Foursquare Is Going Global and It’s Taking the New iPhone, Blackberry, Pre and Web Applications with It
Since receiving funding in late 2009 the company Foursquare has been using most of its time working on the massive expansion of the cities list it will be available in. They were unfortunately stuck within the reality that no matter how hard they were trying they couldn’t expand at a fast enough rate.
So there really shouldn’t be any surprise that Foursquare is throwing all of that away. The company has just officially made the announcement that you’re now able to use the Foursquare product anywhere in the entire world. That isn’t all they have been working on.
Just one of these new things, but maybe the most notable of them is that the service is now available for a large variety of various platforms. It’s been out for both the Android and the iPhone for quite some time now the Blackberry as well as the Palm Pre now finally has the application.
Another thing that’s notable for mention is that Foursquare is currently in a complete redesign stage for both the iPhone application and of their website. The iPhone application in testing now only looks nicer but it also new foursquare iPhone app to run a lot smoother than the soon to be predecessor. The newer application will be available in the Apple Store very soon. With the changes foursquare is going to remove the city-based restrictions and also improve the quality of the location-finding abilities of the application.
With the move to the global game they are also escalating the badging capability. If you’re not familiar with badges, the badges are a graphical item that the user can earn through doing certain tasks in certain places. As an example, say you check into your gym for a preset period of time and then you’re going to earn a “Gym Rat” badge.
There are also additional gaming elements to Foursquare, like that of the point system, and they do tend to lose some of their appeal over time but the badges have actually seemed to remain something that the users have really longed for. Add to that some of the backend service changes and Foursquare hopes to be able to add some more of those badges very soon in order to add to the dynamic for the current and future user. They are actually letting their users make badge suggestions and you can do so through this link.
Now that they are making the move away from the cities you can actually do various things when you’re checking into a new city and not have to duplicate the badges any longer as everything is going to now be consolidated. Keeping that in mind though, there are still only going to be certain badges that you’ll be able to get in certain cities.
They are actually tweaking the point system too. With the move away from the cities they are now going to enlist a point’s leader board that is going to be based on proximity instead of an entire city. So you’ll be able to see if you’re among the points leaders in say a 25 mile radius. Foursquare is hinting at the fact that they should be overhauling the entire points system sometime in the near future in order to:
• Make the game more interesting
• Curb cheating
Another nice change and a big one is that you’ll no longer have to use an address in order to create a new venue. This was by far the biggest barrier when trying to enter a new one and they are making it an option to tag the place that you’re creating by using GPS coordinates.
This move is a little bit of a risk one due to the fact that there is more than likely going to be a massive flood of either fake or incorrect venues but it’s an obviously good move since it is really needed for the global expansion to truly work effectively.
The moves that Foursquare is making are very good ones and it will add massive value to their service. The users that they already have will be very happy and it should do an excellent job of attracting new ones.
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Tags: Android, Android Market, apps, Blackberry, iphone