foursquare is free (iPhone). The foursquare platform gives you an opportunity to learn a lot about the city you are in, and even to arrange a spontaneous meeting with your friends. When you check in an establishment via foursquare, you will notify your friends about it, including via social networks Twitter and Facebook. You can also get a good discount from the host, earn badges and points, and even become the titled “mayor” of an organization, institution, or institute if you visit often enough.
Foursquare is a popular social network with geo-positioning function. To put it simply, you can use it to mark your current location on the map (do the same “check-in”) and see where your friends and acquaintances are. Just think how convenient it is. For example, if you find yourself in the city center and suddenly get bored, you open foursquare and look at the map, and it turns out that your friend is sitting in the nearby square, and your friend is also sitting in the cafe across the street.
However, this is not the only advantage of foursquare, and probably not even the main one. The main thing – all sorts of bonuses in the form of free services and discounts for checks in cafes, stores and other places that benefit from mentioning the check in your diaries and your Facebook. After all, every such check is a kind of advertising coupled with a recommendation, and companies are willing to pay for it. Garmin hurries to join this international trend and is ready to reward for the checks in their stores.
Well, then it’s easy – press the “check-in” button whenever and wherever you want and get your reward points!
Perhaps the people at the company did not fully understand how successful their service was in balancing the usefulness and gaming component. After all, both before and after Foursquare, there were many applications where users had to leave reviews for different places: cafes, restaurants, stores, cinemas and so on. But they didn’t. At least not in the amount that Foursquare did around the world. And this is also important. The service became popular not only in the States, but also in other countries, where previously such applications could not achieve audience growth and, as a result, a normal volume of reviews, making any such service attractive to a new audience.
Foursquare was able to do this easily and effortlessly, largely due to the competitive nature of the service. Foursquare introduced the concept of “check-ins” and “mayorships” and added a spirit of excitement and struggle to the seemingly completely unplayable sphere. People were chequing at new places and writing reviews on them, chequing daily at work, in movie theaters, and everywhere else they could in order to gain the status of “mayor” of that place. On trips and travels, chequered at popular places, and thus visited them, to rack up medals showing: “yes, you did good, you’ve been to this city – hold the award.” A large part of Foursquare’s popularity was built on this, but one day the developers took and ruined what they themselves had created. In July 2014, Foursquare updated the site and at the same time brought all the check-ins, mayorships, and other “gaming” stuff into a separate app, Swarm. Whereas Foursquare itself remains a program where you can read and post reviews on various places and search for them.
