Foursquare released Swarm Friday. This is the first of two apps resulting in the split of the original location-sharing and check-in app.
A few weeks ago, Foursquare said it will take the geolocation-based social features of the Foursquare app and place them into two separate apps. Swarm, the first new app to be released by the New York City startup, is now available for free for iOS and Android devices while a version for Windows is currently in the works.
While the new Foursquare will focus on discovering places, Swarm is all about checking in and keeping up-to-date with what your friends are up to. Checking in feels somewhat similar to what you're used to doing in the original Foursquare app. You can easily tap the familiar pin icon on the location and make a new check-in. However, instead of the old list of possible locations, Swarm will default to the nearest location, which can either be convenient or irritating. For example, if you're in a dense area with multiple locations in a single building, Swarm may possibly come up with an incorrect location.
The check-in feature also allows you to search your past. Swarm now lets you look up a city or a type of place and the app will look through your history of check-ins. It's a pretty cool feature for when you want to remember where you were at a certain date or when you had your last haircut.
The app also touts Neighborhood Sharing, a new feature that allows you to see who among your friends are in the area you're in. You can then make plans for meet-ups with any of these friends using another new feature called, well, plans.
"Swarm plans are different. It's a new riff on planning, focusing on your nearby friends. There's no invite list, and you can leave it as open-ended as you want (our favorite plan during testing was 'beer?' It got 17 replies.)" says Swarm in a blog post.
What about mayorships, badges and the rewards point system? You won't find them in Swarm, but the app does have similar features in place. After seeing that its old approach to mayorships, a Foursquare feature that made the old app a hit with its users, is no longer working, the company has released an updated feature dubbed Mayors 2.0. With the new feature, instead of competing with over 50 million users for a mayorship at one location, Foursquare whittled the competition down to just you and your friends.
"Mayors 2.0 means that places can have many different mayors, one for each circle of friends, instead of just a single mayor at each place," Foursquare explains.
Swarm is chucking the points system, saying it has become "arbitrary and less reflective of real-life achievement" but the badges will be replaced by stickers so you can "quickly express how you feel or what you're doing." You will be given a few handful of stickers at first but will be able to unlock more as you check in at more places.
Until the new Foursquare app is released, we will have to wait before we make a full assessment of the Swarm experience. The company said it is currently revamping the Foursquare app to provide a discovery platform that is "personalized to your tastes" and improved with the "opinions of actual experts."
