New Swarm Update Works Great Without Friends
Swarm 5.0 by Foursquare, released yesterday for iOS and coming to Android soon , has a cleaner look and better venue categorization. Most importantly, it downplays most of the social elements of the social registration app and leverages its individual benefits. This is great news because Swarm can be more useful when used alone.
An early promise from Foursquare (and its predecessor, Dodgeball) was to help people meet their friends by selectively sharing their location. This would give people a kind of social radar that would allow them to meet on an ad hoc basis. Unlike Google Maps or Apple’s Find Friends, Swarm allows the user to be in control of each registration, making it less exhibitionistic but also less hassle-free.
The idea seemed tempting enough to Facebook to allow location registrations in 2010. But even Facebook failed to convince people to report them every time they showed up at a bar or restaurant. Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat have adopted location tags as well, but while it provides excellent post-facto content aggregation, most people don’t use them often enough to enable intuitive pop-ups.
The social elements of Swarm (for example, becoming the “mayor” of your favorite place or collecting points for weekly competitions) are not so useful if your friends are not as die-hard as they are. As a longtime die-hard (and familiar with the founders of Foursquare), I’ve seen fewer and fewer first-time main users sign up, while new friends never join. The app’s social bar has morphed into a ghost town inhabited by the people I knew best in 2014.
But that didn’t stop me from registering (this now often requires just swiping and tapping on the lock screen). I’m not here for glasses or even casual get-togethers; I am here to keep a diary of where I have been and end up consulting with him several times a week.
Foursquare is quite open about Swarm 5’s move towards solo features. “For years, Swarm has focused on helping users connect with friends in the real world,” a Foursquare spokesperson told me.
The common theme, however, was that all users believed that Swarm’s greatest value was that it creates a comprehensive journal of life wherever they have been, from the everyday to the extraordinary, that they can share and return. This was the goal of Swarm 5.0.
The company still benefits as long as you provide it with data, which it then sells to advertisers . According to Wired , “targeting ads and other services allows a company to make money from a relatively small user base.” As usual, the service is free because you are a product. Or, in another sense, you are free labor, and the database you create is a product. Not a bad compromise.
Swarm’s main display used to show where your friends checked in. This display now bills the same as single view, showing a timeline and map of your past checks. You can share this map, but more importantly, you can analyze it the next time you try to remember what you did on Friday night, or when you return to your old neighborhood and wonder what to eat.
Your Swarm checks also help Foursquare customize your recommendations, giving it an edge over Yelp, but you can already customize your recommendations by answering some questions about your tastes. Checking in also helps your friends see your recommendations, but again, it doesn’t matter if your friends aren’t participating in them.
This entry of where you’ve been is still a killer app. If you are tired and want to travel to a familiar place, simply open Foursquare and click on the “Have you been” filter. Check back on your past visits to Foursquare from time to time, and you’ll have a list of places you “like”. Now it will be easy to choose a place to meet or recommend to a friend as a guest. All of this requires minimal effort and doesn’t require careful listing, writing tips, or talking to all of your friends.
And maybe you shouldn’t hang out with your friends, even if you can. Aside from FOMOs, pointless likes, and annoying news about scoring points, what do you get from their random checks?