14 DAY TRIAL // It looks like Airbnb isn’t the only company redesigning its logo these days. Foursquare, the social media check-in app has just unveiled a new logo and introduced a bunch of new features.
In a struggle to remain relevant as it competes with the likes of Facebook as a solution to checking into various places, Foursquare announced a series of major changes.
Aside from the new logo, Foursquare has decided to put a lot more emphasis on its new Swarm app and on personalized search.
“Everyone explores the world differently – guided by their own unique tastes, their friends, and the people they trust. Local search has never been good at this. It doesn’t get you, and, as a result, everyone gets the same one-size-fits-all results. Why should two very different people get the same recommendations when they visit Paris? Or the same list of places when they’re looking for a bar? We’re about to change that,” Foursquare wonders (and making quite a bit of sense).
“In a couple weeks, we’re rolling out a brand new version of Foursquare that’s all about you. Tell us what you like, and we’ll be on the lookout for great places that match your tastes, wherever you are,” the company continued.”
The first change towards this goal is to move all check-ins to Swarm, the company’s new app that will from now on handle all checkins, friends, photos and all other personal data.
But the core of the change and the one powering the entire logo change is the fact that Foursquare is trying to take on the world’s big search engines, including Google by providing this “personalized local search” feature.
According to a statement from the company, this was actually the main idea behind Foursquare from the beginning. Thanks to the 50 million users of the app, it has been possible to build an extensive database that brims with information about locations from all over the world. While Foursquare will offer recommendations on nearby places based on people’s explicit choices, Google Maps, which offers something similar, doesn’t exactly personalize any of the results. Basically, if two people some half mile apart will look for nearby restaurants on Google Maps, they’ll both get the same results, even if they don’t like Italian food, for instance. The new Foursquare should be a better alternative for this sort of searches and the tool will certainly be more useful when pressed by time.
The feature is going to be rolled out sometime in the near future, Foursquare said.