Some big changes from foursquare today as shared on their blog as the company rolls out some major new enhancements. Touted as #new4SQ the service now appears to be placing much more emphasis on local search and discovery. Although you may be accustomed to mainly using foursquare from your mobile to checkin to your favorite places, if you now hit the official website at foursquare.com (you’ll need to login also) you’ll notice some changes, particularly in the form of a large map that shows you and your local area… you’ll even notice your contacts and friends on the map.
Go ahead, start playing around with the map. Pan around and you’ll notice some local venues, hover over them and you’ll see things like “10 of your friends have bneen here”, you’ll also see your contacts on the map showing where their latest checkin took place. Keep looking around and you’ll see venues displayed with an orange styled icon, these are places that offer a special of some form… nice!A box in the right corner shows off some suggestions, these I’m assuming are tips and suggestions about local places left by your contacts.. .again nice! I’m a firm believer in leaving tips and for many users I think this is highly under utilized… keep leaving those tips!
According to the blog post, not only is this much more localized, however, the suggestions are also based on the time that you hit the site. For example, hit the page at 5 PM and you may see suggestions for an evening happy hour or dinner special! Another cool feature is “Radar” where you can enable radar to be on and you can receive notifications about deals when you venture out near a favorite place that’s offering up a deal!
It’s obvious that this upgrade has the Tablet user in mind as a sample image in the foursquare blog posting shows off the iPad version of the app… no doubt recognizing that many people are now toting around Tablet PCs and are searching nearby for deals while out and about and connected with their iPad. Read more about the new foursquare HERE
Note: I’m a Super User (Level 2) and you can connect with me on foursquare at https://foursquare.com/gletham