Foursquare, for the past several months, has been working to expand its service in more and more cities around the country, but they were simply unable to expand fast enough to meet demand and have, therefore, decided to offer their services worldwide. In addition to going global, Foursquare has been working on some other pretty fantastic upgrades to their services which we will detail below.

Probably the greatest change is that Foursquare has made there services available to more users, not simply by going global, but also by rewriting software to make it compatible with more operating systems. The iPhone and Droid have had exclusivity in the past, but users of the Palm Pre and Blackberry can now also take advantage of Foursquare’s many services. Foursquare has, in addition, revamped both their iPhone application as well as their webpage and both seem to load and run much more smoothly than previous versions.

With the move away from cities and onto the global stage, Foursquare had to make some changes to its badging capabilities, and has done so by way of expanding them. Badges are, of course, items that users can collect, which are received upon completion of a certain task, or after visiting a certain location. One example is the “Gym Rat” badge which a user can win after tracking so many visits to a gym. These items are quite popular with Foursquare users so it is no surprise then that Foursquare would include them in the list of services they chose to upgrade.

Foursquare also has overcome the issue of users collecting multiple badges for completing the same task. In the past, a user who visited multiple gyms would receive multiple “Newbie” badges. As Foursquare has gone global, the tracking of these activities will no longer be linked to specific cities, thus ending the issue of multiple badges. Users will still find they have to visit a certain city to get some specific badges.

As users obtain badges they rack up points. This lends itself nicely to the gaming atmosphere which surrounds this application. As part of their upgrades, Foursquare has point leader boards which will list who is in the lead (point wise) for certain activities. These leader boards will be based on distance to a certain location, i.e. within 20 mile radius of Chicago.

Finally, users who wish to add a new venue will be able to do so without the use of an address. Users will now be able to tag the location of their event using GPS coordinates. There is some concern that this change will allow for a frenzy of false or incorrect venues, but it is a necessary change given the move to a global service platform. Another issue of concern is the use of GPS tagging indoors, which does not seem to work all that well. That being said, technology is growing and adapting at such a pace that Foursquare believes its services will be able to use alternate methods (wifi triangulation) to overcome this issue.

Post By Lewis Van Tassel
Lewis is an Education Manager for
Omnistar Email Marketing Software