Foursquare was fun, while it lasted. I checked in at interesting places I visited and shared those with some of my social media friends. I enjoyed seeing where they checked in too. It was great to not use Facebook for that, as I never want to overwhelm any social media channel with too much stuff about me.
Then Foursquare switched things up. Now it’s just a platform for advertising. (Google Maps already allows me to look for businesses quite well, thank you.) Foursquare forced anyone who wanted to keep checking in to download a new app called Swarm. Not me.
This is a perfect example of bad friction. Good friction is when something is a challenge and you dive in. Bad friction is when something happens that breaks the camel’s back.
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I keep getting invitations to LinkedIn. I delete them because I have no need to network at this stage of my life. I may have once created a profile, but don’t remember.
Same situation with Shazam. Once a great app, now clogged with junk.
Thanks for your comments, Tim & Bill.
I just wrote Sam, a product person at Foursquare. I summarized my experience this way: “It simply boils down to the fact that Foursquare, as I used it, became Swarm, and that was too much of a switch for me. I never used Foursquare for the ‘find a business’ aspect but only for the ‘where my friends are’ part. When you split those, you lost me.”