There will soon be one less app to point you to the best nearby pizza joint: Foursquare’s City Guide app will shut down on Sunday, and its web version will expire early next year.
It marks the end of the road for an early attempt at combining smartphone location awareness with crowdsourced place recommendations—one that briefly seemed like it held serious commercial promise.
When Foursquare launched in March 2009 at SXSW, its system of check-ins promised a neat solution to two problems of networked life: knowing when friends were at the same restaurants/bars/shops/airports/etc. as you, and getting useful advice from strangers who had actually been to those establishments about what to eat/drink/buy/experience there.
In the bargain, businesses could use Foursquare’s platform to offer check-in specials to app users, giving people financial motivation to install and use the app.
“People find themselves out of context more often than they realize,” Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley said at SXSW 2013. “You may be stuck on a highway and just need to find a place to eat. Foursquare can help with that.”
The City Guide half of Foursquare—split off into a separate app in 2014—offered quick access to the collective insights that Foursquare users had shared through the platform as tips and 0-to-10 reviews. For a while they provided legitimate competition to the likes of Yelp and TripAdvisor.
New York-based Foursquare Labs didn’t cite a reason for the guide’s shutdown beyond saying, “We’ve made the tough decision to say goodbye to the City Guide app.”
But over the last decade, Foursquare’s business has tilted increasingly toward providing location services to other businesses. For example, location tagging on Twitter relied on Foursquare’s platform until that feature fell victim to one of Elon Musk’s cost-cutting drives.
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Foursquare’s original check-in feature, which earlier inspired similar features at Yelp and Facebook, lives on in the company’s Swarm app. An FAQ about City Guide’s shutdown says the change will let the company “focus our efforts on building an even better experience in Swarm,” including “new features and capabilities, with updates releasing early next year.”
That app could use a refresh. With fewer people using it, Swarm now may not deliver much value beyond providing you with an easily searchable index of your more significant past whereabouts—one with more precision about those places than your Google Maps Timeline but without the end-to-end encryption of Google’s location history.
Foursquare’s FAQ also includes directions about downloading your City Guide data for your own recordkeeping. I started my data-export request Friday morning and quickly received an email advising me to expect a follow-up message with a link to download that data “in the next few days.”
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About Rob Pegoraro
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