Last week I got an email from location-based social network Foursquare:
About five years ago, we launched a little app called Foursquare. As one of the first million people to sign up for Foursquare, you’ve been with us pretty much since the beginning. You’ve seen us grow from a tiny project to a 50,000,000-strong community. And, we’re about to embark on our biggest change yet. We are rolling out two apps – Swarm and Foursquare – one focused on keeping up and meeting up with your friends, the other focused on finding great places.
It went on to explain that all check-ins would be moving to the new Swarm app, while social recommendations would remain in the revamped Foursquare app.
So now I’d have to use two apps to do the things I could previously do in just one.
That’s not an improvement, that’s stupid. Is that putting users first? No, it isn’t. It’s being a dick.
Why can’t I check-in using the perfectly functional Foursquare app I already use? I tried to do that on Monday and got a pop-up message telling me to go to the App store to download Swarm.
But I don’t want to download Swarm. And judging by the reviews a lot of other people don’t want to either:
- Game over
- What’ve you done?
- Why make it complicated?
- Total disaster
- Stupidest app ever
- RIP Foursquare
So I cancelled my Foursquare account. And I told them exactly why: they are clueless idiots who have taken a perfectly good, usable, useful, fun service and ruined it.
forestgatedotnet 
Leave a Reply