The good all days when Dennis Crowley (@dens) launched #foursquare at #sxsw. That is exactly 10 years ago, to a day. I was an early bird fanboy, collecting mayorships and extreme badges like there was no tomorrow. Foursquare was this great app that gamified city discovery, and allowed to meet/great the other “explorers”. Because that was how we felt. The sweet days when you had a reserved parking spot, just because you were the coolest Foursquare kid of the place.
And then, Dennis seemed to be busier with his eternal young-looking entrepreneur in hoodie looks than in taking Foursquare to the next level. Other location based services bypassed Foursquare like there was no tomorrow. When Crowley finally split up the app in Foursquare and Swarm, killing overnight the badges and geo-located memories of countless explores, most of the users –me included- packed up, and went.
Neither the new Foursquare nor Swarm apps succeeded in standing out in a landscape where geolocation still is undervalued, underexplored and underused.
The old dinosaur of geolocation launched a new feature today called Hypertrending. By shaking your phone while in the Foursquare app you see where the phones are all over SXSW.
Crowley stated: “This is pretty “heavy” launch for us – besides being a huge technical achievement on our part, Hypertrending also walks a fine line btw “creepy” & “cool“. (read more here)
Dots on a map, reflecting the number of devices at a given place at a given time. I don’t know Dennis… I really don’t.
