A different kind of time travel – go back to the New York of 100+ years ago
Last week we launched the Foursquare Time Machine to help you relive your past check-ins and adventures. Now there’s the NYPL Time Traveller, an app that transports you a lot further back in time, to the New York of the 1870s to 1970s.
To try out the Time Traveller, simply connect your Foursquare account to the app. It’ll let you know whenever you check in near the site of historical photographs, and you can tap through to view them.
Run a business? Check out ways to easily add Foursquare to your social media toolkit.
If you run a business, you may be using more than one social media channel to reach your customers – and maybe even using another product to help you manage them all in one place. A pizza parlor, for example, might use MomentFeed to manage its Twitter and Facebook accounts from the same dashboard.
With all those busy store and social media managers in mind, we’ve worked closely with several partners to make sure that whatever dashboard you prefer, it’s easy to use all of Foursquare’s free business tools. Starting today, we’ve teamed up with a dozen awesome partners to put Foursquare’s tools into their systems. So, through their sites, you can do things like:
- Claim and edit all your business listings on Foursquare
- Monitor your check-ins, tips, photos, and other analytics
- Create Foursquare Specials and updates and push them across all your social channels
- Integrate Foursquare into your own app, website, or loyalty program
Check out our Foursquare Directory of Partners here for a more detailed listing of partner integrations. And, of course, the 1.4 million businesses using Foursquare can continue to do all this directly on Foursquare.com.
Say hello to the Foursquare Time Machine
With 4 billion check-ins on Foursquare, we love exploring new ways to visualize all the places people go around the world, and the connections they’re making between them. Now, you can re-live each and everyone of your check-ins, and have your own beautiful visualization to share with the new Foursquare Time Machine.
- Zoom through time and space as you visualize all your check-ins
- Discover all the places you should head to next
- Save and share pretty infographics of all your stats
Ready to enter the Foursquare Time Machine? Click here.
Nine kings. One cone. Whose banner will you take up? #GameOfCones starts today!
As the sun rises in the east, we march into battle. Only one House may prevail in the fight for the Iron Cone. The time has come to choose sides, check in like a maniac, and eat lots (and lots) of ice cream. Starting today until June 21, recruit your friends and check in as many times as possible at your favorite ice cream shop in NYC or SF to help them win the Iron Cone! (Don’t forget to include the #GameOfCones hashtag.)
Check back at gameofcones.foursquare.com throughout the competition to see who’s pulling ahead.
Game of Thrones got you stressin? Bury your anxiety in ice cream. #GameOfCones
Summer is coming — which means only one thing: ice cream. Lucky for you, Foursquare is great at finding the best spots to secure a scoop in your city. To welcome the arrival of warmer days, we’re highlighting the top ice cream spots in NYC and SF. We give you: Game of Cones.
Foursquare is pitting the top local, artisanal ice cream places against each other in two all-out battles for the legendary Iron Cone (inspired by epicness that is HBO’s Game of Thrones). Live in the Big Apple or Bay Area? Support your favorite ice cream shop by checking in as many times as possible between this Friday, June 7 and June 21 (the first official day of summer).
Join the battle
See which ice cream shops are competing at gameofcones.foursquare.com, and start checking in come Friday to show your support. Maybe treat yourself to some Neopolitargaryen, or Red Velvet Wedding (too soon?!).
Because as they say, when you play the Game of Cones, you win or you die.
#summeriscoming
How to kill time waiting for Arrested Development to start this weekend
Memorial Day Weekend is just around the corner! Whether you’re staycationing in your city (aka counting down the hours until the Arrested Development premier), or taking a trip out of town, Foursquare’s here to help you make the most of it.
Find a hiking trail, ice cream spot, or BBQ joint you’ve never been to before.
Don’t forget you’ve still got all of Saturday to enjoy (and probably Monday, after your episode-watching binge). Open up Explore to find fun things to do and eat. Try searching “sights” and filter by places you haven’t checked in before to discover new parks, hiking trails, and scenic spots. Then search for “ice cream” or “frozen banana” to find a treat for after.
Heading out of town? Check out the Best of Foursquare to find people’s most-loved spots.
We’ve analyzed our tips, likes, and over 3.5 billion check-ins from our 33 million-strong community to find the most-loved restaurants, nightlife, museums, and sights across the country. Check out the Best of Foursquare to see and save amazing recommendations in Austin, Portland, New Orleans, Nashville, and more.
Giving data nerds access to the realtime pulse of check-ins around the world
Pretty much from the day we founded Foursquare, we’ve had a lot of requests from people who want to use our data for research. That’s because the general trends we can identify – like that New Yorkers are 2.1% more likely to get ice cream for every degree above 60 degrees fahrenheit, or that the busiest time to shop on Black Friday is 2pm – are really interesting, and they are something you can only figure out if you have Foursquare’s data.
In the past, we’ve worked with select academic institutions and press outlets on data research projects. The results are pretty fascinating. It led to this Wall Street Journal visualization of city movement, this Tampa Bay government study, and, for us internally, powers things like our Hurricane Sandy visualization. Through these relationships, we’ve seen firsthand the power of this data to shed new insight and to effect positive change in how the real world works.
So, to allow more people to access this type of data, we are partnering exclusively with Gnip to distribute our realtime ‘places’ data (they have similar relationships with Twitter, Tumblr, and Disqus, among others). We give Gnip a realtime feed of the places where Foursquare users are checking in, which they can then provide to their clients. Here is the data we provide to Gnip: each check-in’s location (for instance, Stop & Shop), the time and date of the check-in (April 30, 2013 at 11:03pm GMT), and the gender of the person checking in (male). Only these three pieces of data are shared, and the check-ins are not tied to individual users. The technical-looking output looks like this:
This data, in aggregate, is incredibly interesting. For instance, market research companies can use it to get a realtime pulse on holiday shopping trends, and social media marketing agencies can instantly track the impact of a national chain’s Super Bowl campaign. Similarly, researchers can better understand a neighborhood’s evolution as the types and popularity of local businesses change. It’s fascinating data and this allows more people to examine the world in more ways.
For more information, head over to GNIP.
Super-specific searches to suit your every need — Foursquare does it better.
When you’re looking for somewhere to eat, sometimes you know exactly what kind of place you want — cheap or fancy, sushi or Mexican, an old favorite, or a place you’ve never been. With today’s update for iOS and Android, Foursquare helps you find exactly what you want, whatever that may be.
Try these five searches. They show exactly the type of thing you can only do with Foursquare (get super specific, we dare you):
- A cheap sushi place that’s nearby and open now, but that I haven’t been to yet.
- A bar downtown that’s new to me, but that my friends have been to. Oh, and that has margaritas.
- A Moroccan restaurant that has tagines on the menu, but isn’t going to empty my bank account.
- One of the museums in Paris that my friend Matt went to last year, that’s also near my hotel.
- A burrito place I’ve been meaning to try (it’s on my to-do list) in San Francisco, that’s in The Mission and open right now.
Happy filtering!
Picking the perfect spot just got easier with even more menus in Explore!
It’s a Saturday night and you’re meeting friends for dinner. You’ve narrowed the choices down to two popular Italian spots — but how to choose? Starting today, you’ll see more menus in Foursquare, so you can decide given what restaurants have to offer. In addition to SinglePlatform, we’ve also partnered with Locu (a company that shares our mission of helping restaurants and local businesses connect with customers).
Do you manage a small business? Update your listing at foursquare.com, and add your menu on Locu and SinglePlatform to help more people find you in Explore.
Find the perfect place to go – now you can filter by price, what’s open, where friends have been, and more
Need to find just the right spot? We’ve added extra filters on foursquare.com to make finding the perfect date spot, brunch place, or bar even easier.
Click the buttons at the top of the page to tailor your results:
- Choose a price range (like a fancy restaurant for Mother’s Day)
- See which places are offering money-saving specials
- See only shops that are open right now
And because it’s Foursquare, it’s easy to personalize the recommendations (you’ll need to log in to use these):
- See restaurants you haven’t been to before (new adventures!)
- See bars your friends like to go to
- See places you’ve saved (make headway on your to-do list!)
We’ll be rolling out more options in the future, along with filters on your phone so you can find the perfect place when you’re on the go. Head to foursquare.com/explore now to try it out!