Foursquare City Guide

Foursquare City Guide
Type of businessPrivate
Type of site
Local search, recommender system
Available inEnglish, German, French, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Thai, Turkish
FoundedNew York City, New York, U.S.
Headquarters
New York City
,
United States
Area servedWorldwide
OwnerFoursquare Labs
Founder(s)Dennis Crowley
Naveen Selvadurai
Key peopleDennis Crowley
Naveen Selvadurai
Employees300[1]
URLfoursquare.com/city-guide
RegistrationOptional[2]
Users50 million[3]
LaunchedMarch 11, 2009; 15 years ago (2009-03-11)
Current statusActive

Foursquare City Guide, commonly known as Foursquare, is a local search-and-discovery mobile app developed by Foursquare Labs Inc. The app provides personalized recommendations of places to go near a user's current location based on users' previous browsing history and check-in history.[4]

The service was created in late 2008 by Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai and launched in 2009.[5] Crowley had previously founded the similar project Dodgeball as his graduate thesis project in the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) at New York University. Google bought Dodgeball in 2005 and shut it down in 2009, replacing it with Google Latitude. Dodgeball user interactions were based on SMS technology, rather than an application.[6] Foursquare was similar but allowed for more features, allowing mobile device users to interact with their environment. Foursquare took advantage of new smartphones like the iPhone, which had built-in GPS to better detect a user's location.

Until late July 2014, Foursquare featured a social networking layer that enabled a user to share their location with friends, via the "check in" - a user would manually tell the application when they were at a particular location using a mobile website, text messaging, or a device-specific application by selecting from a list of venues the application locates nearby.[7] In May 2014, the company launched Swarm, a companion app to Foursquare City Guide, that reimagined the social networking and location sharing aspects of the service as a separate application. On August 7, 2014, the company launched Foursquare 8.0, a new version of the service. This version removed the check-in feature and location sharing, instead focusing on local search.

In 2011, user demographics showed a roughly equal split between male and female user accounts, with 50 percent of users registered outside of the US.[8] Most recent statistics show Foursquare with approximately 55 million monthly active users.[9]

On October 21, 2024, it was announced that the app would be sunset on December 15, 2024, with the web version following suit in early 2025.[10] Swarm, the check-in app spun off from the city guide app, will remain and gain features that were previously only available in the Foursquare app.

  1. ^ Cohen, David (2 October 2018). "Foursquare Closes $33 Million Funding Round, Aiming to 'Refine' Its Products". Adweek. Archived from the original on 13 December 2018. Retrieved 14 December 2018.
  2. ^ Crook, Jordan (13 February 2015). "Foursquare Accounts No Longer Required For New Users". Archived from the original on 7 July 2017. Retrieved 25 June 2017.
  3. ^ Crook, Jordan (19 January 2018). "Foursquare is finally proving its (dollar) value". TechCrunch. Archived from the original on 24 February 2021. Retrieved 18 December 2018.
  4. ^ Kim, Sam (2015-04-24). "How Foursquare and Other Apps Guess What You Want to Eat". Eater. Archived from the original on 2017-01-31. Retrieved 2017-01-18.
  5. ^ "About". Foursquare.com. Archived from the original on 2012-11-17. Retrieved 2014-08-25.
  6. ^ Gillmor, Steve (2011). "dodgeball.com officially Google'd". techcrunch.com. Archived from the original on 14 May 2013. Retrieved 16 March 2011.
  7. ^ Kincaid, Jason (March 18, 2009). "SXSW: Foursquare Scores Despite Its Flaws". The Washington Post. ISSN 0190-8286. Archived from the original on November 6, 2017. Retrieved March 16, 2011.
  8. ^ "Foursquare Now Officially At 10 Million Users". TechCrunch. 2011-06-20. Archived from the original on 2017-07-08. Retrieved 2014-08-25.
  9. ^ "41+ Must Know Foursquare Statistics in 2023". 12 November 2020. Archived from the original on 7 October 2022. Retrieved 29 September 2022.
  10. ^ "City Guide Sunset". Foursquare. Retrieved 2024-10-21.