Some Loyal Foursquare Users Are Checking Out After Swarm Spinoff
"In the first two quarters of this year, we'll make more money than we did all of last year," Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley predicted at a ReadWriteWeb event in San Francisco last month. And Foursquare Chief Operating Officer Jeff Glueck, who has insight into actual user data, told The Verge that current users are checking in more than ever. "People are using Foursquare and Swarm better," he says. "They check in more often on Swarm according to our data, and are using Foursquare more often to explore. We're seeing more Explore queries once people migrated."
The company did admit to some missteps with this rollout, and as we wait for the revamped Foursquare, more and more users like Meredith Gould are quitting both apps. Gould, a Baltimore-based digital strategist whose more than 80,000 tweets indicate she's a social media lover, not hater, gave up on Swarm about a week ago.
"It's such an ugly, dysfunctional, cumbersome, irrelevant, unnecessary app that sucks battery life," Gould says of Swarm. "Why bother? Why do I need two apps when I had one that provided both services?"
But she misses Foursquare for what it was, especially because it served a real function in her daily life.
"Checking into Foursquare was a way to keep track of my day, connect with people in my network and stay connected with them. Getting rid of Foursquare means I've lost something that was helping organize my day, and organize the way I was thinking about and sharing my day," Gould says. "What I'm interested in is, at what point are they going to recognize that the public is right and go back to what used to be normal?"
She isn't alone.