The magic of foursquare discovery, now on your big-screen devices. #new4SQ
NOTE (Tuesday, 1:30pm EST): Now live for all! Enjoy! — As foursquare has evolved, the focus has turned from simply ‘checking in’ to sharing our experiences and expertise, unlocking rewards and deals, and exploring the world around us.
Context & Ripple Effects
This launch extends a deliberate repositioning that Foursquare has been telegraphing all year: the company's own framing has moved from 'checking in' to sharing experiences, unlocking deals, and exploring what's nearby. The clearest prior step was foursquare Radar in October 2011, which pushed notifications about nearby places to users proactively rather than waiting for a manual check-in.
Bringing that discovery experience to big-screen devices also closes a loop opened earlier in the platform's history — after the 2009 Android client and the early-2010 push to make Foursquare playable anywhere, the service now treats the living room as a surface for browsing places, not just the phone in your pocket.
First-order effects
- Users get Foursquare's place-discovery and recommendation feed on television-class screens, making couch-side browsing of venues and deals a first-class use case alongside mobile.
Second-order effects
- The move pressures rival local-recommendation and check-in services to treat non-phone screens as distribution channels too, since Foursquare is claiming the TV as a venue-browsing surface before they do.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, location-based services stop being mobile-only utilities and become ambient content layers that follow users across every screen in the home — with whoever owns the place-data graph positioned to power recommendations everywhere.
The trend: Location-based services are evolving from single-purpose mobile check-in apps into cross-device discovery platforms, with proactive recommendation replacing manual check-in as the core interaction.