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Swarm 3.0 by Foursquare — Turn every day into a game
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As a heavy 4sq / Swarm user (about to hit 7000 check-ins) I'm really happy to see the return of all the gamification elements.
Coins will hopefully bring back a few lapsed users - active users in my friendslist have definitely decreased since the split.
Really hope that city badges will be re-activated as well eventually - any plans on that, @dens? :)
@lehrjulian We've gotten this request a lot. We'll get to them, eventually. But first we need to finish up the collectible 100 stickers. We still have about 2o or so to build. We try to roll out about 5 new ones per month.
Really nice additions! But don´t like the new icon, though. Or maybe it takes some to get used to it...
I don't know why I'm still on swarm, in France I'm forever alone on it with just 2 active friends, I don't know how it is in another countries. But it's dead here
I've been using swarm since the beginning and I have to say, even though I love using it to check in and track where I've been, the design has been getting worse and worse.
I use Swarm because the Foursquare app doesn't allow me to check-in. Otherwise, it hasn't provided any value to me since the split.
@cdevroe Yeah, there hasn't been a fantastic case study of that decision, which was perhaps one of the more 'courageous' in recent product history. This interview is pretty good though: http://hunterwalk.com/2015/03/23...
Hey there. J. here from Swarm! Wanted to chime in with some quick thoughts. Swarm 3.0 is one of our biggest and best updates. We've been working on this for months, and I'd love to shed some insights on our inspiration.
When Swarm first launched in May 2014, it was focused on being a social utility to help people keep up and meet up. And it did a damn good job at that with passive location sharing with little battery drain, smart notifications when friends were nearby, and lightweight messaging tools. But as a result, Swarm shed a lot of its fun and playfulness.
When we unbundled Foursquare and created Swarm, we heard a lot of feedback. And we read every support ticket, tweet and app review. I joined the Swarm team from the Foursquare team in February, and we set out on a mission to "bring back the fun" - in fact, that was our mantra. We've rolled out three big releases since May; (1) revamped sticker game, (2) public mayorships (3) the leaderboard and coins.
The leaderboard is a really important piece of the Swarm story. It's allows you to complete against your friends to see who's having the best week. We're quantifying each and every one of your check-ins. It was inspired by the original leaderboard in Foursquare, but fine-tuned to fit usage today. Instead of a rolling seven days where there were no winners or losers, we set a fixed schedule. Swarm’s new leaderboard starts Monday at 12:01am and closes every Sunday at midnight. More interesting check-ins earn you more coins. And we decided to replace points with coins. Coins just felt much more fun to earn than points. You can see them, hear them, and fling them all over your screen. Maybe you’ll even be able to spend them one day. :) Oh yeah - and finish atop the leaderboard and you’ll earn bonus coins!
We see Swarm 3.0 as the final piece of the foundation. I want to emphasize foundation, because we have soooo many other ideas and features that build off these games. And we're already working on them!
Having been here since 2010, I can honestly say that Swarm is the most fun and rewarding check-in app this company has ever released. If you're a current Swarm user, we hope you dig the changes. If you used to be a Foursquare user, but fell off somewhere along the way - give the new Swarm a shot. On iOS and Android - swarmapp.com
Happy to answer any questions, and would love love love your feedback about the new release. Thanks!
@jcro Hi J, I'm really loving the direction Swarm is going in. It really seems to have found its groove now. A couple of questions:
1. You say that leaderboards reset at midnight every Sunday. How do you deal with different timezones for this? Is that midnight in NYC? What happens when a user changes time zones?
2. Are there any plans to reimagine city badges / cuisine badges within Swarm? I'd love to see levelling city badges/stickers added that give us an indication of how well we know a particular city. (Update: I just saw you answered this below!)
3. Can you please bring back 'swipe to flag duplicates' in the nearby venue list. I really miss that from classic Foursquare.
4. I still think it would make so much sense to display the profile for the current venue within Swarm. This way, after checking in, we can view/create tips and rate the venue we are at without having to jump to and/or download Foursquare to do so. Is this something you have considered?
The "taunt" function is awesome! I love how all the game elements to the checking in are now back and improved.
Gonna state an unpopular opinion here, but that app icon really looks out of place on my homescreen. What was the reasoning behind totally changing the style up?
@tylergalpin It'll probably take me a while to get used to, but also curious to ask what the design rationale was behind the new logo. Really interesting how you guys were able to create some depth while still keeping it flat, it certainly does pop out on my home screen a lot more now!
I don't care if it's called Foursquare, Swarm, or DrippityDoo, I will always use this.
Have been using 4SQ since the day Dens+team launched it over in the UK. I checked in more yesterday than I have done in months. Mostly because I want to hit the top of the leaderboard. Ha! The little things. Nice update.
I burry the Swarm app and still check in via Foursquare because I like to see the tips and pics of the place while checking in. This is becoming harder and harder to do with recent releases tho. My wide and I still battle over mayorships (which is basically just a race to see who checks on first) but other than that the gamification stuff is useless since lots of friends abandoned the app when Swarm branched off.
Foursquare / Swarm went downhill for a couple of years but this update is actually great. Reminds me a lot of Foursquare back when I used to check in 10 times a day. Good work!
It's funny how something like this will get me to use an app more, however silly it is. The competition between friends was always nice to see who has the most outgoing lifestyle.
@alper totally agree. Badges, a silly as they were, were a crazy motivating feature. And competing with friends on the leaderboard - even more so. We have a "taunt" button at the bottom of the leaderboard on your friends with 0 check-ins that week. We'll likely integrate more messaging options into the leaderboard. My favorite feature is after you check-in, if you pass someone, we bring up that little blue bar to tell you which friend you passed. Would be fun to be able to message them a quick "Eat it, sucker!"
@jcro What we always tell people is that points work as long as they are used to quantify real meaningful actions (which going out is). I'll be interested what kind of other interplays between real actions <-> digital pay-offs you can come up with to reinforce this loop.
Oh man. I'm so pumped about this. I used to compete for mayorships all the time!
Really love the little easter egg at the bottom of the sticker list :)
This looks a lot like "Foursquare 2010 meets Candy Crush"
I respect that Foursquare has realized how deeply they've alienated people who were once their most enthusiastic users. I probably talked more than a hundred people into downloading the app six years ago (and wrote and used my own dumbphone client before I got an iPhone) but I don't know this update is going to make me un-churn. A 'glitch' between the two apps deleted two-thirds of my followers on the Foursquare side at the split and despite communicating personally it was never fixed. Checkie is light, fast, and works just fine without sparkling fake money in my face along with the empty promise it might someday be worth something. Sorry.
If I remember correctly, leaderboards in classic Foursquare, had us competing against nearby users in the same geographical area (e.g. our city). In Swarm 3.0, we are competing against all our friends on the service. This is a seemingly small but important change. By competing with our friends regardless of their location, it makes Swarm much more fun for users without many nearby friends on the service. When combined with Mayorships which have us competing with the larger community, we now have two game mechanics that don't require many nearby friends on the service to enjoy.
This was always a huge problem with Swarm when it first launched - it wasn't fun unless you had lots of nearby friends using it - so people left. I'm really pleased to see that Foursquare have now fixed this. Hopefully it'll bring back some of the lost users. I personally think this is now the most engaging check-in experience they have built yet - better even than classic Foursquare.
Many people are saying that Foursquare are simply putting back features that they removed, but in each case they have carefully reworked and rethought each game mechanic so that they are similar but different. Global Mayorships are back but span 30 days rather than 60 which makes for a faster turnover of mayors. Leaderboard offer competition amongst friends and earn user's coins which we'll be able to spend on things in the future. Badges are now stickers that we can actually use for something, rather than being forgotten in a trophy case. Each elements has been reworked, and is better than it was in classic Foursquare. Furthermore, Swarm has added private messaging which Foursquare never had.
The best thing about Swarm is that it has enabled Foursquare to completely rethink and redesign the gamification of the check-in from the ground up. It gave them a blank slate to work from. It was unfortunate this meant alienating some users along the way, but I thing the split is beginning to pay off them in the way they hoped. Swarm is really coming together with this release, and Foursquare has already turned things around for them.
I like the new design but still would have preferred to see information about the places I'm checking into without having to open a separate app.
@itibz Agree! Gowalla was a stunner of an app. I was bummed that it lost out to 4sq back in the day, but it just never got the userbase that 4sq did.
@jameskoole I was using both back in 2011, before they got acquired... They always had so much inspiration/creativity on graphic design & illustrations! So glad that this is in Foursquare now!
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