Foursquare
More info
- Creator
- Dennis Crowley, Naveen Selvadurai
- Released
- 2009
- Type
- Location app and location-data company
The app where people once competed to be "mayor" of their local café, and which quietly turned into a location-data supplier.
Dennis Crowley had already built Dodgeball, which Google bought and shut down. Foursquare launched at SXSW in 2009 and was built around check-ins: you announced where you were using your phone's GPS, collected badges and could become mayor of the places you visited most. The game mechanics were brilliant for a couple of years, until Twitter and Facebook added location features of their own.
In 2014 the app was split: check-ins moved to Swarm, and Foursquare became a Yelp competitor. The money came from elsewhere, though – the database of millions of places, sold through an API and SDK to other apps. Since merging with Factual in 2020, that has been the core business.