Perpetual Beta: Foursquare

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Change is what makes the world go ‘round, what advances us as human beings and most importantly, what motivates software updates and new, innovative features. Perpetual beta is the concept of software that leaves behind the boring and bland software release cycle and takes on the exciting Internet to become a service that is always readily available and improves through user activity and participation. (O’Reilly, 2005)  In this week’s post, I’ll be discussing how the pattern of perpetual beta is applied through Foursquare.

Foursquare helps you find places you’ll love, anywhere in the world




Foursquare is a local search and discover application, providing a personalized local search experience for all users. Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai created this service in 2009 and until July 2014, a social networking layer was launched that allowed users to share their location with friends, aiming to provide very personalized recommendations of suitable places to visit based on a user’s current location. Throughout the years, Foursquare has flourished into a phenomenal sensation by creative design, interactive features and engaging users.

Forever Updating and Engaging




Since the launch in 2009, Foursquare was limited to 100 worldwide metro areas. Since then, Foursquare has undergone countless updates and is currently on version 8.0, released in 2014. Each release is jam packed with new features:

  • 2010: Announced a check-in application to let users discover new locations and activities. Foursquare created a list of personal places and activities named to-do’s where it would remind the user where there were to-do items close by. (Siegler, 2010)
  • 2011: Foursquare was released for iPhone and Android users in early 2011. Added a new feature called Radar to notify when three or more friends have checked in nearby.
  • 2012: Foursquare had a redesigned the whole application allowing users to browse by category. They also collaborated with Facebook, allowing users to recruit their Facebook friends. (Scott, 2012)
  • 2013 & 2014: Foursquare 6.0 and 7.0 was released with many updates along with Foursquare 8.0 and Swarm 1.0 in 2014. 


Foursquare engages and recruits new users like no tomorrow. They encourage users to share everything about their location and even places that they’re not at through the to-do’s. This allows Foursquare to keep an eye on usage and information where they can release new features based on the data. Each feature that is designed is cleverly created around the community feedback to improve on the usability of Foursquare.





All I see for Foursquare is happiness and success - As long as they closely follow O’Reilly’s perpetual beta method. What do you think?

References 

Foursquare. (n.d). About https://foursquare.com/about
O'Rielly, T. (2005). What is Web 2.0. http://www.oreilly.com/pub/a/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html

Scott, C. (2012) Glancee CEO explains social discover apps at SXSW. http://www.computerworld.com/article/2502396/data-center/glancee-ceo-explains-social-discovery-apps-at-sxsw.html

Siegler, M. (2014) Foursquare goes beyond the check in. http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/20/foursquare-2/