
Swarm: Foursquare's ambitious plan to split its app in two - jeremylevy
http://www.theverge.com/2014/5/1/5666062/foursquare-swarm-new-app
======
jedberg
This feels bad to me, but I'll reserve judgement until it happens.

I use 4sq for two things -- keeping track of where I've been when I travel,
and letting people know where I am when I travel in case we're near each
other.

From this description, it sounds like I'll need two apps for that now. In
which case I might as well just use a Facebook checkin and not use 4sq at all,
since Facebook serves both purposes.

~~~
modal
Those are actually the two use cases supported, and enhanced, by Swarm, since
they both revolve around checking in. There's a new, more concise view for
seeing proximate friends and a more powerful profile page for browsing your
past check-ins.

~~~
Touche
The problem is that unless you live in a major metropolitan area no one you
know in real life uses Foursquare. So it's really only useful to track your
own check-ins and find places to go. I was always ok with ignoring the social
aspect of Foursquare (Oh, hey, a guy I used to work with 7 years ago is
checking in to some place, great to know).

But now the thing I use Foursquare for, checking in and finding places nearby
are in 2 apps. Before it was ok if each part was good not great because having
them both together was a win. But by splitting them the places nearby app is
now directly competing against Yelp and Urbanspoon and others.

I'm not installing 2 apps for this, so the check-in part will likely not be
done by me anymore. I might still use Foursquare proper, but only if it is
better than other similar apps.

~~~
nmcfarl
Interestingly - I'll probably go the opposite way, installing Swarm for
checkins, uninstalling Foursquare and just using Yelp. Yelp is horrific for
discovery , but it's still orders of magnitudes better than foursquare for my
uses.

~~~
subpixel
By way of comparison: I live 2hrs from the closest big city. Yelp is the only
game in town for discovery, and its data is 95% complete in the food & drink
category.

~~~
rhizome
So was CitySearch 10-15 years ago. Yelp has been stale and their recent "zoom-
and-hide" changes to their map-search has made Yelp fairly useless for
discovery to me. Yelp has long needed to hire new UI & UX leadership, like
years overdue.

------
gmisra
This seems risky, but interesting. If the core foursquare app becomes focused
on location discovery and exploration, they instantly become the most viable
mobile competitor to Yelp, which is something I (and I think many people)
would be interested in.

They're recognizing that the location browsing/discovery UX is fundamentally
different than their social UX, and de-coupling them, while presumably using
the same infrastructure under the hood. Hopefully, this will allow UI/UX
development that diverges and serves each user group better.

I want a better, more usable location database on my phone, I would use it all
the time. Yelp is unfortunately the default, I think because through crowd-
sourcing data validation, they just have the most accurate listing of
addresses, phone numbers, business hours, etc. But after that, Yelp is social
features I don't care for, review writing that make me sad about humanity, and
very likely bully-esque business practices (but I do like the pictures).
Foursquare has the second best location DB that I've used, but historically
the app has been more aggressive about pushing it's social features, which I
do not want. So, I am curious and cautiously optimistic.

From the comments, it seems like what may be missing is the ability to check-
in via the core foursquare app. This would be a problem if the life-tracking-
but-not-social subset of users is as high as the comments suggest, but also
may not be a problem if the "I was here" feature still exists in the core app
and just has been messaged incorrectly.

------
mikehearn
So in a nutshell, they are:

\-- Removing the check-in feature from the Foursquare app and putting into a
separate app called Swarm.

\-- Making Foursquare 100% about exploring and recommendations, a la Yelp.

This seems like a bizarre move. Unless I'm mistaken, all of their data comes
FROM check-ins. People write tips, answer questions ("Is this place good for
kids?") and generally contribute their info to the web of data that Foursquare
uses to intelligently recommend venues. Couple that with the network effect of
having access to friends' check-ins, which to me is probably the strongest
signal of a particular venue's quality.

So all that being said, it seems like receiving a high volume of check-ins is
critical to Foursquare's recommendation success. They don't have the broad
review base of Yelp or an editorial team, so check-ins are all they have. By
splitting this functionality into a separate app (outside of the Foursquare
app itself), they are explicitly going to lower check-in volume, because SOME
percentage of people simply won't download "Swarm". And then if they lose some
of their user base, it decreases the utility for all Foursquare users as (a)
the recommendation data won't be as solid, and (b) users will lose valuable
friend check-in data.

Maybe I'm overplaying the slippery-slope angle, but when your business largely
relies on a particular user action (check-ins, in this case), it seems unwise
to split that functionality outside of your core product in a move that will
unquestionably make taking that action more difficult.

~~~
jwarren
Worth reading their interview today on The Verge[1]. Seems like automatic
tracking is providing far more valuable data than check-ins.

[1]: [http://www.theverge.com/2014/5/1/5666062/foursquare-swarm-
ne...](http://www.theverge.com/2014/5/1/5666062/foursquare-swarm-new-app)

~~~
kunstmord
By no means am I going to say that what I write is true for the majority of
4sq users, but I and most of my friends use it to mostly keep track of visits
abroad and occasionally search for a restaurant/bar/new place to check out. So
splitting these features into two apps is not something I'd enjoy too much.

------
nrao123
From the verge article - outlining the data behind the decision:
[http://mobile.theverge.com/2014/5/1/5666062/foursquare-
swarm...](http://mobile.theverge.com/2014/5/1/5666062/foursquare-swarm-new-
app)

We looked at the session analysis and saw that only 1 in 20 sessions had both
social and discovery," says Noah Weiss, Foursquare’s vice president of product
engineering. In other words, just 5 percent of Foursquare’s users were opening
it to find friends and find a restaurant. "Why not actually just split those
apart, because 19 out of 20 times, tapping on one icon or the other, you have
satisfied your need completely," says Weiss.

"And as mobile usage has broadened and evolved you get individual experiences
instead. You open an app to do a specific task and not as a gateway to a large
complicated experience."

Having the check-in button as the main interface every time users opened the
app created a noticeable hurdle for engagement. "Imagine if you opened up
YouTube and the first thing it asked you to do was create a video. That would
scare off a lot of people," says Bijan Sabet, one of Foursquare’s early
investors and a current board member. "Just like you don’t need to tweet to
enjoy Twitter, splitting the app in two will help make it clear to a big
audience that you don’t need to check in to find value in Foursquare."

≠=================

BTW a lot of the reasoning of the unbundling of features in the mobile app
world is very nicely outlined in bill gurley' 's post:
[http://abovethecrowd.com/2013/07/17/transitioning-to-a-
mobil...](http://abovethecrowd.com/2013/07/17/transitioning-to-a-mobile-
centric-world/)

------
danso
Ha, just this morning, via the HN discussion on "Putting the Chat into
Snapchat", I learned of jwz's axiom, which was modified for the sake of
discussion: " _Every program attempts to expand until it implements user-to-
user messaging. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones
that can._ "
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7679031](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7679031))

Looks like Foursquare was thinking along the same lines:

> _We built Swarm because you’ve told us how often you still have to text your
> friends: “where are you?” and “what you up to later?” We wanted to build a
> quick way for you to know these two things for all of your friends._

------
hendzen
Another year, another Foursquare pivot.

~~~
AznHisoka
Not sure why this is downvoted. Those 5 words sum up FourSquare in its entire
6+ years of existence. Let's face it: they don't know what they're doing.

~~~
TheBiv
I am sure they know what they're doing, but what they're doing probably
doesn't make enough money!

------
toddmorey
OK, so I think I understand Facebook un-bundling into separate apps. But this
feels like an extremely focused app slicing even thinner. (We've moved from
selling albums to selling singles to selling guitar solos.) I'm just not sure
there's enough utility here to replace Swarm's primary competition: group
messaging.

~~~
nate
I'm still trying to get my head around Facebook unbundling. Why is Messaging a
separate app? Why is Paper separate and not just improvements to the main
Facebook app?

~~~
andrewfong
Prior to the unbundling, responding to a Facebook Message requires the
overhead of loading up the news feed and at least one extra tap to see
messages.

I suspect this also has to do with internal development mechanics as well.
Unbundling lets the Messenger team push app updates out more quickly, without
having to worry if their changes broke the main Facebook mobile app.

Not sure what's up with Paper, but I'd guess it's about letting the Paper team
experiment with new UX ideas without fear of upsetting the majority of users
still using the current app.

------
droob
I'm probably not the most common user, but this completely breaks Foursquare
for me. I use 4sq to keep a list of restaurants I want to check out, keep a
diary of where I've been, and look for nearby places.

Back to synced plaintext files, maybe?

~~~
harryh
Foursquare & Swarm will work seamlessly with each other. I think you'll find
that by giving things a bit more room to breath we're able to make all of
these actions easier & better for you.

------
dang
We changed the url from [1] because although that's a more original source,
the Verge article seems a lot more substantive. We then buried [2] as a
duplicate.

Those of you arguing for a thread-merging feature on HN will find this a juicy
example for your cause. (Edit: which I'm also slowly becoming convinced of.)

1\. [http://blog.foursquare.com/post/84422758243/a-look-into-
the-...](http://blog.foursquare.com/post/84422758243/a-look-into-the-future-
of-foursquare-including-a-new)

2\.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7679771](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7679771)

------
malbiniak
I'm having a hard time understanding this, but comments here and other places
make it very apparent that most users use Foursquare in different ways. That
makes growth and innovation quite the challenge.

What doesn't make sense to me: at the core, users that (still) use Foursquare
use it to check in. From there we vary, but we check in. More importantly,
that's the perception around the app. Changing perceptions with an existing
brand is difficult. Why move the existing user base to a new app built around
checkins (Swarm) and try to rebrand the checkin app (Foursquare) to attract
new users and compete with Yelp?

Confused? Me too.

------
viggity
Did they honestly not what happened when Netflix tried to spin off
"Qwickster"? It was a debacle.

------
mccloy
The logic of this split to makes sense to me - as long as people associate
foursquare with checkins rather than discovery, it'll be hard for them to go
head to head with Yelp.

But it's odd that they'd create a new app around checkins and continue trying
to associate the foursquare brand with discovery. Wouldn't it be easier to
keep foursquare as "the checkin app" (how people already see it) and create a
new brand identity for "the discovery app"?

~~~
jetru
You make valid points. The branding is hard fo 4sq. I think 4sq discovery is
the best out there. But they're having trouble selling it. However, their
approach is totally broken. 4sq is good because everything is in one place,
and now they're trying this gambit to get more attention. Let's see if it
works...

------
untog
I'm always suspicious of moves like this because it makes me suspect that
they're going to kill off one side.

That said, Swarm looks really smart - in fact, it's something I'm amazed
FourSquare haven't done before now. I want to be able to post a status saying
"Lunch?" tagged with my location and let my friends who are nearby with no
lunch plans reply.

~~~
govindkabra31
Quite the opposite actually.. we wanted to do many things for the two use
cases, but were holding back, trying not cram features in a bundled app. Now
with two apps, we can go full steam ahead with all the ideas for each of the
two use cases.

~~~
alttab
"Full steam ahead" in two different directions, that maybe... MAYBE compliment
each other.

To me it seems you've just split your focus. And for a start-up that has
pivoted a million times and was "featured-out" by Twitter and Facebook, I'm
saying you guys have it cut out for you.

Are you a messaging service? Are you a check in yelp thing? Two different
problem domains, which will make swapping resources in between apps
difficult.. communication between development teams across both products will
begin to break down and tenets/design philosophy/code quality will begin to
diverge. There will be a "better app" and a "crappy app," which will do
wonders to swiftly destroy the culture on the team that is getting less love.

Good luck to you.

------
natural_capital
Somehow the idea of calling an application that tracks and monitors your
friends 'Swarm', seems like a poor choice.

------
ropiku
The Verge has an in-depth article about Swarm including photos and a video:
[http://www.theverge.com/2014/5/1/5666062/foursquare-swarm-
ne...](http://www.theverge.com/2014/5/1/5666062/foursquare-swarm-new-app)

------
samstave
Question (I have never used any app or service that allowed for checkins):

Is there any app that allows one to place a digital file onto a map's
geocoords - whereby you can ONLY access that file if you actually go to that
geocoord and then can open/see the file?

------
leorocky
I've never actually found much value in foursquare even when I tried to use
it. Nobody else I know uses foursquare, so it just seemed like something that
took effort and did not add much value.

------
bhartzer
Getting webmasters to migrate is going to be tough.

------
funkyy
Lately there is so many companies and startups with "Square" in name. Again I
misread article and I thought Squarespace is up to something, then it turned
its Square. No, wait, its actually Foursquare...

Is it only me getting confused with them? (I dont live in US so I dont have
access to most of those services thus I am not really used to their names but
so many "Squares" lately).

~~~
namenotrequired
Foursquare is about 6 years old, so it's hardly 'lately' \- perhaps that's why
you're being downvoted. (I didn't downvote you, someone seems to have done so
without replying.)

