A different kind of time travel – go back to the New York of 100+ years ago

The New York Public Library built this awesome way to see old New York as you’re exploring now New York. Check it out here.

Unlock badges without checking in

We love when people tweet about dragging themselves to the gym to earn the Gym Rat badge, or about trying a new restaurant hoping to unlock the Pizzaiolo badge. Encouraging real-world actions is a big part of the mission behind foursquare. We’re also aware that some of those behaviors don’t necessarily involve a check-in, which is why today we’re excited to introduce the first badge you unlock by doing something, not just checking in. Say hello to our first badge partner: a little company called RunKeeper.
 
Here’s how it’ll work: users of RunKeeper, an application that helps you track your fitness routines, can now earn RunKeeper-exclusive badges on foursquare by achieving different milestones within their app. For instance, if you run a marathon using RunKeeper, you’ll unlock their Marathon badge. Once you unlock a badge, it will show up on both your RunKeeper profile and with your other badges in foursquare.

We’ve long been fans of what Michael, Jason, and the rest of the RunKeeper team are doing to innovate in the fitness space and feel strongly that they’re driven by the same ethos that motivates foursquare: leveraging technology to help people live better, healthier, and more fulfilling lives.

To continue promoting this behavior, we’re going to develop more of these badges unlocked by real-world experiences with a handful of carefully selected partners, a few more of which will be announced soon.

If you’ve got a cool idea about using your app for a third-party badge, let us know. We look forward to the day when looking at your foursquare badges reminds you of all your proudest life accomplishments. So get off your computer and get running!

Make personal finance social with AmEx + foursquare

Check out what our friends at American Express are doing with the foursquare API in their new app, Social Currency. Now, when you let your foursquare friends know where you are, you can also tell them what you’re buying and what you’re saving up for. Check in at a restaurant and share the great deal you just got on the best pizza in town. Or check in at a store and upload a photo of the shoes you’ve been eyeing for months.

You can find more info on Social Currency (and tips on how to manage your money) on AmEx’s site, Currency. To see more cool uses of the foursquare API, check out our App Gallery.

Introducing foursquare 2.0: Tips + To-Dos + Add to foursquare + More!

UPDATE: Whoa guys! Servers are melting from all the excitement. We’ll be rolling out the new 2.0 features over the coming days. All clear! Enjoy foursquare 2.0!

When we started foursquare, we dreamed it would be much more than check-ins. We really wanted to build tools that would help people collect and share their real-world experiences.  Today we’re rolling out the 2.0 version of our iPhone app as well as a new way to connect it to the web. We’ve been working on these updates for a while, and feel like they’re a big step towards our original idea. Here are the three things you’ll probably notice: 

1. We split up Tips and To-Dos.
When you open foursquare (iPhone update is live today; changes to Android and Blackberry coming soon!), you’ll notice separate sections for both Tips and To-Dos. Our thinking is that by making it easier to access your To-Do list, foursquare will be better at helping you remember all the interesting things you want to experience nearby.  We’re already finding that this simple change turns foursquare into more than than just a tool for keeping track of where you’ve been, but into something that keeps track of all the places you want to go and the things you want to experience.

2. We sprinkled our new Tips and To-Dos throughout the app.
Since having them in your navigation bar wasn’t enough, you’ll see touches of Tips and To-Dos throughout the app. Next time you spot a brand new cupcake shop (like Butter Lane in NYC), fire up foursquare, and with one tap, add it to your To-Do list for later. You’ll also see your friends’ tips highlighted on the venue view in the app.

Once something is added to your To-Do List, you’ll see a blue ‘dog ear’ for that place whenever it pops up in your nearby places list.  And the next time you check in at Butter Lane, you will get a reminder of any of the To-Dos you’ve saved for that venue. (“Order anything with the raspberry buttercream. It will change your life.”) We even put a handy counter on each tip, so you can see how popular they are with other foursquare users. Put together, we’ve found these new tools super helpful when you’re out exploring the world.

3. Real-world discovery also happens online.
Say hello to the ‘Add to My foursquare’ button. You don’t always learn about new places from your friends, you may have read a review of someplace in the paper. Since there hasn’t been a good way of remembering a review when you’re nearby, we’ve rolled out a new embeddable ‘Add to My foursquare’ button, which connects what you find on the web with your foursquare To-Do List. Read the review, click on the button, and that tip about tasty cupcakes is now on your phone. It’s like Instapaper, but for things to experience in the real world.

The teams at Eater and Racked have already put ‘Add to My foursquare’ buttons on all their place pages, like this one for Momofuku Ssäm Bar. The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Zagat, Time Out Chicago, Time Out New York, National Post, and New York magazine will be implementing it in the coming days. 

If you have a website, this is as easy as embedding a YouTube video. Just find the tip or venue you want to use (or write your own tip), click the embed button, and paste the embed code on your page. See a bit more info about them here.

We hope you enjoy all this. We’ve got more things coming soon, so stay tuned.

-Team foursquare

P.S. Developers, we didn’t forget about you. All these new features are included in the API so feel free to start playing around!

Explore your campus with foursquare!

A few months ago, we put a call out for college students who wanted to represent foursquare on campus and the response was astounding. So today, with everyone settled in on campus, we’re happy to announce official partnerships with over 20 universities, student ambassadors in several dozen others, and we’re adding more every day.
 
With foursquare, universities can help students explore their campus by sharing school traditions, information about classes and building hours, and insider tips. Students can now unlock new badges from an exclusive campus badge pack, rewarding them for their late nights at the library and attendance at sports games. Now, not just seniors will know about campus shortcuts, dining hall secrets, and the can’t-miss campus events.

If you’re interested in joining our program and would like to see how some of our university partners are using foursquare on campus, please visit us at www.foursquare.com/universities

Have fun showing your school pride with foursquare!

Am I mayor yet?

We made a quick yet long-awaited tweak to our apps today. When you’re getting close to winning a Mayorship (within 10 check-ins), you’ll now see how far away you are from ousting the current Mayor. You’ll see the count in the post check-in screen when you check into a place. Take it for a test drive tonight and see if it fires up the flames of competitiveness for you!

Just a quick reminder of how Mayorships work: To become Mayor of a place, you need to have checked in more days than anyone else over the last two months (60 days), so only one check-in per day counts. Oh, you also need to have uploaded a profile photo from your settings page (no one wants a faceless dictatorship!). And yes, we also made changes that prevent registered “Managers” and “Employees” from becoming Mayors of their own venues.

We have lots and lots in the queue, so you’ll be hearing more from us shortly!

-Team foursquare

Changes to our authentication system

Some of you may have seen a blog post about our authentication system that went up earlier today. Since foursquare launched last year, we’ve been using HTTP Basic Auth, a common authentication mechanism. We’re currently in the final stages of integrating a new authentication system (HTTPS), and you’ll be seeing this roll out in the iPhone client next week, and our BlackBerry and Android clients shortly after that. Additionally, we’ll be using OAuth2/HTTPS as the standard for the new API we’ll be releasing in the coming weeks.

As always, we encourage you to email us with any concerns about data security.

- team foursquare

Some notes on foursquare and location sharing

We’re always looking for ways to give our users more control over the data they share through foursquare. We’ve been thinking about how to improve the User Settings page for a while, so we’ve made some changes to the controls you can use to adjust the way you share information with foursquare. For example, you can now choose to share your email or phone number with friends, opt out of all Mayorships, and have more control over email settings. We invite you to check out your updated settings page to review some of the tweaks we’ve made. 

It seems that a lot of concerns over information sharing on location-based services arise from confusion over what is shared and where it’s shared, so we’ve put together an explanation of the different ways foursquare uses and shares location information. You can see this overview here: http://foursquare.com/privacy

We’ve also put together a detailed grid that shows exactly which information is public vs. private and what options foursquare gives you to control the way you share your information. You can view this grid here: http://foursquare.com/privacy/grid

We encourage anyone who uses location-based services and social networking sites to educate themselves about how their information is shared and to familiarize themselves with the user settings available on each site. In addition to the links above, you may also want to review our formal Privacy Policy and the Privacy FAQs on our support site.

And, of course, we’d love to hear your feedback on these changes. Let us know your thoughts in the comments or via email. Thanks!

- team foursquare

Superfans and superusers: show your foursquare pride with swag

So many of you have been asking how you can rock the t-shirts we wear every day here at foursquare HQ, so we made a store for you to get your own! The great thing about this is that it’s really not just a store, but a distribution channel that will allow us get swag out to all our biggest supporters and loyal superusers (love you guys!).

In the future, we hope the store will make it possible for us to do a lot of really cool things—like tying badge unlocks to real-life swag—so you can show off your foursquare accomplishments! Check out the cool voting feature where you can pick which one of our designer Mari’s awesome designs makes it into the store next.

Big thanks to the great people at Sigler out in Ames, Iowa for building the foursquare store! We had thought about creating merchandise for our users, and when we saw that the folks at Sigler had created a foursquare special for their headquarters, we had to give them a call. They’re so into foursquare, they even sent us a photo of the day they had a company-wide swarm! 

Happy swagging, 

team foursquare