Say goodbye to Foursquare check-ins as Swarm takes over

Foursquare is not dead but reinventing itself as recommendation service
Say goodbye to Foursquare check-ins as Swarm takes over

If you had been wondering why you can't check in as usual on Foursquare anymore, well, you're not the only one. See, Foursquare had previously announced that it was splitting into two. It would run local searches and recommendations while spin-off app Swarm would be all about the check-ins.

Question is: was this a good idea in the first place?

When one app doesn't work, split it up?

Say goodbye to Foursquare check-ins as Swarm takes over

It seems Foursquare is taking a bit of a break to emerge from a development cocoon - in the coming weeks, a new version that Foursquare says is "all about you" is coming and it will be about local searches and tailored to individual users' preferences.

Foursquare says no two people will get the same recommendations or results and this change is seen as Foursquare's attempt to beat out rival services like Yelp.  While it's all well-and-fine for Foursquare to admit maybe the check-in thing is dated (and at times annoying), is keeping Swarm around beneficial at all?

Still, Foursquare claims that 75 per cent of its loyal check-in flock have moved over to Swarm and if you have both apps installed, they will work in tandem with each other. If you don't have Swarm, Foursquare will still allow you to rate or review places.

Another thing that slightly complicates matters is that the apps will have different friend lists. Good if you have tons of Foursquare requests (like the one from your boss) that you've turned down out of privacy concerns but bad for people who don't need added complexity in their lives.

But have the people who got bored with Foursquare going to come back, when the whole recommendations thing has been done on plenty of other locastion-aware apps?

In the meantime, Heinken paired up with Twitter to give you recommendations if you're not down with Foursquare.

[Source: Time]