I love Foursquare. It offers users the opportunity for a social networking service that is based on their location. But now, as other social networks keeps adding up location and check-in features, the big question is what makes Foursquare so special and unique?
You see, at some point along the way users might as themselves why do they actually need a Foursquare account if all its features are available this way or another in other bigger social networks as well. Foursquare knows that if it wants to stay around in the future to come, it has to establish its name as the top location-based service.
If it won’t do so, the service’s 20 million users (there were times where it was an astonishing number) will switch very quickly to another social networking service.
Therefore, as part of the company’s ongoing (and so far successful) efforts to remain relevant, the company announced on another meaningful improvement which establish Foursquare’s name as the spearhead of location-based social networking services.
The company has upgraded its history page and made it essentially a private check-ins search engine of which places the user was on his/hers past. Its kind of like the location version of Search Plus Your World. Only good.
The user can search his check-in history if its by specific date (“I ate yesterday at a great restaurant, but I don’t remember its name”), by a place name (“when I was at Disneyland?”), by a check-in partner (“all I remember is that I was with Brad”) or by category (“hell, just show me all the bars I’ve been at”).
As you probably understood, the new history page can be now used as the personal places log of users that will help them keeping track of potentially anywhere they’ve been (if they checked-in obviously). This is a very powerful and useful feature.
What is also interesting about this improvement is the general idea standing behind it. It demonstrates the company’s high aspirations of not only becoming a top location-social service but also a top location-search service.
But the strategic effort to enter the location-search arena already began at the beginning of the year when Foursquare launched the Explore feature which immediately turn Foursquare to a places search engine in addition to a social service. The upgraded history page is basically just another personal layer of location search.
Foursquare is becoming gradually more and more an all-inclusive location service which holds both social and search features. So far it is working pretty good and I’m sure Ashton is pretty satisfied.
