Swarm 3.0
As I often state, I love adventures. I have so many, it is hard to keep track of them. About 5 years ago I hooked up with a great app called Foursquare. It was an app where you “checked in” to various places to let people know where you were and what you were doing. This app also had a “game” aspect to it where you earned points, badges, and became mayor of places when if you checked in enough over a 30 day period. At one point, I was the mayor of over 60 places. The growth of this app was amazing. The first month I joined, there were barely 100 people using the app. Within a year, you had to check in a lot to break the top 100 on the leaderboard. Every month they were releasing new badges for restaurants, cities, even sponsored badges. As people were checking in, they left tips at venues for other people to read. These tips were generally recommendations or warnings for future visitors.
In June 2014, Foursquare broke off its check in feature into Swarm. Foursquare then became a recommendation engine based off of reviews and tips. Unfortunately, the Swarm launch was a bit of a fumble in my opinion. All the fun things with Foursquare checkins were gone. There were no points, badges, and mayorships were watered down. I quickly lost interested and abandoned both apps all together. Judging by the reaction of others, many others left also. One year later, it does appear that Foursquare/Swarm has found the error of their ways. While not fully admitting the grievous mistake, all of the fun things of the Old Foursquare are now back with the New Swarm.
I love it. It’s much like the old days where there weren’t many users. I am sweeping up a lot of mayorships right now that I expect to be losing in a few months. I am hoping they put a little marketing into showing off the new and improved Swarm and the app will be flooded with users again.
I am doing my part by making some Swarm videos for them. In this first video, I talk about the app being back and its brief history. In future videos I plan on laying out my own personal guidelines for checking in. I’m going to call it “Colt’s Checkintiquette.” Get it? Fun fact about this video, I had to film it several times. I kept getting old Foursquare and new Swarm terminology mixed up. With that said, I still said badges instead of stickers once in this video. Enjoy!
