Remember when Foursquare split, eerm Foursquare? Last year, the company split its popular mobile check-in application to two: Foursquare and Swarm. While the new application, Swarm, was to take over the functionality of the old Foursquare app as far as check-ins go, it left out critical ingredients of the latter: badges and mayorships. The new Swarm app focused on helping users discover where their closest friends were hanging out and not measure interaction and check-ins in any way. That aggrieved some users and the company has listened to feedback: mayorships and badges are coming back to Swarm!
Foursquare will be releasing version 3.0 of Swarm in coming days that will bring back mayorships. Mayorships will work just like they did in the old Foursquare: the person with the most checkin-ins at a singular location in the entire Swarm community becomes the mayor. Badges won’t come back as the badges we knew in the old Foursquare: we’ll have stickers instead. 100 of them. Some of these will be modeled around the familiar design of the old stickers while others will be entirely new. Foursquare will allow users to flaunt these to their friends upon checking in or even include them in the messages they send.
In preparation to the big update to version 3.0, there’s a small update already available via the respective mobile app stores that brings at least 70 of the 100 stickers and a few other improvements.
Is Foursquare doing this a little too late?
