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Swarm 3.0 by Foursquare — Turn every day into a game
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Francois Mathieu
Foursquare / Swarm went downhill for a couple of years but this update is actually great. Reminds me a lot of Foursquare back when I used to check in 10 times a day. Good work!
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I've been using swarm since the beginning and I have to say, even though I love using it to check in and track where I've been, the design has been getting worse and worse.
I like the new design but still would have preferred to see information about the places I'm checking into without having to open a separate app.
Oh man. I'm so pumped about this. I used to compete for mayorships all the time!
Really love the little easter egg at the bottom of the sticker list :)
I don't care if it's called Foursquare, Swarm, or DrippityDoo, I will always use this.
I use Swarm because the Foursquare app doesn't allow me to check-in. Otherwise, it hasn't provided any value to me since the split.
@cdevroe Yeah, there hasn't been a fantastic case study of that decision, which was perhaps one of the more 'courageous' in recent product history. This interview is pretty good though: http://hunterwalk.com/2015/03/23...
It's funny how something like this will get me to use an app more, however silly it is. The competition between friends was always nice to see who has the most outgoing lifestyle.
@alper totally agree. Badges, a silly as they were, were a crazy motivating feature. And competing with friends on the leaderboard - even more so. We have a "taunt" button at the bottom of the leaderboard on your friends with 0 check-ins that week. We'll likely integrate more messaging options into the leaderboard. My favorite feature is after you check-in, if you pass someone, we bring up that little blue bar to tell you which friend you passed. Would be fun to be able to message them a quick "Eat it, sucker!"
@jcro What we always tell people is that points work as long as they are used to quantify real meaningful actions (which going out is). I'll be interested what kind of other interplays between real actions <-> digital pay-offs you can come up with to reinforce this loop.
Really nice additions! But don´t like the new icon, though. Or maybe it takes some to get used to it...
The new swarm app comes with a leaderboard where you get coins for checking in. The leaderboard only shows people from your network. Looks like lots of other social goodies in this update too.
As a heavy 4sq / Swarm user (about to hit 7000 check-ins) I'm really happy to see the return of all the gamification elements.
Coins will hopefully bring back a few lapsed users - active users in my friendslist have definitely decreased since the split.
Really hope that city badges will be re-activated as well eventually - any plans on that, @dens? :)
@lehrjulian We've gotten this request a lot. We'll get to them, eventually. But first we need to finish up the collectible 100 stickers. We still have about 2o or so to build. We try to roll out about 5 new ones per month.
@itibz Agree! Gowalla was a stunner of an app. I was bummed that it lost out to 4sq back in the day, but it just never got the userbase that 4sq did.
@jameskoole I was using both back in 2011, before they got acquired... They always had so much inspiration/creativity on graphic design & illustrations! So glad that this is in Foursquare now!
Have been using 4SQ since the day Dens+team launched it over in the UK. I checked in more yesterday than I have done in months. Mostly because I want to hit the top of the leaderboard. Ha! The little things. Nice update.
Gonna state an unpopular opinion here, but that app icon really looks out of place on my homescreen. What was the reasoning behind totally changing the style up?
@tylergalpin It'll probably take me a while to get used to, but also curious to ask what the design rationale was behind the new logo. Really interesting how you guys were able to create some depth while still keeping it flat, it certainly does pop out on my home screen a lot more now!
If I remember correctly, leaderboards in classic Foursquare, had us competing against nearby users in the same geographical area (e.g. our city). In Swarm 3.0, we are competing against all our friends on the service. This is a seemingly small but important change. By competing with our friends regardless of their location, it makes Swarm much more fun for users without many nearby friends on the service. When combined with Mayorships which have us competing with the larger community, we now have two game mechanics that don't require many nearby friends on the service to enjoy.
This was always a huge problem with Swarm when it first launched - it wasn't fun unless you had lots of nearby friends using it - so people left. I'm really pleased to see that Foursquare have now fixed this. Hopefully it'll bring back some of the lost users. I personally think this is now the most engaging check-in experience they have built yet - better even than classic Foursquare.
Many people are saying that Foursquare are simply putting back features that they removed, but in each case they have carefully reworked and rethought each game mechanic so that they are similar but different. Global Mayorships are back but span 30 days rather than 60 which makes for a faster turnover of mayors. Leaderboard offer competition amongst friends and earn user's coins which we'll be able to spend on things in the future. Badges are now stickers that we can actually use for something, rather than being forgotten in a trophy case. Each elements has been reworked, and is better than it was in classic Foursquare. Furthermore, Swarm has added private messaging which Foursquare never had.
The best thing about Swarm is that it has enabled Foursquare to completely rethink and redesign the gamification of the check-in from the ground up. It gave them a blank slate to work from. It was unfortunate this meant alienating some users along the way, but I thing the split is beginning to pay off them in the way they hoped. Swarm is really coming together with this release, and Foursquare has already turned things around for them.
The "taunt" function is awesome! I love how all the game elements to the checking in are now back and improved.
I burry the Swarm app and still check in via Foursquare because I like to see the tips and pics of the place while checking in. This is becoming harder and harder to do with recent releases tho. My wide and I still battle over mayorships (which is basically just a race to see who checks on first) but other than that the gamification stuff is useless since lots of friends abandoned the app when Swarm branched off.
I don't know why I'm still on swarm, in France I'm forever alone on it with just 2 active friends, I don't know how it is in another countries. But it's dead here
@billey_b You're not alone! I am there, too! Can't stop it, but clearly seeing the app fall into decay, as 2 check-ins gets me the mayorships of pretty much every place I visit...
This looks a lot like "Foursquare 2010 meets Candy Crush"
I respect that Foursquare has realized how deeply they've alienated people who were once their most enthusiastic users. I probably talked more than a hundred people into downloading the app six years ago (and wrote and used my own dumbphone client before I got an iPhone) but I don't know this update is going to make me un-churn. A 'glitch' between the two apps deleted two-thirds of my followers on the Foursquare side at the split and despite communicating personally it was never fixed. Checkie is light, fast, and works just fine without sparkling fake money in my face along with the empty promise it might someday be worth something. Sorry.