Foursquare’s New Interactive Map Plots Its Evolution From Local Check-In Site To Global Utility

Any mature Internet product always has difficulty proving its success or illustrating its evolution. Foursquare is definitely one of the companies with a product that fit into many buckets, depending on who you talk to. Today, the company has released a detailed, interactive and gorgeous, topographical map, plotting out 500 million check-ins from the past three months. There are quite a few things you can glean from this, perhaps the most interesting being that Foursquare isn’t a product that’s simply popular in San Francisco or New York City. Since launching at SXSW in 2009 in 10 major cities, the app has grown to 35 million registered members who are visiting places all over the globe. The company has raised $71.4 million to date, from every big player in venture capital, but some pundits and users aren’t sure where Foursquare is headed in the near or long-term. Foursquare’s strength, as most big platforms can attest to, is the data that it collects from its engaged users. As we noted last October, the company is moving towards becoming a destination, and utility, for discovering places around you in the real world. And from your mobile device primarily, to boot. This is not an easy problem. The map allows you to zoom in on different areas of interest, going down to a street level: I spoke with Foursquare’s data scientist, Blake Shaw, about what all of this data means and what Foursquare’s goals are for 2013: We’re starting to realize that people want tools to find the best places, no matter where they are, a familiar city or not. We’re building more tools to achieve just that. We’re also starting to fully leverage our data and aggregate signals to make a more quality signal and experience for users. We’re looking at things like: How often do people come back to a place? What type of people like to come to a place? It all comes back to data, and Foursquare has quite a bit of it. I asked Shaw how Foursquare users have evolved, as far as what types of features they’re asking for and expect: As we’ve grown, users expect a lot more, people really want mobile tools that really fit into their lives. People aren’t sitting at their desk trying to access information, they’re on their mobile device in the real world. In the situation that Shaw explains, Foursquare is trying

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