Company founder Dennis Crowley has been waxing lyrical on his blog as the company preps foursquare version three for the iPhone and Android platforms – both of which should be heading your way any minute now.
Discovery
With a focus on discovery, encouragement, and loyalty, there’s several new features coming to the iPhone and Android Foursquare applications, and Crowley gets very chatty indeed about the new ‘Explore’ tab:
The idea is pretty simple: tell us what you’re looking for and we’ll help you find something nearby. The suggestions are based on a little bit of everything – the places you’ve been, the places your friends have visited, your loyalty to your favorite places, the categories and types of places you gravitate towards, what’s popular with other users, the day of the week, places with great tips, the time of day, and so on.
We’ll even tell you why we think you should visit a certain place (e.g. popular with friends, similar to your favorite spots). You’ll find it’s helpful for general things like “food”, “coffee”, “nightlife” (we built in quick access to these searches) and you’ll be surprised by what you get when searching for really specific things, like “80s music,” “fireplaces,” “pancakes,” “bratwurst,” and “romantic.” The more random you get, the more interesting the results get (though be patient with this first release… sometimes we can’t find every random thing).
The leader board has also been revamped, as Crowley explains:
You’ll see that we’ve replaced our old leaderboard (and its simple points system and Sunday night reset) with a sliding 7-day barometer of you and your friends. Check-ins now trigger points for dozens of different types of actions – everything from discovering new places, trying new types of restaurants, visiting new cities, getting groups together, hanging out with old friends, and a few things you might not expect.
More rewards
With customer loyalty rewards being a driving force for many users, foursquare will be hoping to broaden its appeal by rolling out six new types of foursquare Specials for merchants.
Business will now be able to offer Specials to swarms, groups of friends, regulars, newbies, Mayors, or anyone, with a list of all the Specials nearby appearing in the Places screen.
Big plans ahoy
Singing off, Crowley adds that his company have got “really ambitious plans for the rest of the year,” although an updated BlackBerry client due out later this week won’t include many of v3.0’s features.
As for Windows Phone and Symbian users, it looks like you’ll have to make do with the old version for now as the company ‘work hard’ on your platform’s updates.
