and LBS apps.
Now that the app is going more mainstream and is supported on more devices there will be many more users jumping on board… I fear that the loyal, techno-geek faithful will start abandoning the app, unfortunately these are also the “Super Users” that crowd-source and QC much of the data. How can Foursquare keep the Super User happy??
Ideally, I'd like to see more businesses encourage users to check-in (I've yet to see a promo in my area for a Mayor) and hopefully some cool apps will be developed using the foursquare API (recall that announcement last year) . The app needs to evolve and stay fun and interesting. I thought it was cool last month when @Waze incorporated foursquare check-ins, after all, a new way to check-in sounds kind of fun. Unfortunately I didn't have much luck with that feature, nor did it ever feel as exciting as I would have hoped. Perhaps a cool app using the foursquare API will come along soon... I'm thinking that integration of foursquare functionality directly into a mobile Twitter client (like Echofon, Tweetdeck, Seesmic) would be very slick. Something that enables me to tweet from a famliar environment and check-in at the same time... now that would be cool!
