Foursquare is set to release new versions of their iPhone and Android apps tonight featuring some of their biggest changes ever. They focus on three core portions of the service — discovery, encouragement and loyalty.

Discovery

The old Tips tab is gone, replaced by a new “Explore” tab that’s honed to your particular interests. It combines “different signals we’re pulling together to surface the most relevant content for each user,” said Alex Rainert, foursquare’s Head of Product. Those signals include the places you’ve been, the places your friends have visited, your loyalty to your favorite places, the categories and types of places you gravitate towards, what’s popular with other users, the day of the week, places with great tips, the time of day, etc. You’ll be able to tweak the settings using the settings button in the top left of the tab.

By default foursquare will show you what it thinks you’ll like that’s nearby. If you’re looking for nightlife, for instance, you can drill down into that category using buttons at the top of the screen. You can even search for more esoteric things like sushi or chocolate chip pancakes and foursquare will surface its recommendations for you. It will also be able to show you what’s hot nearby right now.

Foursquare is finally taking all that data they’ve been collecting about the places we visit and the things we like, aggregating it, and feeding it back to us in useful ways. This is what will make foursquare truly useful as a platform. The ability to get recommendations about places we should visit in the real world is incredibly valuable.

Encouragement

After its first few weeks, foursquare’s leaderboard became pretty useless. It was easy to game and didn’t really tell you anything about how you compared to your friends other than who checked in a lot. Foursquare realized this and marginalized the leaderboard, eventually to the point of putting it inside a hard to find section of the app. Many of foursquare’s newest users probably have no idea it’s there.

With foursquare 3.0, the leaderboard once again has relevance. You’ll get points for dozens of different types of actions, from trying new kinds of restaurants and gathering groups of friends to visiting new cities and seeing people you haven’t seen in a while. The leaderboard is now a seven-day sliding scale that compares your checkins with your friends. You’ll see and update on your progress with each checkin.

The leaderboard moves front and center under the “Me” tab, along with a ranking of your most explored categories. This will help you seek the expertise of your friends in the categories where they’re experts.

Whereas the old points system was designed to encourage users to add venues to help build foursquare’s database, the new leaderboard is designed to actually get you out and exploring new places with friends. “A lot of us are gamers at heart, so we know the value of the leaderboard for encouraging user behaviors,” said Rainert. It should finally be fun again to see how your checkins stack up against your friends.

Loyalty

Businesses aren’t left out of the updates. Beginning later this week, they’ll be able to choose from six types of specials that encourage customers in different ways:

• Swarms — offering rewards that tip Groupon-style after a certain number of users have checked in
• Groups of Friends — rewarding users for checking in with their friends
• Regulars — Similar to the current loyalty rewards
• Mayors – Rewards for the person who checks in most
• Newbies — Valid on the first checkin
• Everyone — Rewards valid on any checkin

Users will be better able to find nearby specials from within the app with a new link from the places page that links to a list of all the specials nearby.

Big Changes

These are without question the biggest changes foursquare has made to their service since it’s launch at SXSW two years ago. While specials are still an important part of the app, the pivot to providing recommendations moves foursquare away from the comparisons to Facebook Deals that have been popular over the past few months. It shows where the true value for users lies in the long term — especially for those who don’t live in one of the big cities where foursquare specials are incredibly popular.

What do you think of the changes?

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