Gadgetory

it's South by Southwest 2009 Foursquare introduced the world to the check-in a way to quickly share your location with friends five years later it has five billion check-ins and Counting giving it one of the world's most powerful databases about where and what to eat or do in any given neighborhood but users were confused was Foursquare meant to replace Yelp or help them find their friends the company never caught on with the mainstream struggled to raise funding and watched his user base quickly fall behind younger services like Instagram eventually they came to a striking conclusion if the company wanted to survive it needed to make its riskiest decision yet killing off the check-in and splitting its app into over the last couple years like what what story is the most important story of coursework is it I check in two places because you tell Foursquare great things and then we can you know kind of give you amazing personalized open search results or is it you know come in search and discover find great places and then check into those places I think people will always think Oh Foursquare that's like that's the check-in out well of course we're that's the thing where you check in and get badges and I think I'd your if that's your perception of what we're doing like you're missing ninety percent of like the vision in ninety percent of like really what the company is here to do we looked at this and looked at the session analysis and saw that only one in 20 sessions had both social and discovery at the same kind of app open right so what it says to me is that 19 out of 20 times and someone used Foursquare that had the business up front and the party in the back either went to business or went to a party but not both we did this exercise where we brought kind of 10 different people from around the coming together kind of posed to them we call like the Lego block challenge or something like that which was it was actually a really important point to make we said all right let's let's kind of catalog all the LEGO pieces that we have as a service and as a company you know obviously we have are like 40 million plus users we have RP oh I dated base of 60 million plus places we have 40 million plus tips 150 million plus photos I'm just rambling off PR staff but like these are all the Lego blocks now how do we take all of those different like all of those different LEGO pieces and assemble them in a way that really makes sense for like the things that we can do and you know with phones in 2014 we've been working on just reimagining enforcement as if it was created today and what that would look like and for us that means two different experiences it means one that's focused on where your friends are right now and how to keep up with them and it's another about where to go next and how to find a great place to go and it's totally different from any local search experience right now by splitting them into two we give people really clear messages to again you have swarm which is your social teeth map look at what you want to know is where your friends are you should download swarm and you'll be able to meet up with them at fantastic moments when you might not have seen them otherwise and if what you're looking for is recommendations then Foursquare is the app for you and I think in the past that's been hard for us because they are two very different use cases but they've been stuck together breaking the app and two wasn't exactly how the company's leadership and vision or squares future but as teams started working on the two apps one for check-ins and one for discovery the dichotomy felt increasingly obvious the first app called swarm is a dead simple location sharing app that is one key wrinkle unlike people discovery apps of the past swarm only shares your general location with friends when you first open the app you see a list of friends who are nearby followed by friends who are in the neighborhood and then in the same city as you it's like find my friends but a lot less creepy and if you want friends to know exactly where you are you can always check in just like you used to swarm is a lot like Facebook's recently launched nearby friends feature but inside its own app with its own friends list just the people you trust it sounds a lot like some of the friend finding apps that have launched in the last few years Google Latitude sonar highlight banjo social radar none of these apps ever hit the mainstream and frankly neither did Foursquare check-ins but Foursquare thinks it's figured out why being able to say hey you know what people don't want to have their face on a map they don't want to be like precision pointed a lat/long so someone can like go find them in the middle of a park like find my friends on on your iPhone it is great if you have like a spouse who like is like total transparency right like you can track where they are or they're the gym and the shopping and you maybe do it with one person the world but they wanted people to be kind of eminently aware of where they are so their friends can now like hey if I go to the Williamsburg I get a train here my 10 French one Williamsburg like a lot of the stuff that we were inspired by is early message like instant messaging clients you know to be able to look into like these people are online these people are offline this person's active this person's not like what does that version of a buddy list look like when it's on your mobile phone and it has some element of location it makes it easy to connect with people and it's kind of easy to know of people's awareness and availability it remains to be seen whether people really do want to know who's around a trend tech investors and early adopters love to push which the mainstream has ignored but swarm is only half the equation for the new Foursquare at that it's the much smaller half the most important part of Foursquare's future is a new version of its discovery and recommendation service while the company won't yet divulge how the new app looks one thing is clear Foursquare aims to take Yelp head-on and its hopes to be the undisputed king of local search people have been telling me for years like there's no way that's going to work it's impossible to do if someone's gonna do what Google would have done it already and I'm like no I think we can do this in a different way it's always been really hard to tease those experiences out of Foursquare because like you have to check into the places and you have to look at the screen you have to get the tip and thinking was always like let's just get a ton of knowledge about the world about where people go get a ton of these tips and then when we can tell when someone just walks into the place we can just pop up that message and the phone will buzz and let us look at it now that's what we wanted to do in 2009 just took us five years to get to where we are Yelp can't do what we do like Yelp doesn't need to be able to personalize for you because when you search for Pete on Yelp it shows you the top ten pizza places it's not tailored to you but when you're on Foursquare and you search for pizza we know if you like a greasy slice or the most artisanal perfect pizza in New York if people weren't afraid we would have done this a long time ago right like and not afraid in an irrational way afraid and like this is like a somewhat risky thing to do it is richer than the current path we're going down ultimately I think like the winner in the local search space it's all about who has the best data and we're not the point now it's like God the company has succeeded to the point like we built all this great stuff the phones have matured like we have the we have the flexibility and the freedom to kind of rethink this entire space and we came up with this idea of like we should do two apps one for check-in one for search and we you know you have to sit on it for like a week or two weeks you know and during those two we say this is kind of crazy right but then it's like no this makes perfect sense this is what like we really can do it now because of all the things that we've done in the past but it's makes a lot of sense you