Before I made my glorious move to the South, I spent a few years in New York City (also glorious). There, all of my friends loved Foursquare. We were pretty competitive over it, actually. I had a coworker who ate at McDonald’s down the street from our office every single day just to check in because he wanted to be the mayor of somewhere.
Upon relocating, I noticed quickly that Foursquare isn’t as much of a “thing” in New Orleans. It took 4 check-ins to become the mayor of FSC Interactive (a title that has since been pulled out from under me by Mignon… This is not over!), 2 check-ins to become the mayor of a nail salon, 6 check-ins to become the mayor of my yoga studio, etc.
By nature, human beings are resistant to change. We’re especially resistant to change when checking in to your yoga studio is suddenly less intuitive, threatening your mayorship and everything that you stand for. So you can imagine my dismay when, suddenly, Foursquare is directing me to its new sister app, Swarm.
I took to Twitter to get to the bottom of this:
Thanks, Foursquare!
From what I understand, the Foursquare we know and love is basically transforming into something more Yelp-like, and we’re now being directed to Swarm for check-ins. Foursquare users are being pushed to a new app that does the same as the old app, and then changing the functionality of the old app.Why not just let us continue using Foursquare the way we know how, and build out a new app that functions the way that they envision Foursquare to function in the near future?
This transition doesn’t feel very user-friendly to me, but I’m staying optimistic. The upside? Swarm offers an array of fun emojis to use when checking in. All is not lost.