Foursquare Reinvents Its Application - Swarm Is Created

Foursquare has split its application (app) into two entities: the redesign of Foursquare and the original creation of Swarm. Foursquare is seeking to monopolize the market, making Foursquare, and now Swarm, the most popular check-in apps currently available on the market.

Some things such as mayorships and badges have been eliminated completely. The app on Swarm will still track your ‘streak’ of how many weeks in a row you have been to the gym for instance. However, Swarm is geared more towards togetherness (finding out where groups of people are, hence the name “Swarm”).

In regards to mayorships, if you were formerly a mayor, the user will hold this position and move towards mayors 2.0 version.  This is a 60-day window where all previous mayors coexist and fight for spot to be the superior mayor against other mayors in the 2.0 version. What Swarm should do is just make this mayor competition a contest with a hierarchy that mirrors our political system now … we will call this Swarm Government Competition.

Badges have also been replaced in Swarm with stickers that can be attached to any place where you check-in helping to describe the mood or thoughts regarding a particular place. All of these stickers are indeed free!

The main focus of the newly redesigned Foursquare is to replace the geolocation-based social attributes of the New York City start-up’s original app. Since Foursquare will be focusing on discovering new places and Swarm for social and tracking aspects, this will dominate the market for this category of apps.

With Foursquare, a user can search a place, person, or even a type of place and then Swarm will showcase relevant results. User reviews are not so appreciative that the user must use two different apps to manage all actions. This proposes the question why is Foursquare trying to help users find places when the Yelp app exists to do exactly this?

Swarm is featuring a new feature called “Neighborhood sharing”. When you turn this feature on, your friends that also have this feature turned on can see when you enter his or her neighborhood and the same goes for when your friends enter your neighborhood. This was enabled to create more meet-ups between friends. To turn this feature off, tap on either of the two left hand tabs located at the bottom of the navigation bar and then swipe right at the top of the screen.

Foursquare and Swarm might increase in popularity once again if people can get a handle on the separation of the app’s features. At least checking in is still available.