With foursquare now “Everywhere” there’s been a surge in usage (apparently) as witnessed by Twitter checkins from around the Globe. According to the Foursquare blog, the team is about 95% there and now, users anyplace can check-in to places and earn reward badges. The recent updates from the social app include:
- no more city buckets (ie. using the closest official foursquare metro area as your home location)
- New city badges (yes, the badges are cool, although I’m still unsure how one goes about earning the “DoucheBag” badge)
- Improvement via GPS when adding new venues
- new leaderboards
- now on Blackberry and Palm OS
- changes to the point system
- more!
No doubt foursquare has momentum but will the service be able to retain users. Myself, I find the stickyness of the app wearing off and I know that some connections of mine are also checking-in much less. I still notice some issues via iPhone where foursquare doesn’t not recognize the POI where I am even though I have already checked in there many times (like my local gym and coffee shop), so then I have to search, enter details etc… Also, the badges and rewards are getting a little boring and so I ask myself, why am I continuing to do this? No surprise as the initial hard-core users of foursquare are mobile geeks, social media nuts, and those heavily into social location and LBS apps. Now that the app is going more mainstream and is supported on more devices there will be many more users jumping on board… I fear that the loyal, techno-geek faithful will start abandoning the app.. unfortunately these are also the “Super Users” that crowd-source and QC much of the data. How can Foursquare keep the Super User happy??
