Foursquare City Guide

Foursquare City Guide
Type of businessPrivate
Type of site
Local search, recommender system
FoundedNew York City, New York, U.S.
Headquarters
New York City
,
United States
Area servedWorldwide
OwnerFoursquare Labs
Founder(s)Dennis Crowley
Naveen Selvadurai
Key people
  • Dennis 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 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 "check in"—a user would 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.

On October 21, 2024, it was announced that the app would sunset on December 15, 2024, with the web version in early 2025.[8] Foursquare Swarm will remain and gain features that were previously only available in the Foursquare app.

  1. ^ Cohen, David (October 2, 2018). "Foursquare Closes $33 Million Funding Round, Aiming to 'Refine' Its Products". Adweek. Archived from the original on December 13, 2018. Retrieved December 14, 2018.
  2. ^ Crook, Jordan (February 13, 2015). "Foursquare Accounts No Longer Required For New Users". Archived from the original on July 7, 2017. Retrieved June 25, 2017.
  3. ^ Crook, Jordan (January 19, 2018). "Foursquare is finally proving its (dollar) value". TechCrunch. Archived from the original on February 24, 2021. Retrieved December 18, 2018.
  4. ^ Kim, Sam (April 24, 2015). "How Foursquare and Other Apps Guess What You Want to Eat". Eater. Archived from the original on January 31, 2017. Retrieved January 18, 2017.
  5. ^ "About". Foursquare.com. Archived from the original on November 17, 2012. Retrieved August 25, 2014.
  6. ^ Gillmor, Steve (2011). "dodgeball.com officially Google'd". techcrunch.com. Archived from the original on May 14, 2013. Retrieved March 16, 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. ^ "City Guide Sunset". Foursquare. Retrieved October 21, 2024.