Foursquare City Guide is a local search-and-discovery mobile app[1] that provides recommendations for places to eat, visit, or explore in the user’s vicinity. The app offers features like local search and recommendations, tips and expertise, tastes, location detection, and ratings. Users can level up and contribute by earning a Superuser status, which allows them to edit venue information and contribute high-quality edits. Foursquare also generates revenue through partnerships with companies that create pages of tips, and through promoted updates. The app’s features have evolved over time, with check-ins and location sharing now moved to Foursquare Swarm. While it has faced privacy[3] concerns, Foursquare has taken steps to address these issues and has integrated with platforms like Microsoft[2] to enhance user privacy.
This article reads like a press release or a news article and may be largely based on routine coverage. (November 2018) |
Foursquare City Guide, commonly known as Foursquare, is a local search-and-discovery mobile app developed by Foursquare Labs Inc. The app provides personalized recommendations of places to go near a user's current location based on users' previous browsing history and check-in history.
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| Type of business | Private |
|---|---|
Type of site | Local search, recommender system |
| Available in | English, German, French, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Thai, Turkish |
| Founded | New York City, New York, U.S. |
| Headquarters | New York City ,United States |
| Area served | Worldwide |
| Owner | Foursquare Labs |
| Founder(s) | Dennis Crowley Naveen Selvadurai |
| Key people | Dennis Crowley Naveen Selvadurai |
| Employees | 300 |
| URL | foursquare |
| Registration | Optional |
| Users | 50 million |
| Launched | March 11, 2009 |
| Current status | Active |
The service was created in late 2008 by Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai and launched in 2009. Crowley had previously founded the similar project Dodgeball as his graduate thesis project in the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) at New York University. Google bought Dodgeball in 2005 and shut it down in 2009, replacing it with Google Latitude. Dodgeball user interactions were based on SMS technology, rather than an application. Foursquare was similar but allowed for more features, allowing mobile device users to interact with their environment. Foursquare took advantage of new smartphones like the iPhone, which had built-in GPS to better detect a user's location.
Until late July 2014, Foursquare featured a social networking layer that enabled a user to share their location with friends, via the "check in" - a user would manually tell the application when they were at a particular location using a mobile website, text messaging, or a device-specific application by selecting from a list of venues the application locates nearby. In May 2014, the company launched Swarm, a companion app to Foursquare City Guide, that reimagined the social networking and location sharing aspects of the service as a separate application. On August 7, 2014, the company launched Foursquare 8.0, a new version of the service. This version removed the check-in feature and location sharing, instead focusing on local search.
In 2011, user demographics showed a roughly equal split between male and female user accounts, with 50 percent of users registered outside of the US. Most recent statistics show Foursquare with approximately 55 million monthly active users.
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