Foursquare was a really popular app back then which was focused on letting people check in on locations, earn points and become the mayor of a specific place if you check in the most times. They later on decided to spit the Foursquare into two apps: Foursquare, which deals with finding points of interests available in your location and Swarm, which has the classic check ins and battle for mayorships.
However, there has been a change in the social networking world where companies have started embracing bots to automate certain aspects of the experience. Telegram Messenger has a bot platform, same case with Messenger which was announced last month, Skype too is developing one and Microsoft has been experimenting with Twitter bots. Now Foursquare has decided to tip its toes into the bot world with a new app.
The new app, Marsbot is a different type of chat-bot as explained by the company in a blogpost. Foursquare’s goal was to create a “product” that would recommend to you where to drink or eat proactively. Sounds like the Foursquare app but in bot form, does it? Well they continued to describe what the app will do for you and its unique features:
It’s a completely different mode of interaction. With a chatbot, you ask specific questions and give specific prompts for what you need. Our goal with Marsbot is to give you the answers before you even ask-just based on where you are and where you usually go.
This will make it easier for you to know the various POIs around you without actually manually querying for them. Since bots are geared to make our experience easier, this is a prompt move by the company. Unfortunately, the app is currently limited to iOS users and it is a “work in progress” so expect more changes and roll out to more users in the future.
