4 Details You Shouldn’t Overlook In The New foursquare
1. Foursquare is Now Your Journal
Go to your profile tab, scroll below the 6 pretty boxes, and lo and behold: your history. The more you add to each check-in in the form of photos, shouts, and comments, the more complete your real world history becomes.
2. Check-in Photos Are Condensed Into Single Events
Adding photos to a check-in doesn’t mean that you’re checking in again to the same place. That means that you can share your experiences within a place throughout your time there without appearing like you’re checking in multiple times.
You can swipe through people’s photos as a place within the activity feed. If there’s little white dots at the bottom of a photo, that means there’s more goodness to be seen. It’s great for watching a polite meetup at a bar degrade into a drunken staggerfest!
3. Checking In Takes Fewer Steps
The check-in button moved to the top right, is bigger than it was before, and is up there on nearly every screen. The benefit is the bottom bar is all about exploration and the top is all about announcing your activity.
Even better, checking in is now accomplished with one fewer screen than before. Less is definitely more when you’re just trying to announce you’ve arrived.
4. You Can Dislike Venues
In Facebook’s world, you either “Like” something or you ignore it. In foursquare’s, you can also “Dislike” a venue.
That’s huge.
It gives new, meaningful data to the Explore algorithms and might eventually tell store owners how effectively they’re pleasing their customers.
Also, seriously, clicking that little fractured heart after a bad experience at a place is quite cathartic.
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3 Major Changes to foursquare that Change Everything
Beta testing is part of life in technology companies so I’ve been using successive iterations of the newly released foursquare for a few months. Here are the three major shifts that were particularly hard to keep secret.
1. Explore Is Now A Genius
Imagine going to Google and having your search results waiting before you type a single character. That’s the new Explore.
Using data from your history, 20 million users, and 2 billion check-ins, they know you’re looking for coffee and a croissant at 9:47am and a bourbon and brisket at 8:31pm. They know if that sleepy little coffee house is weirdly crowded for a Thursday night. They know if a hidden burrito joint is just around the corner and is on a lot of locals’ to-do lists.
Of course, you can still search, but the beauty is that Explore now does the work for you.
2. It’s More Interesting Than Facebook
The Friends panel is no longer a graveyard of all your friends’ last check-ins. Instead, it’s a lively feed of everywhere your friends have been, everything they want to do, every brand they’re following, every Tip they’ve left, every check-in they’ve liked, every List they’ve created, and so forth.
In short, it’s who your friends are when they’re in the real world. That is a compelling feed.
3. It’s Beautiful
The design team lept from “utility” to “experience.” This isn’t a tool for checking in to places. It’s a way of experiencing your friends’ lives and peering into the possibilities around you.
Banishing the fortune cookies pictures in favor of Instagram-like moments makes a massive difference, but the real changes are really in the details. The font choice and subtle line shading that indicates Tips, the shout overlays on top of check in photos, swiping between multiple photos, and the simplified bottom navigation are effective, compelling, and intuitive.
The overall polish signals just how far the underlying technology and platform have come.
Bonus: You Can Now Heart Check-Ins!
Finally! 
Now, run to your nearest App Store and download it.
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