Foursquare is one of the most popular applications in the world when it comes to helping you discover new and interesting locations in any town or keeping/meeting up with your friends. Millions of people are using it each and every day but only to do one of those 2 things and not both. This is why Foursquare has recently split its services into two different apps, the old Foursquare that still keeps the original feature of discovering new places in a town and Swarm, a new application, available for both iOS and Android that is specifically designed to help you meet up with your friends and track their whereabouts with ease.
While most of us are a little confused when it comes to the way Foursquare has split its services, what is clear is that we need to keep our Foursquare application installed if we want to find new and interesting places in the town we are currently in. The Swarm application was created to help people that used Foursquare only for keeping up with the latest info regarding their friends instead of finding new places to visit. Splitting up the two services was a smart business idea as far as we are concerned, as it allows Foursquare to focus on their more important features a lot easier, instead of catering to the needs of all their customers into a single app.
Splitting the main, original application into two different services is somewhat of a gamble, as it can lead the users of the Foursquare to leaving the service because it’s not as complete as it once was. Yes, there are lots of people that simply don’t want to install yet another mobile app on their phone, instead they want all functionality in a single tool. Foursquare unfortunately doesn’t help them, as it now removes all the friend related features from the homonym app and transfers them to Swarm.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that Swarm is a bad idea. On the contrary, since we live in a social world, being able to keep up with the location and activities performed by our friends is always a step forward. With Swarm you will be able to check out who hangs out near you and even create a new hangout with your friends without even calling them. It brings a revolutionary system that’s designed to help you get in touch with your friends effortlessly at any given time.
By splitting the original tool in two different apps Foursquare is able to address the different user categories at a more professional levels, as it plans to offer specialized updates into the near future that are specific to the customer base of each app. This ensures us that Foursquare will be an even better application for all explorers while Swarm will take care of all the social interaction you might want.
This is an interesting business strategy, an unexpected one of course, as most companies tend to unify their product lanes instead of splitting services. However, we think that this was the right thing to do in the case of Foursquare, because now all customers can access the service they need separately, without having to browse the actions of a single app in order to do what they want. Simpler is always better, and by splitting it in two apps, Foursquare does just that, it makes the whole experience a lot easier to perform and fun as well, a trend that has surely transformed the app marketplace in a better way.
Photo credit: Nan Palmero
