Foursquare, the location-based mobile game startup that pioneered the checkin, will introduce version 3.0 Tuesday evening. The new release turns on the power of every checkin accumulated over the course of its two-year history and transforms that data into recommendations.
“Our theme internally has always been that every checkin counts,” says co-founder and CEO Dennis Crowley, who speaks of version 3.0 as the materialization of that philosophy.
New Recommendation Engine
The Foursquare user will immediately begin to see the value of the checkin in the new Explore tab. The Explore tab, which sits where the Tips tab once was, now serves as the meat of the application. Here, users can query for recommendations or dive into food, coffee, nightlife, shops and arts and entertainment recommendations served up by Foursquare and ranked by what’s most interesting to the user.
Crowley explains that recommendations are similar to Amazon or Netflix recommendations, but made for the real world. He compares the recommendation engine to a recycling center that makes old data new again. “We’re recycling data; so [the engine] spits back things that are tailored to what you’re doing.”
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