Foursquare has just launched Swarm 4.0, complete with brand new profile pages, updated search capabilities, full-screen photos and a weekly Swarm update from your friends.
The most important update to the app comes by way of new individual user profiles. These profiles show a clickable map of all the places you’ve ever been right at the top, followed by basic information like number of check-ins, photos, and number of friends.
All of that was previously displayed on profile pages, alongside a chronological feed of your check-ins.
Now, that feed has turned into a number of sections that are a more general indicator of what your Swarm life is like. The first section is a readout of where you check-in the most, based on category. For example, my top category is bars, then airports, followed by coffee shops, American restaurants and offices.
If you click into any one category, you’ll get a more detailed readout. When I click into bars, I can see that I frequent cocktail bars the most, followed by dive bars and sports bars. I can dive even deeper and see which bars in each of those categories I visit the most.
These views are available over the last sixty days or all-time.
The next section is top friends, which shows you the friends you check-in with the most often. This is also viewable over six months or on an all-time basis. The third section shows the specific places you frequent the most, again with a version for the past sixty days or all-time. And finally, you can check your streak history and see how many weeks in a row you’ve been to bars, restaurants, hotels, offices, etc.
At the bottom of the revamped profiles, Swarm will offer up a unique fact about you. Right now, mine says that my longest check-in streak at sports places lasted 15 weeks.
Individual profiles are only viewable to the user, whereas searching for friends’ profiles will show the same chronological feed of check-ins as past versions of Swarm.
Swarm 4.0 also includes a brand new search bar, placed prominently at the top of your brand new profile. The search is universal, letting users search by category (like Sushi restaurants), city, or friends, listing all the relevant results based on each query.
Another update to the app is Weekly Swarm updates. This is a feed that is more algorithmic and curated than the basic chronological feed, showing you all the most important or interesting check-ins from the weeks. These check-ins are categorized based on friends who traveled, folks who went to cool events like sports games and concerts, and trending places. Weekly Swarm also shows new and lost mayorships as well as new stickers.
Finally, the new and improved Swarm shows full-screen images in the feed, instead of the cropped, thumbnail-ish versions from before.
Since the launch of Swarm 3.0, which re-introduced mayorships and turned the social utility app into more of a game, Swarm has now reached 8 million daily check-ins.
You can check out Swarm for yourself right here.
