Foursquare to close, but Swarm game will live on

And the company is doing the right thing with its database

Foursquare Labs is closing its venue-finding app, rather than the mobile game – but it's open sourcing the worldwide database it built.

Foursquare Labs, the company behind both the Foursquare City Guide and social-media location-based game Swarm, is shutting down one of its apps… but things are not going the way that we expected. We thought that, having served its purpose long ago, at some point the Swarm game would be turned off, but we were wrong.

Instead, the company has announced that in mid-December, it will sunset the City Guide. However, although the Foursquare app is going away, the company is opening its Places database to the world. Django co-creator Simon Willison has already investigated the database and has some info on how it's hosted and how to access it.

Foursquare was founded in 2009 and The Register was already reporting on an outage the following year.

The original Foursquare app rewarded users for populating its database by creating places, leaving descriptions and reviews and tips, by successfully gamifying the process, The Foursquare mobile app was both a way to find venues near you, and leave comments, but users could also score points by "checking in". (Notably, it only shared your location with people already on your in-app friends list.) Other mechanisms kept users returning: for instance, if you checked in more than any other player, you could become "mayor" of that venue, retaining a competitive element.

We say "successfully" because this vulture has been an avid player since the early days. It's the only mobile phone game we play, having bounced hard off Niantic's Ingress – and having zero interest in Pokémon, thanks. Other companies have also tried, mostly without conspicuous success.

In its early days, Foursquare shared anonymized data on patrons with businesses, and a few businesses repaid the patrons with rewards for checking in. Thanks to this, the Reg FOSS desk got into the Prague beer festival for free a couple of times, and also got a free coffee at London's Clapham Junction train station. We gather that Stateside users did rather better, and that "mayors" received discounts and so on.

Foursquare was co-founder Dennis Crowley's second startup in this space, after Dodgeball, which was bought by Google – followed by Crowley's departure. Mountain View attempted to merge Dodgeball's gamification into Latitude – with such success that it shut Latitude down the next year.

Having built a database of many millions of places around the world, in 2014 Foursquare split its offering into two: Foursquare itself refocused as a more serious tool to look up places in your area, optionally by a very-low-power background location-finding function. The gamification element was turned into a standalone game, Swarm, which let you check in, vie for mayorships, and almost incidentally, find out if your mates were at a nearby pub.

Foursquare CTO Vikram Gundeti last month shared a blog post about the company's new Places engine, which involves Crowdsourcing redefined with human-AI agent collaboration. Apparently, using "AI" may help it merge the Foursquare Places database with the machine-generated database it acquired in its 2020 merger with Factual.

Gundeti says this makes the combined company "able to address the limitations of the early integration approach," which it talked about in 2023. Surely this undertaking can't have gone so badly wrong that the company needs to bring in "AI" bots to fix it?

But, as the company says, "absent a global proprietary distribution platform like Google Maps, building a comprehensive and accurate base layer of place data is indeed a problem best solved by an open source community." For those interested, the latest version of the Foursquare Places database is here. ®